Maeve of Connacht lives just as a princess should--her five older sisters do make things difficult sometimes, but her mother Cloithfinn is strong and fierce, and her father Lord Eochu has just become High King of Eiru after he cut off the head of Lord Fachtna, the old High King, in a battle. Now Fachtna's head sits in the lintel above their doorway--the place of honor. Maeve has managed to cut a piece of hair off of the end of the tail of Dubh, widely reputed to be the fiercest bull around. Quite an accomplishment for a five-year-old girl, she thinks! But as Maeve gets older, her sisters are sent off into fosterage with other families--the annoying ones and, less fortunately, sweet Derbriu, Maeve's only friend--and every single male guest at the Cruachan ringfort keeps following her around, seeing her as either their wife or daughter-in-law. Maeve decides that the only way to throw off these troublesome suitors is to learn to be boyish, and the best way to do that is to take fighting lessons. But it's not easy for a princess to suddenly start vanishing and learn to swing a sword and toss a spear, and her secret lessons don't remain secret for long. Punishment results, and the outcome will haunt Maeve for a long time. But when she is nearly fifteen years old, a druid named Master Iobar shows up at Cruachan, along with a very strange son named Odran. The boy's hair is waist-length and blue-black, he wears a thick cloak even in May. But strangest of all, Odran carries with him two animals, Guennola the stoat and Muirin the red fox. Maeve and Odran quickly become friends, spending time together healing injured animals in an old shack. Maeve learns how much Odran loves healing small animals, and that he doesn't want to be a druid like his father, which is the path that Iobar is set on his son following. Like Odran, Maeve resists the future set before her, but neither one of them will get their way without a fight...
I found Esther Friesner's Princesses of Myth series on my Kindle. Her book Sphinx's Princess showed up as a suggestion, and I read it and liked it. I soon discovered the great world of Princesses of Myth books, and now I'm thoroughly inundated in them. Deception's Princess is the seventh Princesses of Myth book so far. Friesner writes these two-book series on various historical princesses--real or mythical--from all around the world. Even with only four females in the series, she's managed to pull them from extremely diverse cultures--we have seen Helen of Ancient Greece in Nobody's Princess/Prize, Nefertiti of Ancient Egypt in Sphinx's Princess/Queen, Himiko of medieval Japan in Spirit's Princess/Chosen, and now Maeve of Iron Age Ireland in Deception's Princess. Throughout all of these books (I've read them all except for Nobody's Prize and Spirit's Chosen), there's definitely the running theme of the royal girl growing up surrounded by perfection, realizing that everything isn't quite so fantastic as she thought before, and rebelling to take her own path. For the most part, this creates a strong unity between all of the radically different cultures of the books, but it is sometimes the books' weakest point (more on that later).
Maeve of Connacht lives just as a princess should--her five older sisters do make things difficult sometimes, but her mother Cloithfinn is strong and fierce, and her father Lord Eochu has just become High King of Eiru after he cut off the head of Lord Fachtna, the old High King, in a battle. Now Fachtna's head sits in the lintel above their doorway--the place of honor. Maeve has managed to cut a piece of hair off of the end of the tail of Dubh, widely reputed to be the fiercest bull around. Quite an accomplishment for a five-year-old girl, she thinks! But as Maeve gets older, her sisters are sent off into fosterage with other families--the annoying ones and, less fortunately, sweet Derbriu, Maeve's only friend--and every single male guest at the Cruachan ringfort keeps following her around, seeing her as either their wife or daughter-in-law. Maeve decides that the only way to throw off these troublesome suitors is to learn to be boyish, and the best way to do that is to take fighting lessons. But it's not easy for a princess to suddenly start vanishing and learn to swing a sword and toss a spear, and her secret lessons don't remain secret for long. Punishment results, and the outcome will haunt Maeve for a long time. But when she is nearly fifteen years old, a druid named Master Iobar shows up at Cruachan, along with a very strange son named Odran. The boy's hair is waist-length and blue-black, he wears a thick cloak even in May. But strangest of all, Odran carries with him two animals, Guennola the stoat and Muirin the red fox. Maeve and Odran quickly become friends, spending time together healing injured animals in an old shack. Maeve learns how much Odran loves healing small animals, and that he doesn't want to be a druid like his father, which is the path that Iobar is set on his son following. Like Odran, Maeve resists the future set before her, but neither one of them will get their way without a fight...
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Wow.
I've been meaning to get around to reading The Princess Bride for absolutely ages. I'd heard about the great swathes of personal-narrative text in this book, and that put me off for a while, but at last, after years of loving the movie, I finally bought it. I really don't know why the idea of great swathes of personal-narrative text was so abhorrent; it's never much of a problem for me unless it's really badly written. After reading it, I can safely say that it didn't take away too much from the story at all, and I'm so glad that I have read this book at last. In the country of Florin, milkmaid Buttercup is slowly making her way through the ranks of beauty, eventually arriving in the top twenty most beautiful women in the world by her late teens. But her pretty exterior doesn't say all for her, because she's horribly rude to the boy who works on their farm. His real name is Westley, but she always calls him Farm Boy, and never speaks to him except to order him around. Every time she gives him a task, he answers the same way: "As you wish." Buttercup's parents are not in what most people would call a happy marriage, and their daughter has so little imagination that her beloved stallion is named simply Horse. But one day, following a visit from a Count and Countess, Buttercup begins to realize that she is in love with Westley. She dashes to his hovel and tells him of her thirty-minutes-old passion, and eventually he tells her that he loves her back. But their happiness is shattered when Westley decides to go seek his fortune in America. It's not long before the dreadful news arrives--pirates have attacked, and Westley is missing, almost certainly dead. Buttercup falls into a blank state and vows to never love again. Meanwhile, Prince Humperdinck has just received news that King Lotharon is dying, causing his son to be very put out, because now the hunting-obsessed Humperdinck shall have to find himself a bride. After a few failed suits, including a bald princess of Guilder--the enemy country--who conceals her shame under a massive hat collection, the milkmaid from the country, gorgeous and grieving, is swept up onto the Prince's horse and taken away to begin her new life at the castle in Florin City. They have established that there is to be no love in their relationship, but there's worse than that, unbeknownst to Princess Buttercup. The hidden plots begin to be revealed when a strange trio kidnaps the young woman on one of her daily rides. They are Vizzini the evil genius, hired to commit crimes; Fezzik the giant, who really hates to hurt people; and Inigo Montoya the great fencing wizard who wants nothing more than justice for the murder of his father, which he witnessed when he was a young boy. But as they near the Cliffs of Insanity, Inigo notices a ship following them--the man in black has come to claim his prize... Well, here we go. First not-so-wonderful review. It had to happen at some point; one can't like all books that they read. I did want so much to love this book, but that wasn't going to happen. The premise sounded fantastic, and really it was. The bit about the main character suddenly moving to Northern Ireland interested me especially, since I'm very interested in Ireland. I thought it might help me write some of my own works that take place partially or entirely in Ireland, considering that the writer is from Carrickfergus, where the story is set. I did learn some, but once the alien planet was discovered...well...the writing just went, as I've been telling people, NEEERRRRRRRRRRRR. A finger moving downward in a rapid arc accompanies that noise. The beginning was really wonderful, but towards the middle, the plot was literally the only thing driving the story, and by that time it wasn't even a very good plot at that.
Jamie O'Neill had bone cancer a year ago, which resulted in the amputation of his left forearm. Since then, he has not said a single word. He communicates by gestures and writing things in a notebook, and he lives with his mother in a ramshackle New York City apartment. Though Anna O'Neill has a good, well-paying job, all of the cancer treatments for her son took loads of money, and her debts are too great to live somewhere nicer. It doesn't help that her husband left her for a woman in Seattle when Jamie had just had his surgery, leaving his wife in the economic lurch and causing his son to feel betrayed, alone, and unloved by all except Anna and an old librarian named Thaddeus Harper who is fond of talking to him. Jamie has no other friends, and his Harlem School for Children with Special Needs is not at all the right place for him, since all the other kids there who can't speak are actually mute. Jamie chooses not to speak, and he connects with no one at school. But then Anna receives a letter with a lot of confusing legal terms in it one day, but she understands what it means: a distant relation of hers has died and she has inherited Muck Island off of Islandmagee off the coast of Ireland (at one point Jamie thinks of it as an island off the coast of a bigger island called Islandmagee off the coast of an even bigger island called Ireland which is off the coast of an island larger still called Great Britain--I liked that take on it). On Muck Island there is a little Victorian cottage--and an old lighthouse that is no longer used as such. Anna and Jamie, having nothing really to stay in New York for, decide that yes, they will move to the Lighthouse House on Muck Island, Northern Ireland. When they arrive, they make an interesting discovery--when he turns eighteen, Jamie will be the Laird of Muck, or Lord Ui Neill/O'Neill, a designation similar to a lord. On Jamie's first day of school, he makes a friend--a guy named Ramsay McDonald who shares his rather rare views on the world. Ramsay respects that Jamie doesn't want to talk, and he's very smart, spending lots of the words he says to Jamie on bits of information. Ramsay and Jamie finally convince Anna to let them use the lighthouse as a place to hang out and do homework, as long as they were careful on the decrepit stairs. But one day, Ramsay looks at the lighthouse and realizes that it's too tall--there's an upper chamber that they haven't discovered yet. Jamie and Ramsay break through the ceiling and discover that there is, indeed, another room at the top. In that room, they find a strange gold device shaped like a fish and decorated with jeweled buttons. It doesn't take long for them to figure out that the Salmon, as it is called, takes them to the alien planet of Altair, where the equatorial country of Aldan is desperate for help in fending off the northern invaders from Alkhava, a country running out of resources and space as the permanent ice creeps over their land in the process of global freezing (the opposite of Earth's global warming). There, Jamie and Ramsay meet an Aldanese girl named Wishaway who claims that her people have been waiting for the Lords Ui Neill; in past times of trouble, they have come just in time to save them. This is one of those books that I meant to read and meant to read ever since it came out, and I just never got around to it until last month. It really catches your eye at the bookstore--among all the kid/YA books that have cover pictures of either plucky young protagonists looking confused and carrying magical instruments, or very ordinary and harassed-faced teens trying their best to be attractive, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children really stands out in that its cover is a vintage photograph of a levitating little girl in a tiara, floating blank-faced among some trees. "Wow," you say to yourself. "That must be one strange book." And you pick it up, and you flip through it, and things get even weirder as you notice all the old and creepy photographs, largely of kids doing impossible things like lifting huge boulders or having two reflections in water. Actually, these pictures aren't nearly as creepy and weird when you read the book, because they connect to the story, and you just go, "Oh, yeah, there's Hugh with his bees all over him, like usual."
Jacob Portman has a rather unusual grandfather named Abe, and according to Abe, his past was literally magical. He was born in Poland just before WWII, and had to escape the Nazis. He was sent to an island off the coast of Wales, where, as he tells his grandson, the sun shone all day and everything was perfect. And the kids there did magical things; Abe even has photographs to prove it--invisible boys and such. At first, Jake is fascinated by these tales, even though a part of them gives him nightmares--the monsters. In Abe's early stories to young Jake, horrible monsters with loose black skin and many tentacle-like tongues were what chased him away from his family and to the island off of Wales. But as Jake gets older and wiser, he figures out that Abe's stories must be embellished, and that the creepy monsters were really just men with guns and uniforms, who Abe later went to fight when WWII finally came. Only then something awful happens: Abe is murdered in the middle of the woods. Jake and his friend Ricky arrive just in time to see the old man die, and Jake sees something terrifying in the woods that runs away before he can get a proper look--it's one of the monsters Abe always told him about. But Ricky didn't catch a glimpse of the creature, and so Jake gets a psychologist named Dr. Golan who diagnoses the boy with acute stress reaction, and pronounces the "monster" in the woods a product of that, and after a while, Jake is convinced that he saw nothing. His grandpa was killed by wild animals, nothing else. But Abe's last words are still haunting him, and he cannot figure them out. On his sixteenth birthday, Jake receives a gift from his grandpa: a book of Ralph Waldo Emerson's writing, and inside there is a letter, fifteen years old, from someone named Alma Peregrine. Soon, Jake and his father plan a trip for a few weeks to the Welsh island of Cairnholm. Mr. Portman wants to research birds there, and Jake plans to figure out what really happened to his grandfather when Abe was a child, and so he finds Miss Peregrine's home for peculiar children. Paper Towns was my first John Green book. I thought that such a popular author could not be any good, since most of the time, I cannot stand the bestsellers in the YA section of the bookstore (e.g., The Hunger Games. I know, I know--I don't like The Hunger Games. I'm sorry, everyone). But my friend (who also doesn't much like The Hunger Games) gave me Paper Towns as a birthday present, and I was utterly amazed. I had no idea that John Green wrote about such deep ideas as philosophies of life! What? This was new to me. It's been almost a year since I read Paper Towns, and since then, the only Green book I've read has been An Abundance of Katherines. From what I've seen, AAoK is one of his less popular books, but I really enjoyed it.
Colin Singleton just graduated from high school and got dumped by a girl named Katherine for the nineteenth time. Ever since he began dating, his girlfriends have have only been named Katherine, and it has to be spelled exactly like that, and she can't go by a nickname like Kat or anything. But weird dating type aside, Colin is no ordinary boy. He is a prodigy, and has always been super-smart. He tries to read 400 pages a day, and he learns facts like crazy. Unfortunately, prodigies are not so cool forever, and Colin is beginning to figure this out for himself. If you're a genius, you invent things, and you're brilliant into your adult life. But prodigies...well, Colin feels like they never do anything really special. You get to be that ten-year-old who knows everything, but by the time you hit college, you're just like everyone else, and it sucks, since for your whole childhood you were called special and brilliant, and now...now you're not. And to make matters worse, this most recent Katherine who dumped him...well, he was actually in love with her. He knew that it was more than just a crush, more than the feelings he had for Katherines throughout elementary school, middle school, and the early years of high school. He is heartbroken, depressed, and feels useless. So when his friend Hassan Harbish shows up at his house shortly after the terrible dumping and offers to take Colin on a road trip to dispel his misery and perhaps find a new purpose, Colin readily agrees. The boys soon head out of their hometown of Chicago and find themselves in Gutshot, Tennessee, a little town that claims to contain the grave of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Colin and Hassan meet a girl named Lindsey Lee Wells, whose mom, Hollis, offers the boys the job of interviewing Gutshot residents to compile an oral history, and in exchange, she will pay them $500 per week and give them room and board at her house. Between interviewing, Colin is trying to come up with a formula he calls the Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability, which is supposed to show the progression of a relationship, and could also be used, Colin believes, to predict the future. At the same time, he's trying to convince Hassan to go to college. His friend has "taken a year off" and that one year looks like it may turn into two if Hassan isn't careful. While spending the summer in Gutshot, Colin discovers many things about Katherines, the Theorem, being a nearly-former prodigy, and the way he loves. When I was in fourth grade or fifth grade or something, I read The Apothecary. A few years later, I was appalled to discover that I remembered next to nothing about it—odd, considering that I remember books very well, especially ones that I liked. And I liked The Apothecary. And yet despite all of my usual tendencies, I remembered nothing except that it took place in postwar London, the main character was named Janie, there was a guy named Pip, and at some point some people turned into birds. Wow. One of the worst story recalls of my life. It was a little confusing, but that sort of thing has never deterred me or caused such a lack of memory. And so, after a couple of years of gazing in agitation at the gray volume reposing on my shelf in the M section (for Meloy), I finally picked it up again last month.
It's February 1952, and 14-year-old Janie Scott lives a normal life in California. But then strange men start following her home, and her family discovers that they are being followed by the American government, who thinks they might be communists. The Scotts are forced to move to London, and Janie doesn't know what to do, uprooted from everything she'd ever known and taken to a foreign city, enrolling at a school where she has to take Latin, a language she speaks not a word of. It seems like everyone hates her--the first student she met was Sarah Pennington, rich, privileged, and gorgeous, who keeps saying "This is Jane Scott from California," like the state is fictitious or something. The Latin teacher, Mr. Danby, is nice, though, and Janie feels a bit better knowing that there is a Russian kid at school, Sergei Shiskin, who's probably having an even worse time than she is. But during her first day at lunch, they have a bomb drill, and the only person who refuses to go under the cafeteria tables because he claims they will offer no protection is Benjamin Burrows, son of a local apothecary who wants more than anything to become a spy. Janie and Benjamin become friends over chess in the park, where Benjamin sits and watches people. He has become suspicious of a particular man. But then strange things start happening--Benjamin's father is kidnapped. A man is murdered with a sundial. A mysterious book called the Pharmacopoeia falls into Janie and Benjamin's hands, and the quest to find the missing apothecary and find out what his real work is begins. |
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August 2017
AuthorI am Fiona, a 16-year-old person. I write reviews of books that I read. I love reading, writing, spoonerisms, word jokes, accents, In Which chapters, parentheses, long dashes, et ceteras, and acronyms. Categories
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