Review of Princess Ben, by Catherine Gilbert Murdock

Fairy Tale Variant, Fantasy, Light Reading, Romance, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

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Princess Ben

Being a Wholly Truthful Account of Her Various Discoveries and Misadventures, Recounted to the Best of Her Recollection, in Four Parts

by Catherine Gilbert Murdock

Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 2008.  344 pages.

Starred Review.

I dearly loved Princess Ben!  This is exactly my favorite sort of book — an original fairy tale, with princes and princesses and magic and danger and enchantments and adventure and romance.

Princess Ben is no damsel in distress who waits around to be saved by the prince!  (In fact, there’s a delightful fairy tale reversal toward the end.  I dare say no more!)

At the start, Princess Benevolence’s parents meet a dreadful fate, with circumstances pointing to assassination at the order of the neighboring, or rather surrounding kingdom of Drachensbett.  As in so many other princess tales, Ben must now learn to be a proper princess, under the stern direction of her aunt the Queen.

Naturally, there are also plans to marry Ben off in the service of diplomacy.  However, matters get complicated when Ben discovers a secret passageway to a magic room and a book of magic.  She begins learning how to perform magic and use it to serve her own purposes, like get some decent food.

But as in any fairy tale, before the end the fate of the kingdom lies in Princess Ben’s hands.  The reader can’t help but root for things to end Happily Ever After.

Ben’s a delightful character, a princess with spunk and a weight problem.  The plot is nicely twisted to keep things interesting.  Utterly charming and a whole lot of fun.  Not a book that’s easy to stop reading.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on the main site at:

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Review of Ask Me No Questions, by Marina Budhos

Contemporary, Teen Fiction Review 0

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Ask Me No Questions,

by Marina Budhos

Simon Pulse, 2007.  First published in 2006.  162 pages.

Fourteen-year-old Nadira is from Bangladesh, but she has grown up in America.  Her father’s visa has expired, and they tried to get legal residency, but their money was taken by a lawyer running scams.  It didn’t seem to matter — everyone else seemed to be in the same situation.

Then September 11th happened.  The INS was cracking down.  Rumors were flying. 

Nadira’s older sister, Aisha, is a senior in high school and the star of the debate team and every teacher’s favorite student.  She has applications in to prestigious schools, but she can’t apply for financial aid unless their legal status changes. 

They hear a reliable (they think) rumor that they should go to Canada and apply for asylum.  The result is disaster.  The Canadians do not let them cross the border, and they are promptly detained.  Nadira’s father, Abba, is arrested and held in a detention center.  They have no idea how long he will be held or if the whole family will be deported.

Nadira and Aisha have no choice but to go back home to New York and go back to school.  They will stay with their cousin.  Aisha doesn’t have a license, but she drives them back.  Ma must stay at the border to try to get Abba’s case heard.

So begins Ask Me No Questions.  Can Nadira and Aisha help in any way to get their father’s case heard?  How can they go on with ordinary high school life?  How can Aisha focus on tests and college interviews?

Nadira says:

Tuesday morning Aisha and I are back at Flushing High as if nothing happened.

We’re not the only illegals at our school.  We’re everywhere.  You just have to look.  A lot of the kids here were born elsewhere — Korea, China, India, the Dominican Republic.  You can’t tell which ones aren’t legal.  We try to get lost in the landscape of backpacks and book reports.  To find us you have to pick up the signals.  It might be in class when a teacher asks a personal question, and a kid gets this funny, pinched look in his eyes.  Or some girl doesn’t want to give her address to the counselor.  We all agree not to notice.

I remember when I was little, crouching in a corner of the playground and hearing a group of girls chant:  Ask me no questions.  Tell me no lies.  That’s the policy of at school.  Ask me no questions, we say silently.  And the teachers don’t.  “We’re not the INS,” I once heard one of them say.  “We’re here to teach.”  But sometimes I feel like shaking their sleeves and blurting out, Ask me.  Please.

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Find this review on the main site at:

www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/ask_me_no_questions.html

Review of Ever, by Gail Carson Levine

Children's Fiction Review, Fantasy, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

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Ever,

by Gail Carson Levine

HarperCollins, 2008.  244 pages.

Starred Review.

Hooray!  A new book by Gail Carson Levine, author of Ella Enchanted and Fairest.  In Ever, the author takes us to a different sort of world.  Instead of magic and fairies, this world is inhabited by gods and goddesses.

Olus is a youthful god, the god of the winds.  He is curious about mortals, and so travels far from his own country and disguises himself as a mortal, a herder of goats.  He finds himself fascinated by the family of his landlord, especially Kezi, who makes beautiful weavings and beautiful dances.

Then, because of an unfortunate vow, Kezi’s life is to be sacrificed.  Can Olus find a way to save her?  Perhaps he can make her immortal like himself.  Only this will mean both of them undergoing a terrible ordeal.

Here is an enchanting story about love and fate, about uncertainty and awareness.

As with her other books, Gail Carson Levine again achieves a mythic quality to her story that I love so much.  We have a simple story with undercurrents of Truth.  Delightful!

http://www.gailcarsonlevinebooks.com/

http://www.harpercollinschildrens.com/

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Find this review on the main site at:

www.sonderbooks.com/Childrens_Fiction/ever.html

Review of Peeled, by Joan Bauer

Contemporary, Teen Fiction Review 0

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Peeled,

by Joan Bauer

G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2008.  248 pages.

Hildy Biddle is a girl with an obsession.  Hildy’s obsession is to report the news, to let people know the truth, to make their high school newspaper shine.

But when a scare starts at the old Ludlow house, with a death and rumors of haunting, the town newspaper only seems to want to fan people’s fears.

Can Hildy and her high school friends stand up for what’s right against the interests of powerful adults?

In many ways, this feels like the same story Joan Bauer has told in her other wonderful books, like Hope Was Here and Rules of the Road.  A teenaged girl with an obsession stands up for what’s right against powerful interests.  However, I can’t complain — This story Joan Bauer is telling is a good one, makes fun reading, and does stick with you.

I do think I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t had the vague feeling I’d read this before.  However, I will still highly recommend it to young teen readers.  Joan Bauer tells a good story, and Hildy Biddle joins her cast of strong young women who stand up for what’s right and entertain the reader while doing it.

http://www.joanbauer.com/

www.penguin.com/youngreaders

Buy from Amazon.com

This review is posted on the main site at:

www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/peeled.html

Review of American Born Chinese, by Gene Luen Yang

Graphic Novel, Stand-outs, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

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American Born Chinese, by Gene Luen Yang, color by Lark Pien.
First Second, New York, 2006.  233 pages.
Winner of the 2007 Printz Medal.
Starred Review
Sonderbooks Stand-out 2008, Number 1, Contemporary Teen Fiction
My son loves graphic novels, but I haven’t read many myself.  However, when American Born Chinese won the Printz Medal for an outstanding Young Adult Novel, I decided this was one I should read.

I checked it out, but didn’t get around to reading it until it was due the next day.  I loved it!  I knew my son just had to read it.  Fortunately, graphic novels are quick reading, so he finished it before the day was over and I could turn it in.

This book is done beautifully.  The author uses the graphic novel form in a way that makes the story better than it would be as a regular novel.  I love the expressions on faces, and the way he uses visual storytelling and creative formats to tell the story.

There are three parallel stories in this book.  First is the story of the Monkey King.  He goes to a party with other gods, and they laugh at him for being a monkey.  He shows them.  Then we see Jin Yang, a boy born in America to Chinese parents.  They move from Chinatown in San Francisco to a place where he is the only Chinese kid in his class.  The third story has the format of a television show.  An American high school kid named Danny somehow has a cousin Chin Kee who’s terribly Chinese.  He visits Danny every year and embarrasses him so badly at his school that Danny’s been switching schools every year.

All the stories beautifully and unexpectedly come together at the end, with a well-told theme of being who you truly are.

At one point in the story of the Monkey King, he meets Tze-Yo-Tzuh, He Who Is, a God more powerful than any other gods.  At first, I was a bit offended when he started describing himself with words used from the Bible:  “I was, I am, and I shall forever be.  I have searched your soul, little monkey.  I know your most hidden thoughts.  I know when you sit and when you stand, when you journey and when you rest.  Even before a word is upon your tongue, I have known it.  My eyes have seen all your days.”

However, as I read on, I realized the author had beautifully placed the God Who Is into this tale about being the person (or monkey god) whom you were created to be.  This is a beautifully told, powerfully presented tale of the individuality God has lovingly placed in each one of us.  Yet it doesn’t come across as a religious story at all.  On the contrary, it comes across as a laugh-out-loud light-hearted comic book story.  Magnificent!

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on the main site at:

www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/american_born_chinese.html

Review of Seeing Redd, by Frank Beddor

Fantasy, Teen Fiction Review 0

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Seeing Redd:  The Looking Glass Wars, Book Two, by Frank Beddor

Dial Books, New York, 2007.  371 pages.

http://www.lookingglasswars.com/

www.penguin.com/teen

In Seeing Redd, the sequel to The Looking Glass Wars, Queen Alyss’s Aunt Redd is again plotting to take over the queendom of Wonderland.  Now she’s in our world gathering a sinister army to join her.  Next door to Wonderland, Alyss’s neighbor King Arch has plots of his own.  Meanwhile, Hatter Madigan is finding out what happened to his family while he was gone.

This second book has a darker feel, with lots of time taken up showing the evil of those dedicated to Black Imagination.  There’s also lots of detail in the fighting and weaponry.  This trilogy (I believe it will be) will make an exciting movie some day with lots of special effects, but I had trouble visualizing the detailed weaponry, and wasn’t terribly interested in that part.

I am now quite interested in Alyss, so I will definitely want to read the third book when it comes out.  I hope she gets a time of rest at the end!

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This review is posted on the main site at:

www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/seeing_redd.html

Review of The Looking Glass Wars, by Frank Beddor

Fantasy, Teen Fiction Review 0

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The Looking Glass Wars, by Frank Beddor

http://www.lookingglasswars.com/

Dial Books, New York, 2006.  358 pages.

Starred review.

What if Lewis Carroll didn’t make up the story he told in Alice in Wonderland?  Suppose instead of him telling a story to Alice Liddell, she was the one who told a story to him.  In that story, she was really Princess Alyss Heart of Wonderland.  Suppose her story were true…

Alyss’s last day in Wonderland was her seventh birthday.  She was ready to begin her formal training to eventually become queen.  Alyss had the most powerful imagination ever seen in a seven-year-old Wonderlander.  This was important, because what the queen imagined became real.

Instead of the Cheshire cat Lewis Carroll told about, Alyss’s birthday was interrupted by a part-cat, part-human creature with nine lives, the chief assassin of her aunt Redd, who wanted the throne.  Alyss’s aunt Redd burst into the celebration shouting, “Off with their heads!” She battled Alyss’s mother and took over the Queendom.

Hatter Madigan was the name of Alyss’s personal bodyguard.  He managed to escape with Alyss to another world – our world.  But on the way, he lost his grip on her, so while she landed in England, he wound up in Paris.

At first, Alyss could still create things with her imagination.  She could still make flowers sing.  But as time went on, as her stories were mocked, as she was taught what was “real” and what was not, her imagination grew weaker.

But after Lewis Carroll published his book of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Hatter Madigan, still searching for Alyss 13 years later, at last knows where to find her….

This well-crafted book has characters that sound familiar, but have much more depth than you might have remembered.  Once I started this book, I didn’t want to stop.  I’m going to start reading the sequel right away!

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Review of The Sky Inside, by Clare B. Dunkle

Science Fiction, Teen Fiction Review 0

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The Sky Inside, by Clare B. Dunkle

Ginee Seo Books (Atheneum Books for Young Readers), New York, 2008.  229 pages.

http://www.claredunkle.com/

http://www.simonsays.com/

Martin gets a dog for his birthday, but this is no ordinary dog.  In fact, he gets an Alldog — “Large or small, sleek or fuzzy — all the dogs you ever wanted rolled into one.”  Martin’s “dog” is programmed to please Martin, in doglike ways.  Later, when Martin discovers his dog’s abilities go beyond the “normal” simulated dog, he finds some intriguing things the dog can do for him.

Meanwhile, Martin has to stick up for his little sister Cassie and their friends.  Cassie is a “Wonder Baby:”

“Never had the arrival of the stork brought such excitement.  Overflowing with charm, brimming with intelligence, Wonder Babies were like nothing the suburb had seen before.  But that didn’t turn out to be a good thing.

“Wonder Babies didn’t wait around to be raised.  They got involved in their upbringing, wanted to know about their feeding schedules, and read voraciously before the age of two.  Worst of all, Wonder Babies — or the Exponential Generation, as they preferred to be called — wouldn’t stop asking embarrassing questions.  No amount of time-outs, missed snacks, or spankings could break them of this awful habit.”

Martin’s suburb, under a big dome, is a place where kids dream of getting mediocre test scores so they can get a factory job and hire a robot to do the work.  This community gets tired of the Wonder Babies quickly.  Martin doesn’t fit in too well himself, always trying to find things out.

When a man comes to take away the Wonder Babies to a “special school,” Martin thinks he may have found out too much about their real destination.

One of the things I love about Clare Dunkle’s other books, The Hollow Kingdom Trilogy and By These Ten Bones, is how real the settings seem.  She builds worlds that feel like true history, with all the details twining together and making sense.

Oddly, that was exactly what bothered me about this novel — it was hard to get a grasp on the world Martin was living in.  There are lots of ideas, maybe too many:

What would it be like to live in a domed community, afraid of the world outside, which is reported to be only blowing sand?

What would it be like when robots can do most of the work?

How would genetic engineering affect communities? 

What if game shows were used as punishment?  (That’s not at all far-fetched.  After all, isn’t that what Rome did with the arenas?)

What if only a select population were allowed to live in perfect, planned communities?

What if robots could be programmed to change their appearance as well as their behavior?

In one place, Martin asks what fire is, then calmly watches someone prepare food over a fire.  I didn’t quite feel I really understood where Martin was coming from….

However, I still recommend this book.  It takes the story of a boy and his dog to an entirely new level.  A lot of fun, and with some intriguing ideas.  Like all good science fiction, this book could spark some interesting discussion, with plenty of food for thought.  What would such a world be like?

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on the main site at:

www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/sky_inside.html

Review of Audiobook Enna Burning, by Shannon Hale

Audiobooks, Fantasy, Teen Fiction Review 0

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Enna Burning

by Shannon Hale

Read by Cynthia Bishop and the Full Cast Family

Full Cast Audio, 2007.  8 CDs.  8 hours, 30 minutes.

Text copyright 2004.

http://www.squeetus.com/

http://www.fullcastaudio.com/

My readers probably know that Shannon Hale is one of my favorite living authors.  Her books always show up on my stand-outs lists, usually at the top or near the top.

Full Cast Audio’s fabulous production of the second of the Bayern books, Enna Burning, allowed me to enjoy the book in a whole new way.  They cast the book with fresh voices for each character.  You feel you’re really hearing Enna’s thoughts and her interactions with her friends.

Enna Burning is a beautiful book with a dark edge to it.  It’s a story of wartime, but also of magic.  Of trying to do what’s right.  Of trying to use power wisely.  It’s also a story of an enduring friendship between Enna and Isi, the heroine of the earlier book, The Goose Girl.

This audiobook does have some difficult themes.  But it would make a wonderful family listening experience for older kids.  For adults and teens looking for an absorbing story beautifully performed, I highly recommend this production.

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This review is on the main site at:

www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/enna_burning_audio.html

Review of Flight, Volume Four

Graphic Novel, Science Fiction, Teen Fiction Review 0

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Flight, Volume 4 

Villard, New York, 2007. 344 pages.

Like comics? Here’s a book sophisticated and strange, silly and freaky all at once.

In the book Flight, Volume 4, you’ll find a magic window maker, a girl preserved for years in a box in the basement, a roomie-pal to order when you’re traveling, a baby born with shining eyes, and the silly story of Igloo-Head and Tree-Head. (Find out what happens when they meet Public Library-Head!)

All the stories are done graphically, each with a totally different style than the story before. These stories will make you think, they will make you laugh, and they’ll make you scratch your head and say, “Huh?”

Find this review on the main site at:

www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/flight_v4.html