Book review: The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

The narrator of The Knife of Never Letting Go, Book One of Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking series, is Todd Hewitt, the last boy in Prentisstown.  There are men in Prentisstown, and very young men - just barely more than boys - but Todd is the last child.  Oh, and there are no women or girls at all.  The town was ravaged by a virus, the Noise, that made every male's thoughts audible to those around him.  There is no secrecy, no privacy.  Everyone can hear what everyone else is thinking.  The cacophony has driven some men mad but worse, it has killed all the women.  Only men are left in Prentisstown - and the animals, which can talk/broadcast their thoughts too.

One day, about a month before Todd is to become a man at age thirteen, he and his dog Manchee go out into the woods surrounding the town to fetch some apples.  Even in the forest there is no quiet as the squirrels and birds and other assorted critters contribute to the Noise.  But then, out there, Todd finds a spot of true silence: it's coming from a girl, alive, about Todd's age, and cowering in the bushes.  Things happen very quickly after that as Todd realizes that the town is hiding a terrible secret.  Todd, Manchee and the girl Viola must run from the men of Prentisstown, out into a world that none of them knows.

I realize I'm being particularly vague here, with little to no plot outline.  But I don't want to spoil The Knife of Never Letting Go and to tell much more would reveal too much.  This YA fantasy novel, with touches of science fiction, is pretty good and I have a feeling that it's going to get better as the series progresses.  It is heart-wrenching, funny, tender and violent.  The book is written very much in Todd's voice, complete with misspellings and mispronunciations (which is a little distracting sometimes), which conveys the urgency of his and Viola's situation.  The dog Manchee provides much of the needed humor; the start of the book is great:

The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don't got nothing much to say.  About anything. "Need a poo, Todd."  "Shut up, Manchee."  "Poo.  Poo, Todd."  "I said shut it."

Awesome - and giving a pretty clear picture of Todd and Manchee right from the git-go.

TKoNLG ends on a big cliffhanger, clearly intending to continue in successive books.  I'm looking forward to picking up the next one.

Book review: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente

There are a lot of fantasy fiction books being published these days, it seems.  Harry Potter and the Twilight insanity has opened the floodgates and there is genre fiction out there for all tastes and all ages - vampires, werecreatures, zombies, witches and wizards and faeries for children, YA and grownup sensibilities.  A lot of it is rubbish, of course, but now and then a good one pops up.  Catherynne M. Valente's The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making is one of the good ones.

September is the titular girl, twelve years old and living in Nebraska around the time of WWII.  Her dad has gone off to fight in the war and her mom works in the factories, so September is left home alone a lot, reading fairy tales, washing teacups and generally not caring for her life very much.  When the Green Wind arrives on the Leopard of Little Breezes and offers to whisk her away to Fairyland, she jumps at the chance at chance for adventure - so much so that she leaves one shoe behind.

The Green Wind instructs September in the current rules of Fairyland, put into place by its present ruler, the Marquess, a strict and scary young girl with a very fine hat: (1) no iron allowed at all (except that which binds the fairies' wings, per order of the Marquess); no alchemy except for girls born on Tuesday; (3) transportation by air only by Leopard or licensed Ragwort Stalk; (4) all travel occurs widdershins (counterclockwise); (5) rubbish takeaway every second Friday; (6) all changelings are required to wear identifying footwear; (7) no crossing the borders of the Worsted Wood except for visiting dignitaries and spriggans.  Plus, the eating or drinking of Fairy food means you are bound to Fairyland for ever and ever.  September, being a capable and slightly stubborn girl, thinks she can handle all that and gladly charges onward.

The first folk she meets are a couple of witch sisters and their husband, a Wairwulf, and she accepts a quest from them.  As September continues on, she befriends A-through-L, a Wyvern (dragon with only two legs), and the adventures escalate from there, as they come into contact with a Golem, the Marquess, various fairies, shapeshifters, spriggans, pookas, wild bicycles, Marids (a water-based genie), talking furniture and Death, to name just a few.


TGWCFiaSiHOM is very much in the vein of Baum's Oz and Carroll's Wonderland books.  The heroine is a resourceful young girl but her adventures are not easy for her and her new friends: things are scary and painful and freezing cold and near-death and very often unpleasant.  Baum's and Carroll's books were much darker than the universally loved movies but even the Judy Garland version of The Wizard of Oz was frightening in spots - those horrible flying monkeys! the scary floating Wizard head! - and I remember being quite afraid when Alice fell down the well in the Disney cartoon.  Valente's book skirts the line between a children's book and a YA book: there are no coming-of-age themes in TGWCFiaSiHOM that might attract a YA audience, but there is definitely enough scary stuff that the youngest readers might not be ready for.

I really enjoyed The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making.  It has an old-fashioned feel without being stodgy, clings closely to traditional fairytales and yet adds its own embellishments.  September is a great heroine: clever, stubborn, brave, only Somewhat Heartless and sometimes foolish.  She loves Fairyland and through her, even we adults can remember how to love it too.

Mini book review: The Strain by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan

There has been an overabundance of vampires in popular culture (books, movies, television) lately, a wealth of romantic, beautiful, never-aging, sometimes sparkling, sexy creatures of the night, pining for, sipping from and sometimes - often reluctantly - killing their swooning victims.  The Strain, by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, is a vampire-horror novel that contains none of that.  No sparkling, no swooning, and no sex.  These are nasty, nasty vampires.

When an airplane from Germany lands at JFK, windowshades closed, lights out, no communications, there is cause for concern.  There is greater cause for concern when all passengers and crew - save four individuals - are dead, and a giant, dirt-filled coffin disappears from the cargo bay.  The four survivors soon begin exhibiting strange changes to their physionomy, but even stranger is that all the bodies of the dead passengers vanish from the morgues of NYC.  The CDC is befuddled and way out of their league.  It takes a Holocaust survivor and vampire hunter, Abraham Setrakian, to show them what they're really dealing with: a terrible, 100% contagious virus that turns regular humans into vampires.  Within days, NYC is all but lost - the concern is that the contagion be confined to the city and not allowed to spread where it could take over the world.

When I learned that del Toro had [co-]written a horror novel, I couldn't wait to pick it up - he's been responsible for some movies I adore (Pan's Labyrinth, the Hellboys) and I was interested to see what he could do in written format.  I'm sorry to say that the book is not quite the masterpiece his movies are.  The concept is definitely intriguing, and he's upended the traditional vampire mythology quite interestingly.  But the prose is thin somehow.  The writing is not eloquent, the characters have little depth, and there's a lot of telling rather than showing.  All the while I was reading The Strain, I could just picture the novel being used as a jumping off point for a movie - I felt as though the authors wrote just enough to sketch out a scene, figuring that the filmmakers' vision would fill in the rest.  Maybe that was the whole point and, if so, I'll probably see the movie because I like del Toro's visions.  But as far as the rest of this trilogy goes, (The Fall and The Night Eternal coming later this year), I've got other things to read.

Titles Nine - #11 -- Series

Time once again for another riveting installment of the FMS series, "Titles Nine," whereby I go to my many bookshelves and pick out nine volumes to share with you, my faithful reader[s].  Since I'm tearing my way through Stephen King's Dark Tower series for the second time, it occured to me that I must have at least nine book series in my collection, or at least partial series.  Let's see what I found!

• The Dark Tower series by Stephen King (Books I-III at present)
• A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket (1-11)
• The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell (complete set: Justine, Mountolive, Balthazar and Clea)
• Griffin and Sabine, Sabine's Notebook and The Golden Mean by Nick Bantock
• The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander (I used to have the full set but can only find 1-4 at present)
• The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan (1-11 only)
• The Little House on the Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder (not only do I have all the books but I also have a Little House cookbook!)
• I Claudius and Claudius the God by Robert Graves (does it count as a series if there are only two in the run?)
• A Wrinkle In Time, A Wind in the Door and A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L'Engle (I need to reread these/finish the series)

And since the Robert Graves ones scarcely count, I also have nine or ten Bloom County books by Berke Breathed.  I realize that's not actually a series but I do have a lot of them so it must count for something.

Book review: Coraline by Neil Gaiman

In my quest to work my way through the catalogue of the prolific Neil Gaiman, I’ve sampled some of his movies, adult novels, short story collections, YA short story collections and graphic novels (to date, just Black Orchid, review coming to FMS soon). Coraline is the first children’s novel of his that I’ve read: it’s not a picture book, but it’s a little easier to get through than his YA stuff. That being said, Coraline is scary.

Coraline Jones lives with her parents in a flat in part of a big old house. They share the old house with the denizens of the other two flats: the crazy old man in the attic flat, who tells Coraline that he’s training up a mouse circus; and the Misses Spink and Forcible, aging actresses, with their sundry aging terriers. The big old house has a ramshackle garden around it and many rooms to explore in it, which is a good thing since Coraline’s parents, who work at home doing things on computers, all but ignore their daughter, too wrapped up in their work. The neighbors aren’t that much better: they pay attention to Coraline but can’t manage to get her name right. She reminds them (to no avail): “It’s Coraline. Not Caroline. Coraline.”

The Jones family flat has twenty-one windows and fourteen doors – Coraline counts them all one bored day. The fourteenth door is locked, however, and when she finds the old iron key and opens it, she finds a brick wall. Until she tries it again later and finds a passageway into another flat. This other flat is in another house that is very similar to Coraline’s house. There’s even another mother and another father who feed her things that she likes to eat and show her another bedroom with crazy toys. But as much as she initially likes it there, Coraline realizes that there is something wrong with the other mother and the other father, not just that they have black buttons where their eyes should be. The other parents want her to stay and live with them, there’s just something they need to change first …

There’s also the matter of the other children, the ones that were trapped in the house by the other mother so many years ago that they are only ghosts, hiding in mirrors now. Coraline is the only one who can rescue them, if she can figure out how to outwit the other mother with her terrible long fingers and snaky black hair, and the rats who do her bidding.

There is no question that Coraline is a scary story – I was a little scared and I’m thirty-something forty-something old a Stephen King fan. The other mother is scary, the rats are nasty, the thing in the basement that I’m not going to talk further about is totally creepy. But Coraline is a sensible, clever girl and she keeps her wits about her, and that is what children will connect with. I would imagine that Coraline would be a good book for children and parents to read together (although perhaps not right before bedtime), but I can tell you from experience that it’s a treat to read by yourself as an adult as well.

Book review: The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett

It’s a good thing that Terry Pratchett has written so darn many books, because I like his writing and intend to read a lot of them. The Wee Free Men is one of his YA novels, tangentially related to his more adult Discworld fantasy series. You don’t have to be familiar with Discworld, however, to enjoy TWFM: the story latches onto you from the get-go and never lets up.

Young heroine Tiffany Aching lives a quiet country life on the Aching family farm. She’s an odd girl, prone to too many thoughts and questions, but she’s hardworking and dutiful, and good at making cheese. She has a baby brother, Wentworth, who seems to be always sticky due to his always wanting to eat candies, and she’s not entirely sure she likes him that much – things on the farm were just fine without him. But because she’s a good girl, Tiffany watches Wentworth when her mother asks her too and only once or twice uses him as monster bait.

Strange things are coming down out of the hills: river monsters, headless horsemen and winter when it shouldn’t be winter. Tiffany, whose Granny Aching (excellent with sheep) was rumored to be a witch, and who rather thinks she might like to be a witch herself, consults with Miss Tick (also a witch) and learns that an invasion of these bad things is coming. And there’s no one to stop them, bemoans Miss Tick. There’s me, says Tiffany.

After having said that, however, the girl isn’t so sure since the witch wasn’t very forthcoming with the witchy education, only leaving a talking toad behind for advice. But when Wentworth suddenly goes missing, Tiffany takes up her weapons (a cast iron frying pan and her Granny’s book, Diseases of the Sheep) and enlists the help of the Nac Mac Feegle, also known as the Wee Free Men, tiny blue Scottish-ish pictsies (not pixies). The only thing the pictsies like to do better than drink is fight and, luckily for Tiffany, they’re really good at doing both.

Pratchett has an incredible ear for accents – and his Nac Mac Feegle are thick with a twisted brogue – and excellent timing to his sentences. His descriptions are marvelous and this is one of the most easily visualized books I’ve read in a long time. The plot hits the ground running and keeps picking up pace, throwing in wonderful characters, tweaked fairy tales, funny jokes and social commentary without missing a stride.

This is only the second Pratchett book I’ve read (the first was Guards! Guards!) and I’ve got to say that I’m totally hooked. I’m planning on delving into the stacks of the SLC City Library (ooh - what a library!) soon and hope that they have a decent stash of Discworld books for me. In the meantime, HUGE thanks to friend of the blog Kevin C. for introducing me to Pratchett’s worlds – and giving me these books.

Book review: In Search of Molly Pitcher by Linda Grant De Pauw

In Search of Molly Pitcher, by Linda Grant De Pauw, is a young adult novel that not only seeks to solve the mystery of just who Molly Pitcher was, but also the mystery that confounded all of us in grade school: how the heck am I supposed to write a paper about that?

The protagonist is Peggy McAllister, a thoroughly modern heroine. An eighth grader, Peggy is very bright, a little weird and a lot lonely. Her single mother works long shifts at Wal-Mart to make ends meet; her best buddy is her 90-year old “Greatgramps,” a World War II vet and former private investigator. Peggy is a misfit at school, seemingly friendless, and throws herself into her schoolwork to keep busy. When a local contest offers prize money for “excellence in eighth grade social studies,” Peggy decides to enter with a paper on a great American hero. She picks Molly Pitcher out of a list her social studies teacher provides to the class even though the teacher tries to dissuade her from this selection, saying too few facts are known about Molly. Peggy is tough, however, and more than up for the challenge.

And what a challenge it is. Conflicting stories abound – some calling Molly a sergeant and others a captain; some saying her husband was killed and others just wounded; some saying she carried a pitcher and others a bucket – and very few are based on primary sources. Peggy soldiers on, with support from her Greatgramps and a local historian/historical romance author, collecting a huge amount of evidence about the numerous women who were on the battlefields of the Revolutionary War. She finally develops her thesis that “Molly Pitcher” was not an actual person but instead the embodiment of female martial bravery during the American Revolution. Peggy writes her paper and wins her prize (although her cranky social studies teacher gives her a B- for writing about several women as opposed to one American hero, as was the assignment).

Peggy is a very believable little girl. The quest she goes on to uncover the truth about this American icon is likewise laid out in realistic fashion. In Search of Molly Pitcher is as much an instruction manual on how to undertake a research project as it is a detective story about one of American history’s mysteries. De Pauw takes the reader step by step through the research process her main character follows: figuring out what questions need answering, learning the difference between primary and secondary sources, assembling a bibliography, organizing information into hard evidence and leads for further exploration, and putting the mass of information into cohesive form.

It’s been a long time since I had to write an eighth grade research paper. I’m also not that interested in the American Revolution. But I sat down and read In Search of Molly Pitcher in one sitting, as excited as Peggy as she sorted out the facts from the fiction about her hero. This book takes an innovative approach to getting middle schoolers interested in history. If only someone had done something like this for math when I was in grade school I might be able to solve the mystery that is my checkbook register today.

Postscript: The book jacket illustrator is a Maine artist - cool!

Literary Mice - book list

As anyone who has been reading this blog from the first post knows, I've been fond of mice all my life. Today, while I was at work (but clearly not thinking about work or really even doing any work, let's be honest), I started wondering how many books I have with mice in them. Obviously, there's my newest acquisition, Mouse Guard Fall 1152. But how many others? My parameters are broad: any book for children or adults, picture book, graphic novel or prose novel, with mice as the subject matter or, at the very least, having a mouse as a fairly major character.

Most folks my age probably have one or two at the most. I have eleven:

• The aforementioned Mouse Guard Fall 1152 by David Petersen
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll [Dormouse]
• Maus by Art Speigelman [1986, graphic novel about Holocaust survivors with mice as the Jews and cats as the Nazis]
• Is There a Mouse in the House? by Josephine Gibson [1965, rhyming book]
• She Was Nice to Mice by Ally Sheedy, age 12 [1975, before Sheedy got into acting she wrote this biography of Queen Elizabeth I who was apparently nice to mice]
• The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse, The Tale of Two Bad Mice and The Tailor of Gloucester, all by Beatrix Potter [separate books]
• Pippa Mouse by Betty Boegelhold [1973, children's book]
• Julius, Baby of the World by Kevin Henkes [1990, children's book about introducing a new baby into the family, starring anthropomorphic mice]
• The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame [the Water Rat ... he counts]

That's an impressive list, if I do say so myself - but I am always ready to buy new books. If anyone has other mouse-centric literature suggestions, I am eager to hear them!