The sympathetic side of murderous Japanese spirits

Bookstore shelves are packed with books drawing from Western folklore. Elves, fairies, sprites, even selkies have found their way into books recently, especially ones targeting the ever-growing young adult market.

Part of writing young adult, it seems, is to not expect too much outside knowledge of the reader going in. It's assumed that readers know about European fantasy creatures, since that's what most of the fairy tales and Disney movies they've grown up on focus on. But once a piece of another culture's folklore hits the public knowledge, it's fair game.

Enter Okiku, and The Girl from the Well. Okiku was introduced to most Western audiences in the 2002 movie 'The Ring,' but there's much more to her than popping out of old VHS tapes. In the intervening years, Okiku has moved on from haunting the well where she was killed. She's made it her passion to exact revenge on those who have hurt children, and she has left a trail of gruesome, unsolved murders in her wake.

But one day, while drifting around looking for a new victim, she comes across Tarquin. Tark is, in many ways, just an ordinary 15 year old boy. He and his father have just moved, and he's having some of the normal problems fitting in to his new school. He's quiet by nature, so it's hard to get him to come out of his shell.

And, well, accidentally summoning a flock of headless birds in the cafeteria might not make him homecoming king either.

The problem started when he was very young. Before his mother married his father, she was a shrine maiden who spent her days putting spirits to rest with her sister back in Japan. Later on, during a visit back to the shrine, and exorcism went terribly wrong and the only way to keep the malicious spirit from destroying the town that the shrine protects was to bind it to her young son.

The trauma and guilt from that night broke Yoko, and after a few instances of trying to kill Tark and the spirit trapped within him, she's been committed to a mental hospital.

Tark's father has been doing his best, trying to balance a demanding job, a mad wife, and a son who understandably has a few issues.

And the binding left Tark with tattoo-like symbols covering his arms, hips, and chest, without a mother, and a history of bizarre, alienating events surrounding him.

It's no wonder Okiku notices him, and takes an interest.

We also get to know Tark's cousin Callie. A teacher's aide at the school he's now attending, they were close when Tark was young, and she feels a bit of a motherly responsibility for her young family member. She knows that he's been having a hard time, especially since they've moved closer to his mother's hospital and there's been a bit more interaction with her, and she wants to do whatever she can to help Tark out.

And perhaps figure out what's going on with the strange spirits that have been following him.

For as he's growing up, and becoming a less 'pure' vessel, the binding symbols his mother used to shut away the evil spirit have begun to fade. The strange occurrences have become more frequent, and if that spirit escapes, it won't end well for anyone involved.

The Girl from the Well doesn't read like a traditional Stephen King horror novel. Like many Japanese novels, it's much more contemplative and slow-building than that. Most of the bad reviews on Goodreads seem to be coming from people who are expecting a different sort of book. This isn't a hack-and-slash, bloody horror novel. Rather, the creepiness builds as the story progresses and the reader becomes invested in the characters. The tone of the novel rather than graphic imagery is what will keep the reader up at night, either to finish the book or wondering what that shadow behind them in the mirror is.

Highs: This is a great starter book for people who aren't too familiar with Japanese folklore, since The Ring was so popular, and can easily spark an interest in other books with Japanese settings.

Lows: Once again the father is clueless - bordering on neglectful - and mostly ignored throughout the book.

Verdict: A wonderfully creepy young adult horror novel with a distinct East Asian flavor.

Further Reading: The Suffering, Another, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

From a village in Nepal to the streets of Calcutta

"It is a woman's fate to suffer...simply to endure is to triumph."

In Patricia McCormick's Sold, Lakshmi knows how to take pleasure in the simple things in life. Her pet goat, Tali. The way the sun rises over the mountains surrounding the village. The tinkle of gold in her mother's ears. 

Even though her stepfather spends his days at the teahouse gambling rather than working. Even though the old thatch on their roof lets in as much rain as it keeps out.

But after a terrible drought, followed by terrible rains, the family is left with nothing but debts.

Nothing, that is, except Lakshmi.

Lakshmi's best friend Gita left the village to be a maid to a wealthy household in the city. Lakshmi sees the tin roof that her friend's natal house now has. She sees the 'electric sun' hanging from a cord inside. She sees the weariness of her mother, and her tiny baby brother. So when the crops fail and even her mother's earrings are sold, Lakshmi can easily see what a great help it would be for her to go to work. And with a heavy heart, but a hopeful gaze, Lakshmi leaves with the beautiful stranger, and her stepfathers leaves with a handful of money.

As Lakshmi travels to the city, she sees many things she's never seen before. She sees the landscape race by her as she rides the train. She sees men in uniform, and is frightened of them. She sees a girl, in the gutter, with her head freshly shaven and with men throwing cigarette butts at her. She sees what happens to women her age who disobey the men in their lives.

Even after all these sights, Lakshmi still arrives in Calcutta with the hope that she'll be a help to her family. She walks into Happiness House with a straight back, hoping to show her new bosses that she is a hard worker. She sees girls in beautiful dresses, and she starts to wonder if working in this place might not be so bad after all.

Then Mumtaz gives Lakshmi her first 'job,' putting her in a room with a man who had paid for her.

Written in free verse, Patricia McCormick does an amazing job transporting the reader to Central Asia, contrasting the remote, idyllic village in Nepal where Lakshmi was born and raised to the dirty, bustling city of Calcutta. Written in free verse, the chapters flow together with the reader not realizing how quickly the story is passing until the final climactic pages.

Painstakingly researched, Sold is a beautifully written young adult book that keeps its readers in mind regarding content, and is a wonderful introduction for young people to the realities that girls face other parts of the world.

Highs: The wonderful stories of contentment taking place in the village give a sharp contrast to the bleakness of life at the Happiness House.

Lows:  Being a young adult book, it wraps up just a bit too neatly for my adult taste, but that's expected in the genre.

Verdict: A great book for a classroom, or a cross-generational reading group, with beautiful prose and a tactful manner of handling difficult subject matters.

Further Reading: The Good Women of China, Escape from Camp 14, The Boy who Harnessed the Wind

A Merry Christmas Young Adult Shopping List

The YA Shopping List 2014

 

It's that time of year again, when the festive masses swarm the malls and shopping districts, looking for those perfect gifts fort the people in their lives. Books are an ambitious gift, with tastes being very personal and reading preferences sometimes being quite surprising.

 

What has become incredibly popular over the lsat few years, across all demographics, is the Young Adult novel. Fast paced, simply structured and full of easily relatable characters, Young Adult as a classification has much to offer both the occasional and the voracious reader.

 

And so, here's a list of some of the best of YA, all of which would make great gifts.

 

 

Etiquette & Espionage

 

 

 

Steampunk is still going strong, and Gail Carriger is a founding author of the new wave. Her adult series, the Parasol Protectorate, is wildly popular and has been spun off into this prequel series. Taking place in a floating finishing school, these young ladies of Quality learn all manners of...finishing.

 

 

Life as We Knew It

 

 

 

Young Adult novels are full of Chosen One characters. These young protagonists end up starting revolutions and leading armies. Miranda of Life as We Knew It is a refreshingly normal girl, simply trying to help her family alife as the world around her falls apart. She is hardly perfect, and all the more endearing and relatable for it.

 

 

The Book Thief

 

Some of the most popular settings in YA fiction are the post-apocalyptic world and the oppressive dictatorship. These settings lend themselves to all sorts of flights of fancy, from zombies to televised battles. But The Book Thief takes place in World War II Germany, and history itself is all the horror the story needs.


Eleanor and Park

While so many books have perfect families and read like adult romance novels, Eleanor and Park is a refreshingly honest look at high school first love. Park is awkward, Eleanor has more to worry about than just her schoolwork, and anyone who remembers being fourteen will find something that rings true.


Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit

People complain that there aren't enough strong female characters in literature, or that the women who are there are just skinned men. Balsa is perhaps the best example of a strong woman who actually acts and thinks like a female. Whether she's fighting off assassins, taking care of her young charge Chagum, or reconnecting with a childhood friend who could have been something more, Balsa is a woman who everyone could aspire to be.


The Midnight Palace

 

 

Magical Realism goes hand in hand with Young Adult, and no one does it better than Carlos Ruiz Zafon in The Midnight Palace. With twins separated at birth, a group of orphans and a villain who might be more than he appears, combined with prose that is an absolute pleasure to read, this is perhaps the best-written of the bunch.

 

 

And that should give you a good start on your holiday book buying. With stories safe enough to hand to most teenagers, and writing compelling enough to hold the attention of a well-read adult, these are some of the hidden gems of the Young Adult field. Good luck with your shopping, and as always, gift receipts are a lifesaver.

As the world ends, families come together.

It's amazing how life can change in an instant. Forgetting to check your blind spot while driving, or carelessly mowing the yard, can have consequences that last forever. Lightning strikes cause forest fires that decimate hundreds of acres, and tornadoes can flatten towns in a matter of minutes.

In Susan Beth Pfeffer's Life as We Knew It, Miranda is an eyewitness as one of these events happens. It's been the most talked about astronomical event in a generation: an asteroid is about to hit the moon, and it's large enough to be seen with just a normal pair of binoculars. All the new stations have been bringing astronomers on to talk about it, and Miranda's teachers have been trying to elbow moon-related topics into their lesson plans.

But no one could have expected that the astronomers would be so wrong. No one knew that the asteroid would be orders of magnitude more dense than anything they'd ever seen before. So when that huge piece of space debris hit the moon, it didn't just put on a show for the amateur stargazer. The asteroid hit with such tremendous force, in fact, that it moved the moon visibly closer.

With the increased gravitational pull of the moon on the Earth, the planet is thrown into chaos. The tides rise higher than even the worst tsunamis, literally wiping island nations off the map. Earthquakes strike areas that have weak fault lines, but haven't shaken in centuries. Satellites are disabled, and the worldwide information grid is shut down.

Underneath all of those worldwide crises, there are the day to day problems of living in a world turned on its head. Miranda is a high school girl, who lives with her mother and younger brother in northern Pennsylvania. She has most of the normal high school girl problems: a mother who pushes the schoolwork, friends who are drifting away, an ankle injury that cut short her dreams of figure skating. Like most girls, she was pretty unremarkable, and the journal that she kept only reinforced it.

But as the world crumbles around her, the journal that she's keeping becomes more and more compelling. Public utilities stop working, school is cancelled, and their well runs dry. With the lack of satellites the television quickly becomes channel after channel of emergency signals, and the radio stations soon fade out.As winter begins months early, and both food and fuel begin to run out, it will be all that the family can do to stay together and stay alive.

Unlike so many of the young adult books I've read lately, I truly like Miranda. She's far from perfect, and since it's her journal everything we see is through her eyes, but she is absolutely the most relatable character I've come across in YA in a long time. She fights with her mother over silly things, she resents both the freedoms that her older brother receives and the special treatment of her younger brother. She's a fairly capable, independent young lady, but still mourns the loss of her friends, whether physical or emotional. She worries about her father and his new family, and her sister or brother-to-be. She does the best she can in the situation that she's found herself, and few readers could honestly say they would do better.

Life as We Knew It is a refreshing take on the young adult dystopian novel, without the tired love triangles and created drama that have become hallmarks of the genre. 

Highs: Watching a family try to pull together in a crisis, even when it's hard, is always uplifting.

Lows: I never like books with unreliable narrators, and a few scene might not have happened quite as Miranda writes them, but for the most part it's minimal.

Verdict: Different enough to stand out in a field flooded with dystopian fiction, LIfe as We Knew It is a wonderful, realistic look at a family in crisis.

Further Reading: The Dead and Gone, The Book Thief, Shades of Grey, Under a Graveyard Sky

A very busy time for Death.

World War II was a busy time for everybody. In Europe, as the fighting age forces were depleted, both the very young and the very old were pressed into the service. For those left behind at home, it was a time of desperation, as everything from food to metal to silk was diverted to supporting the war effort. There were a million stories written during this time, and Markus Zusak's The Book Thief tells a story that is fiction, but all too true.

The Book Thief tells a lot of stories. It tells is the story of Liesel Meminger. It begins on a train, with her mother and brother Werner. Her father's gone, and her mother is in danger as well. They're on their way to a foster home, where they will be safe. On Himmel Street, there will be soccer games, and foot races, and fistfights. There will be thin bean soup, and air raids, and the songs from an old accordion.

But only for one of them.

It tells the story of Hans Hubermann and his wife Rosa. They've already raised two children, one of whom despises them. Rosa is brash and loud, while Hans can be quiet, but both care much more than is safe in times like this. Their days are filled with hard work, and their nights are filled with worry, but there is still music and love to spare.

Taking in foster children isn't the first risk they've taken during these mad times, and it won't be their last.

There are other stories too. There's the story of Max, a young Jewish man whose father Hans knew back during the first War. There's the story of Rudy, who loves to run more than anything else. There's the story of the Ilsa Hermann, the Mayor's wife, whose life ended when she lost her son.

But mostly, it tells the story of Death. Death, who is overworked in these terrible times. Death, who takes special care of the souls of children that he has to collect. Death, who meets Liesel three times, and takes a special interest in her.

Death, who names Liesel The Book Thief.

Because the book is from Death's point of view, sometimes he spoils things. From the beginning, you know that things aren't going to go well for anyone involved. But rather than frustrating or disappointing the reader with these glimpses into the future, it brings a certain sense of dread to the story. The reader knows that these characters only have a little bit of time left, with so much left to do. And as the pages turn, the sinking feeling of dread only gets worse.

Markus Zusak has created characters that are amazingly sympathetic, even when they're not always likable. No one deserves what happens to them, but that's just the way life is. In a very crowded shelf of World War II books, The Book Thief deserves a place front and center.

Highs: The power of words, and of reading, comes up over and over in this book,and it's an important lesson to learn.

Lows: At first the narration from Death can be off-putting, but as the story goes on it makes more sense.

Verdict: There aren't very many World War II books that have something new to say, but this one is absolutely worth reading.

Further Reading: Between Shades of Grey, Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Victorian London isn't exactly tolerant of a girl with a temper

Miss Jayne has lost another position without a reference in this first story of The Steampunk Chronicles, Kady Cross' 'The Strange Case of Finley Jayne.'

It's hardly Finley's fault that she was fired. The governess Miss Clarke ought to have known better than to slap her charge hard enough to make him cry, just for taking an extra biscuit from the tea tray. There's no call for that, and in Jayne's estimation she deserved that punch to the mouth.

It's rather odd, though, that a maid her size would be able to swing hard enough to send her flying. 

And her teeth must have been in terrible condition for her to lose them so easily.

Finley wonders a bit about this terrible temper she's had of late. Normally a good-humored young lady, recently it's as if there's an invader in her own head. One minute she'll be as docile and calm as ever, and the next she's lashing out at someone, or not holding her tongue as she ought. Hardly a flaw that is acceptable in someone in her position.

Either way, whether it was because of her extraordinary strength, or her lack of control, she's been let off and now she gets to return to her mother and stepfather in disgrace. Again. She's fortunate enough that her parents have the resources to let her stay with them, but she still feels like a burden when she ought to be out working for her living.

Luckily, she's able to leave her parents' care very quickly. It turns out that yes, word of her ignoble departure from her last position has indeed made it into the gossip that swirls around London's upper-class households. While most would assume that a lady of the house would avoid such an unpredictable maid as Finley, there is in fact one Lady looking for someone just like her.

Lady Morton needs a companion for her youngest daughter. About the same age as Miss Jayne, her duties would essentially involve being the girl's shadow, following her to dances and out visiting and such. After being a maid, it's much less demanding work, and for much better pay as well. It turns out, Lady Morton appreciates that a maid would defend a child with no thought to her own position in the household.

It's a good thing that Miss Phoebe will have such a protective companion. Her father has made a match of convenience for her, as the man is willing to cover his many gambling debts and keep him funded in the future. Her betrothed is quite a bit older than her, and the more Phoebe's mother and Finley find out about him, the more uneasy they are about the whole situation.

Kady Cross sets the stage for her Steampunk Chronicles series with a novella introducing us to the heroine of the first full-length novel. Lots of threads are left unfinished, as these will be addressed later in the series, but the main story story concludes satisfyingly by the end. Cross shows that she can develop an interesting world with sympathetic characters, and leave readers wanting the next story.

Highs: Almost any reader can sympathize with wanting to let that voice making snarky comments out once in awhile.

Lows: None of the overarching questions of the universe or of our main character are answered here, which makes the story rather unsatisfying as a standalone.

Verdict: Well-written, if a bit thin main plot, perhaps better enjoyed after reading the first full-length story.

Further Reading: The Girl in the Steel Corset, God Save the Queen, A Study in Silks, Steam & Sorcery

Remember when you had to work up the courage to hold a girl's hand?

Betrayal. Revenge. Sparkly vampires and emo witches. Recently, young adult romances have been very much like adult bodice-rippers, but with teenagers in high school instead of neglected housewives or lonely lasses on the Scottish Highland.

Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor and Park bucks this trend with the most realistic young adult romance in years.

Park is the son of an Army veteran and his Korean wife. They don't live in the best neighborhood but they get by. His mother sells Avon and takes pride in her house and her sons. His dad is hard on him, and tends to favor his more traditionally masculine brother, but is still involved in his life and does the best he knows how. He's hardly a popular kid, and Taekwondo isn't enough to make him sporty, but he has is place on the bus and headphones to block out most of the noise from his classmates.

For all that Park's family does the best with what they have, Eleanor's family is an all too common disaster. As the oldest child, she stilll remembers how it was when her parents were still together. She remembers her mother baking cookies and making Christmas dinners. She remembers the kids having their own rooms, not to mention their own beds.

She remembers a time before her stepfather Ritchie. Before being sent to their shared bedroom at 4:30pm. Before having her mother guard the bathroom without a door while she takes as quick a bath as possible. After a year's exile to the friend of the family's house, Eleanor is back with her mother and siblings, and is determined to make the best of it.

Like most relationships, it isn't love at first sight. In fact, it is nearly the exact opposite. Not hatred, but an almost complete indifference. But as Eleanor and Park share a bus seat, and English class, they both begin to thaw towards one another. In typical 1980s fashion it begins with mix tapes and comic books, and slowly it develops into one of the most truthful, honest relationships I've ever read.

High school is hard. Some people have money and charisma and it's not so bad for them. Some people don't, but a loving family can make up for a lot, and fore them it can be tolerated. Some kids go through hell; tortured at school because kids are cruel, and then go home each night to another kind of nightmare.

Sometimes, two kids from very different backgrounds find one another, and together pull each other through.

Highs: Everyone in this book, from the overenthusiastic teacher to to Park's mother, react in very authentic ways.

Lows: That said, Eleanor's siblings didn't always ring true to me.

Verdict: Eleanor and Park transports the reader to those days in high school when life was harder than it should be and you couldn't do anything about it.

Further Reading: Fangirl, Beautiful Creatures, Moribito

A small town with a big secret

Small towns everywhere have a few things in common. There's a group of overly-involved mothers who rule the town via a network of gossip. There's usually a relatively incompetent sheriff's department that gets lazy due to the lack of real crime to deal with. There's kids who will live out their whole lives there, and others who want to leave the day after they get their diplomas. Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl do a wonderful job at setting the scene of Gatlin, South Carolina in their novel Beautiful Creatures. 

Ethan Wate is one of the kids who can't wait to leave town. He has a map of all the locations in the books he's read that he wants to visit. He hides his books under his bed, Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, since even though is family is more progressive than some of the other families in town, it's still not expected that one of the stars of the basketball team would have a bookwormish bedroom. He's had a hard time of it recently, following the death of his mother, and with his father retreating more and more into his study to work on his 'Great American Novel,' he's been relying on Amma more and more for advice and love. Good old Amma, with the little wards she leaves around the house, and her wise advice mixed with cryptic phrases.

He's been having nightmares recently. In them, a girl is falling, and her fingers slip out of his hand. He can never quite make out her face, and he's sure that he doesn't know her, but he also knows that he loves this girl more than he can believe. He can never remember how the dreams ends, and even stranger, no matter how sure he is that he shut the window at night, it's always open when he wakes up.

On his first day of school, after yet another one of these strange dreams, he finds a new song on his ipod. 'Sixteen Moons.' He tries to show it to his best friend Link, but when he goes to pull it up again it's vanished. But there's news at school: there's a new girl. An actual girl, named Lena Duchannes, that they haven't known since they were babies. Big news in such a small town. And even stranger, she's the niece of the town recluse, and living in the house that everyone's convinced is haunted. Arriving at school in a hearse probably didn't help the rumors much, either.

Later in the day, he hears the strains of the dream song wafting up from the band room, but again the person playing it is gone by the time he gets there. 

Driving home from a freak thunderstorm, Ethan almost runs over a shadowy figure in the road. It turns out that the person in the road is Lena, and her hearse broke down. As Ethan gets a good look at the new girl, he realizes something: this is the girl that he's been dreaming about.

Beautiful Creatures takes the typical YA romance story and infuses magic. Lena is overprotected for a reason: this year, on her sixteenth birthday, she will be Claimed as either a Light or Dark magic user, with huge consequences either way. Ethan learns more than he ever thought he would about the men he was named after, and each of the 'Families' of Gatlin have more skeletons in their closets than an anatomy classroom.

There's quite a few storylines in this book, possibly because it is the first of a quartet. As such, at times the book drags terribly. At one point, Ethan and Lena's lives turn into "try to find information, can't find information, hang out some more." And while this is how life usually is, it didn't need to be shown to the reader. Also, perhaps because both authors are women, at times Ethan seems to be more of a female character skinned as a high school boy than an actual guy. Both he and Link are completely idealized teenage boys, without any of the crudeness that one expects.

Despite its flaws, Beautiful Creatures is an engaging Young Adult romance, with a well thought out magical system and side characters that fascinate even more than the main ones.

Highs: The Caster Library is every bibliophile's dream.

Lows: Naming a librarian Marian is just too spot-on-the-nose for me.

Verdict: At an intimidating 560 pages, Beautiful Creatures drags occasionally but is still a relatively quick, entertaining read.

Further Reading: A Discovery of Witches, A Shimmer of Angels, Dust Girl

This isn't your grandmother's finishing school

Gail Carriger returns to the Parasol Protectorate universe with a young adult prequel, Finishing School Book the First: Etiquette & Espionage.

Note: This book is a prequel to the Parasol Protectorate series. As such, while there are no direct plot spoilers, there are some allusions to the earlier series. Check out the first Parasol Protectorate book, Soulless, here. Otherwise, read on. 

Sometimes seeing what no one else can doesn't mean you're crazy

The best YA fiction makes the reader forget about everything else. With a quick opening, compelling characters and a clear black and white, good vs evil plot, it's a breath of fresh air from the shades of grey reality we all live in.

A Shimmer of Angels by Lisa Basso is just such a book. Clean enough for the most discerning of parent, yet compelling enough to keep an adult up tale rading, it's the perfect read for a snowed-in winter weekend.

We start with Ray, a teen girl struggling to be normal. Since her mother's death, she's seen angel wings on the occasional stranger in public. Her father, perhaps a bit grief-stricken after the loss of his wife, turns this problem over to therapists, and eventually psychiatrists, and ends up with his elder daughter in and out of psychiatric hospitals with a schizophrenia diagnosis.

Finally out, medicated to the gills and with more mental tics than when she went in, Ray is determined to have a normal high school experience. She has a best friend, a part-time job at a diner, and is keeping up with school. She's learned that normalcy is something to be cherished, and has a running tally in the back of her ind of how many days it's been since she's seen wings.

Her carefully crafted new life starts to unravel when the wings come back. This time, they're attached to a new boy at school. Cam, short for Camael, starts out friendly enough, sitting next to her in History and trying to get to know her during lunch. He even befriends her best friend Lee in an attempt to get in her good graces.

To Ray, however, Cam represents everything she's been trying to put behind her. She fully believes that the psychiatrist's diagnosis, and has internalized the idea that the wings are nothing more than her broken mind's attempt to come to terms with the loss of her beloved mother. She might be able to hide the fact that she's seeing wings again from her father, but not if she has to keep interacting with the subject of her delusions.

The she meets Kade.

Apparently a regular at the diner she's begun waitressing at, he's different than all the other winged people she's seen. Instead of glowing white wings, his are a luminescent black, that both absorbs the light and shine with an almost slippery sheen.

And then the suicides start.

Now, with the help of two winged helpers that can't trust each other, Ray is the only person who can track down what's happening to her classmates. The only thing connecting the deceased students is a picture of a winged man that each draws before his death, and which has been haunting Ray's dreams.

Will Ray be able to solve these deaths, protect the ones she cares about, and avoid being sent back to the SS Crazy in the process?

Highs: From the hurt friend who doesn't understand why Ray has become so distant to the petulant younger sister, even the minor characters in this story react just as one would expect.

Lows: While it makes sense that Ray would come out with a few new neuroses, it's hard to imagine that a 13 year old would be institutionalized for seeing non-destructive hallucinations, and that as a 16 year old, Ray would still see herself as crazy after she finds out the wings are real after all.

Verdict: Despite a few plot hiccups, A Shimmer of Angels is a wonderful bit of escapism fit for both younger teens and their mothers.

Further Reading: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, The Painted Boy 

A half-fairy girl battles the fairy courts in 1930s America

1935 was a hard year, in the middle of a hard decade, for the Great Plains.  Beyond The Great Depression, which had the entire country in its grips, the Dust Bowl made a great swatch of the breadbasket of the nation unlivable.  People died of dust pneumonia and malnutrition, and millions fled the area.

But Callie, in Sarah Zettel's Dust Girl, is trapped.  Her mother owns the last hotel in the small Kansas town of Slow Run, and since Callie's father promised to come back to her someday, she refuses to leave.  Never mind that she hasn't heard word from Callie's father since before she was born.  Never mind that no one comes through town to stay at the hotel anymore.


Never mind the eternal dust, filling their house and their food and their lungs, slowing choking them to death.


But on April 14, 1935 that all changed.  The day of the worst dust storm in all of Kansas, Callie's mother disappears and Callie's life is turned upside-down.  


Turns out, Callie's father had a pretty good reason not to come back. Both the Seelie and the Unseelie Courts have a little something to say about his human love and half-breed daughter.    And in order to rescue both of her parents, Callie will have to master a world of magic and deception that she didn't even know existed.


The first in the forthcoming The American Fairy Trilogy, Dust Girl does a decent, if not spectacular job of setting up the world in which Callie lives.  Zettel assumes the reader has some basic understanding of the Dust Bowl, as well as the Great Depression, which is reasonable.  Novelties such as dance marathons are explained well, and add to the atmosphere of the era.  


The magical aspect, however, is much less well-defined.  Whether this is in an effort not to write herself into a corner in other books, or whether is simply a matter of magic being undefinable is hard to say.  The parts that are well-defined, though, show a rather interesting idea of a fairy or magic user being able to use the wishes of those around her to bring things into being is a fairly interesting concept.


Like most YA fiction, Dust Girl is a quick read.  The main characters remain engaging throughout, and even if their actions are at time a bit predictable, it's a comforting predictability that takes nothing away from the story itself.


Highs:  The descriptions of the dance marathons and the hobo camps show the reader what true desperation is.


Lows:  The lack of a defined method of magic among the fairies makes it frustrating at times.

Verdict:  A standard adventure story whose seldom-used backdrop puts it a bit above average.


Further Reading:  The Midnight Palace, Howl's Moving Castle 

A young man's childhood stories come alive in a most peculiar way

Everyone grows up hearing little fantasy tales that we eventually learn aren't true.  Whether it's Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny or house hobs and brownies, the world gets a little bit less magical as we age.  But what if these stories come back, with a vengeance, in your teens?

This is Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children, and for Jacob, these stories hold more magic, and more horror, than his five-year-old self could ever have believed.



Jacob was raised on his grandfather's stories of the children's home he grew up in.  Abe told Jacob fantastical stories of the monsters he escaped by arriving at the home, the wonderful woman who raised them, and the amazing feats that his fellow children could perform.  The ability to create fire, to levitate, to lift boulders, invisibility.  He even hand black and white photos that supported his stories.


But as all children do, Jacob eventually grew up.  "Logic" began to displace "fantasy," and Jacob stopped believing his grandfather's stories.  Abe had a hard life, he reasoned.  Born in Poland, he was sent to the children's home to escape the Nazi's, and lost his entire family back in Europe.  Of course the children's home would seem like a magical place to him.  The monsters he told of had any number of possible real-life counterparts.  Perhaps, after losing so much, it was simply easier to tell these stories instead.



When Jacob finds his grandfather dying in the forest behind his house, after what seemed like an especially bad bout of dementia-induced disorientation, Jacob's world is turned upside-down.  Officially the death was blamed on wild dogs, Abe's death was a violent attack.  In his dying moments, Abe was able to give Jacob a few cryptic clues to his past.  Paired with a glimpse of what actually attacked Abe, a series of events is set in motion that only a youngster listening to his grandfather's stories might believe.


Chasing these monsters leads Jacob across the pond to Britain and the bombed-out remains of the home that Abe grew up in.  And while exploring the remains of the U-Boat attack, Jacob runs into a very peculiar group of children, indeed.


This book is in turns a ghost story, a time-travelling adventure and a coming-of-age story.  Jacob very quickly grows from a poor-little-rich-kid working at this family's pharmacy chain to a young man fighting to defend a band of children against monsters literally straight out of his nightmares.  He learns that some things are worth fighting for, and is betrayed in the most under-handed of ways.



Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children is another piece of young adult fiction that is worth reading for people of all ages.  The photos within are all found material from photo collectors who loving scavenge piles for the most peculiar and strange images of a bygone era.  For the art alone, this would be a book to check out, but paired with a lovely story this is one that would be a shame to miss.



Highs:  The contrast between war-torn Europe and the idyllic country home makes for beautiful, haunting imagery.



Lows:  There are several side characters with talents and personalities what desperately need more exploration.



Verdict:  Yet another excellent addition to the young adult genre.



Further Reading:  The Midnight Palace, Dingo

A boy's quest through a fantasy land to change his life in the real world

When a video game is based off of a book, or vice versa, usually one or the other suffers for it.  Either the player can't tell what's really going on in the characters' heads, or or the book is paced so much like a game that it becomes distracting.

Thankfully, Miyuki Miyabe created an amazing story that has survived many retellings in Brave Story.

Wataru Mitani really is just a normal boy going through normal boy problems.  As is sadly too common in Japan, his father is fairly absent from his life, due to the demands of being a salaryman.  At the outset of the story, though, his father announces that he is leaving the family.  Wataru's life continues to crumble around him as his mother tries to kill herself and is left in a coma.

Desperate to change his situation, he ends up in the land of Vision and discovers that if he can complete his quest, he can change his life in the real world as well.  But he has competition on this quest.

The best part of YA Japanese books is that they don't talk down to their readers.  In a nation where children meet their salaryman parents at work to make sure the come home at a reasonable hour, lest they succumb to the national plague of karoshi, kids understand a lot more than some adults give them credit for.  In the US, the surge in YA books like The Hunger Games and The Midnight Palace are starting to draw up this market, but even these books keep things relatively simple for the reader.  There's a clear bad guy or something to struggle against.  Even if there is some inner turmoil for the main character, there's still a clear path to be taken.

There is much more introspection in Brave Story.  Wataru truly grows as a person throughout the book, and is fundamentally changed by the end.  And he changes in a way that one would expect of a boy in this situation.  There's no logic gap in why he's behaving in the manner he is.

Beyond that, though, this certainly is an adventure story.  Laid out rather like a standard RPG, there's a quest to gather the five gemstones.  There's side missions along the way that help further the plot and character development.  There's helpful natives that tag along, seemingly just to see what the Traveler is up to next.  And there's an antagonist, though not precisely and enemy, that Wataru needs to interact with and defeat.

Now, I don't mean to oversimplify the book.  Just because parts of the structure are formulaic doesn't diminish the story as a whole.  On the contrary; it makes perfect sense that the imaginings of a boy whose primary entertainment is video games would draw heavily from those themes.  And readers who have played and loved their stories in that format should be comfortable and enjoy this immensely as well.

Highs:  Miyuki Miyabe, though not so well-known in the US, has written quite a few books in Japan and it shows in the pacing and character development

Lows:  A reader not familiar with RPGs might be a bit confused with the plot design

Verdict:  A grand adventure, and a good selection for reluctant readers

Further Reading:  Book of Many Ways, The Midnight Palace

Dragons have returned, and it takes a village to defeat it

Graphic novels have enjoyed a renaissance as of late.  Once the domain of men wearing capes and tights, comics evolved in the underground comic culture with the likes of Eisner, Spiegelman and Gaiman.  With the introduction of Japanese and Korean comics to chain bookstore shelves, as well as the newer trend of the graphic novel memoir, there are many options for the discerning adult.

But with the explosion of options for adults, there are fewer choice than ever for children who aren't interested in manga.  While there are plenty of shonen and shojo comics out there, many superhero comics are either too dark or too sexualized to hand to a mid-grade child.  The ones based off of the cartoons, likeTeen Titans Go! and The All-New Batman: The Brave and The Bold are still fine, but again, these are of the capes and tights variety.

Jane Yolen is a well-respectd author who has won awards as varied as the Caldecott medal and two Nebulas, as well as a World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement.  If anyone could bring the graphic novel back to children, it would be her, and she does.

The Last Dragon, illustrated by Rebecca Guay, delivers a well paced, dramatic, enchanting story from beginning to end.  A healer with three daughters, called Rosemary, Sage and Tansy after their father's affinity with herbs, disappears one day while he's out gathering.  Just the day before, Tansy found a flower that could only be Dragon's Bane, known for burning any flesh that it touches, and being powerful enough to set fire to dragons.  Legend has it that Dragon's Bane only flowers when there's dragons nearby, but none have been spied here in centuries.  But as more and more large animals, and eventually people, start disappearing, only one conclusion can be made.

Dragons have returned.

As the boys in town go off in search of a hero, the Healer's daughters cope in their own ways as well.  Rosemary, kind but not pretty, starts being approached by suitors who see her father's house and status and want it for themselves.  Sage, pretty but not bright, holds out hope the longest and is the family cheerleader.

Tansy, on the other hand, set to follow in her father's footsteps as a healer, starts researching the folklore about dragons and how to defeat them.  When the boys come back with the most heroic man they can find, perhaps Tansy will make good use of the knowledge she's gathered to help their "hero." 

The story teaches a lot of the lessons that young adult literature tends to teach.  It shows that being heroic isn't the same as not being afraid.  It shows that cleverness can come in just as handy as brawn or a sword.  It shows that a town can come together, each doing what they're able, to face a seemingly unbeatable foe.

But something must also be said about Rebecca Guay's amazing art.  Beautiful, painted scenes set the tone for a classic fairy tale without putting off the younger crowd by being childish.  Tensions is built up by avoiding showing the monster in its entirety until later in the story, and while the panels are wonderfully detailed, it never comes off as too fussy or cluttered.

This is the perfect book for the reader who has grown up with Diana Wynne Jones and Brian Jacques, but might not be ready for Fables.

Highs:  Not every guy telling stories at the tavern qualifies as a bona-fide her, you know.

Lows:  Does every dashing hero have to win a maid's hand?

Verdict:  An amazing addition to young adult literature, and a great bridge from picture books to graphic novels.

Further Reading:  The Prince of Mist, Little (Grrl) Lost