Review: The Last Battle

This week I finished reading The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis aloud to my daughter. And thus we finished reading the complete Chronicles of Narnia together.

I've read these books many times, but there's just something about a good story read aloud. Even if I'm reading it more to myself than my daughter. It also set a good tone for reading together each day. She used to ignore me and play while I read. But in the last few months, she took that time to bring me books to read to her while I was reading. So our reading of the Chronicles of Narnia was interspersed with readings of The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Bob and Larry's ABCs (a Veggie Tales ABC book that is her favorite--she calls it Bob).

Next I'm going to read aloud her Beatrix Potter collection that my mom gave her. After that, I have no idea. But it's a habit that I want to keep up.

And now for The Last Battle. It is the only Narnia book that I didn't read and reread as a child. I read it once and never picked it up again. When I read it this time, I remembered what I didn't like about it.

Spoiler Alert: Susan is taken out of it. She is "no longer a friend of Narnia" and has become preoccupied with nylons and lipstick. She was always the most skeptical of the Pevensie kids, and C.S. Lewis might have been trying to make a last days of Narnia thing realistic by not having every person we know end up in "Aslan's country." But I didn't like it. Susan is by no means my favorite character, but it still made me wonder what C.S. Lewis had against her to turn her into a snob and leave her out. If I ignored that fact, I enjoyed this book a lot more than I did the first time.

Review: The Lightning Thief

What if the Greek gods were real and were still around today? Well, they'd be doing what they've always done, which includes hanky panky with mortals that results in half-god, half-mortal children, i.e. heroes.

That's the premise of The Lightning Thief and the other Percy Jackson and the Olympians books. I read the first book quickly. It's an easy, entertaining read. I found a couple of bits a little predictable, but there were plenty of unexpected plot twists as well.

I'm not rushing out to read the next one, but I probably will read them all eventually. They'll be good for when I've been doing too much heavy reading and need some lighter fare. Plus these books include just enough allusions to popular Greek myths so that someone (like a young adult, the target audience) who doesn't know the myths can follow the book but also might be interested enough to learn more. Which can only be a good thing.

Reading Aloud: Voyage of the Dawn Treader

In our adventures of reading The Chronicles of Narnia together, my daughter and I just finished The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. I haven't seen the movie yet because we moved to the middle of nowhere with no gas station let alone a movie theater a few weeks before the movie was released. I look forward to seeing it soon. Even if I have to wait for it to come out on DVD, it will be relatively close to my rereading of the book and I hope to be able to compare the two mediums with more accuracy.

Review: The Giver

In honor of Banned Books Week, I reread The Giver by Lois Lowry. The first time I read it, I felt like I knew what the ending meant. Now I can see a few different interpretations--though that still means I'll choose the interpretation that I like. With the book fresh in my mind though, I am going to go check out its companion books Gathering Blue and Messenger.

Besides being an enjoyable and interesting read without being too laborious (that's what I love about quality YA fiction), it was good for me to read this book at this time in my life. Lately my toddler has been getting hurt or sick every time I turn around. It's stressful and sometimes I want to just put her in a bubble (or maybe wrap her in bubble wrap), but this book shows the extreme end of never having any pain or troubles. We need pain and suffering to know joy and love. I always knew it, but it's a good reminder right now.

Prince Caspian

I just finished reading the fourth book in the Chronicles of Narnia aloud to my daughter. I love the movies versions of both The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian. Though when I've recently read those two books, I've noticed how many differences there are between the books and the movies. But in this case, the differences aren't important because I think the movies capture the spirit and imagination and magic of the books.

I'm excited that we finished Prince Caspian because I know that we'll be able to get through Voyage of the Dawn Treader before the movie comes out this December. Which I'm excited about for more than just the fact that Ben Barnes, who plays Caspian, has a beard in the movie--but that helps.

Review: Gregor the Overlander

"Courage only counts when you can count."

Since I read the Hunger Games series, I decided to try out Suzanne Collins's first book: Gregor the Overlander. I found it interesting and entertaining enough, even though I am by no means its intended audience. I'm not about to run out and read the second book in the five book series, but I may pick it up another time when I want something entertaining and easy to read.

Like the Hunger Games series, this series is pretty scary and violent for a YA book. In some ways Gregor the Overlander was even scarier to me, probably because of my fear of spiders of any size, let alone enormous ones. I was more freaked out than any ten year old when the huge spiders chased Harry Potter and I spent a couple of years dreading the enormous spider from the Lord of the Rings (because I anticipated it in the second movie, but it didn't arrive until the third one).

One moment in this book seemed to echo one of my favorite YA books, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. Compare the two quotes:

“Despair settled like a stone in the pit of Meg’s stomach. She had been so certain that the moment she found her father everything would be alright. Everything would be settled. All the problems would be taken out of her hands. She would no longer be responsible for anything.” - A Wrinkle in Time

"This was the scariest part of all. Gregor had thought he would get a parent back when he found his dad. Then he could stop having to make hard decisions. He could just be a kid." - Gregor the Overlander

Both Meg and Gregor learn a hard lesson early on: your parents can't fix everything, and eventually you have to start making hard decisions for yourself whether your parent is there or not.

Review: A Fistful of Sky

I picked up this book because the title sounded cool and because the author, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, lives in Oregon, thus fulfilling one of my goals to read more local authors. But I'm sorry to say that I was disappointed in it.

First of all, it was weird. It has a fantasy element to it, so that should be expected. But it was in that odd in between stage where the world is almost normal, but not quite.

My main complaint as I read is that the main character was very juvenile. In some reviews I read, I think this book is supposed to be for a YA audience, but it wasn't shelved that way at my library. Plus, there are so many YA books that crossover well for an adult audience. This was not one of them.

But what I liked the least was the ending. It could have and should have ended a couple of pages earlier. The main character's final choice just didn't make sense with all of her thoughts and actions leading up to it. And it was weird. And I thought it was stupid.

So...I really wanted to like this book, but really, really didn't. The author has gotten such great reviews for her books that I wanted to like this one enough to try another of hers, but I was so disappointed in the ending, that I don't think I'll ever pick up another book by her.

Childhood Favorites: The Magician's Nephew

A few Christmases back, my father-in-law gave me one of the best gifts of my life—a beautifully illustrated copy of all the Chronicles of Narnia. I can’t wait for my daughter to be old enough to sit on my lap and look at the pictures as I read the stories aloud to her. In fact, I found no reason to wait.

About a month ago, I started reading The Magician’s Nephew aloud to her as she played around me. Her attention span currently lasts about ten seconds (she’s not quite one year old), but she did occasionally sit on my lap and look at the pages. Sometimes she played long enough that we got a whole chapter read, sometimes I only read a paragraph, but we finished reading it yesterday.

There is no need to say that I loved it—my childhood copies of the Chronicles of Narnia are in tatters. But even though she’s too young to understand it yet, I enjoyed reading the words out loud to my daughter and talking with her about what was happening in the book. Well written books are always enhanced by being read aloud—and I love having a child to read to so I don’t feel silly reading out loud to myself.

Today we’ll begin reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I hope that these books turn into fond childhood memories for her, just as they are for me.

Review: Two More Shannon Hale Books

I recently finished reading the last of the Books of Bayern, Forest Born. I was pleasantly surprised, and I even think it was my favorite in the series. Besides the fantastical story of another land, it was a touching book about a girl who is so unsure of who she is that she imitates those around her, and thus completely loses herself--before finding herself again in the end, of course.

(My one complaint is that there is only this lame new cover, not the beautiful covers that go so well together that many of her earlier books have. For example, I love the one below.)

And so, I picked up Princess Academy again. I started at the beginning instead of trying to jump partway through to where I had left off twice before. Which is a much better strategy for revisiting an abandoned book (unless it's Moby Dick or anything by Dostoevsky--if you keep starting over, you'll never finish).

Once I pushed through the beginning and got over the title, I enjoyed it as I knew I likely would. I think I appreciated this book more after reading the Books of Bayern--the connection to the landscape was a lot more meaningful.

I honestly can't think of a better title, I just know that the one it has turned me off to it for a long time.

The book ended just as a I wanted it to--just as Shannon Hale always does. My literary, English graduate side fights against those happy endings that tie up so neatly. But my girly side (which is in there somewhere) loves Shannon Hale's endings. So she's right on target for her audience--which my English graduate side can appreciate as well.

Review: Catching Fire

Catching Fire, the follow up to Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games didn't disappoint. It was just as gripping and nail biting as the first, and I can't wait to read the third when it's released in August.

I must admit that I was surprised with the direction the plot took. Surprise in fiction is good, but there were a few parts in the beginning of the book that felt rushed in order for Collins to get to the story she really wanted to tell.

And this might be part of the main character's charm, but I found her to be completely clueless at times. Or in more flattering terms, you might say that she's innocent and unassuming. The hints that other characters were trying to give her were apparent to me, but she was completely blind to them. I'm still not sure if that bugged me or not. I may hold out judgement until book three to see if she learns to be a little more savvy.

Finally, I've heard that The Hunger Games is being made into a movie. Part of me wants to see it because I enjoyed the book, but another part worries that any true rendition would be too bloody and yucky for me. Of course, these books were written for ages 12 and up, so how much could they show in a movie made for that audience?

Review: The Book of Atrix Wolfe

"But unless Atrix could name what he fought, he would never defeat it, for he thought he fought only himself."

It's surprising that I've never read anything by Patricia McKillip because I devoured everything by Robin McKinley as an adolescent--and they're right next to each other on the shelf. I chose The Book of Atrix Wolfe based on the Author Read-Alikes section of my library's NoveList.

Before reading further, I want to say that I'm not not recommending this book--it might be just your thing. It just wasn't really my thing.

I enjoy what I call light fantasy--the stuff you can read without having to learn an entire new world and new language to understand. This book fell somewhere in the middle. It took me about fifty pages to connect all the different threads of the story, and I got lost on and off throughout the entire book.

One element of the writing was just straight up annoying. I'm an advocate of the simplest dialogue tags possible--"said" and "asked" are the only ones you really need. Anything more flowery is just a sign that the dialogue isn't strong enough on its own. And completely unforgivable: tagging dialogue in a way that interrupts the dialogue.

"What," Burne barked, "happened."

or

"Tell me," he said harshly, "what he recognized."

Even an untrained ear can hear how awkward that is. And those two examples came from the same page.

The book did have some redeeming qualities. It was entertaining enough for me to keep reading to the end. And it had some very beautiful imagery. It's a good book for lovers of fantasy.