In a sort of alternate-universe medieval Scandinavia, Halli Sveinsson grows up hearing the tales of the heroes, just like everyone else in the valley has for generations. The time of swords and bravado-filled quests is over, and this now-peaceful land has no need for great men, their feuds, or their weapons. But Halli loves the stories more than most children, which is not advantageous for the House leaders' second son. He spends his days concocting and carrying out tricks and practical jokes on his fellow descendants of Svein. His jokes get more and more outrageous and daring. One cup of bad ale served to the snide, swaggering Ragnar Hakonsson leads to disaster and a quest of revenge. With (the extremely fabulous) Aud of the House of Arne by his side (or sometimes far ahead of him--he's got rather short legs), Halli faces monsters, robbers, and angry villagers, and discovers the valley's ancient secrets.
Jonathan Stroud appeared in the world of books for kids and teens fairly recently, and he's absolutely wonderful, and getting better with each book. His first novel, Buried Fire (1999) sounds great but falls a bit flat. Heroes of the Valley, published while Stroud was in the midst of the Bartimaeus series, is stellar. I find that Stroud's series (Bartimaeus, Lockwood & Co.) feature more interesting main characters who you actually want to spend several books with, and nothing can beat Bart's snark or Lucy's dry teenage cynicism, but Heroes of the Valley is still utterly hilarious, well-written, and all-around delightful.
In a sort of alternate-universe medieval Scandinavia, Halli Sveinsson grows up hearing the tales of the heroes, just like everyone else in the valley has for generations. The time of swords and bravado-filled quests is over, and this now-peaceful land has no need for great men, their feuds, or their weapons. But Halli loves the stories more than most children, which is not advantageous for the House leaders' second son. He spends his days concocting and carrying out tricks and practical jokes on his fellow descendants of Svein. His jokes get more and more outrageous and daring. One cup of bad ale served to the snide, swaggering Ragnar Hakonsson leads to disaster and a quest of revenge. With (the extremely fabulous) Aud of the House of Arne by his side (or sometimes far ahead of him--he's got rather short legs), Halli faces monsters, robbers, and angry villagers, and discovers the valley's ancient secrets.
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Okay. At long last, none of the books in my to-read stack have been there for longer than three or four months. That's not too bad. I've read everything I got last Christmas, everything I got for my birthday, and everything I got over the summer. I think that's progress. I believe I got The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender in September. I ran across it on the Powell's website, thought it looked interesting, and had it put on hold for me at the City of Books. (That hyperlink on the word "Powell's" will take you to the website of the most amazing bookstore in the world. The City of Books is their largest location--an entire city block of BOOKS. Silly grin. If you don't live in or around Portland, OR it's not much good to you, but if you visit, make a stop there.)
After years of research into her strange family's strange history, Ava Lavender is ready to share it with us. She was born with wings, wings with brown speckled feathers. Her brother Henry was unusual, too--he disliked being touched, and he didn't speak (at least not to living people) until he was a teenager. Their mother, Viviane, could put a smell to everything, including happiness and people. The boy she loved as a child and a teenager left a mark on her neck where he kissed her. Her mother, Emelienne, perceived much more of the world than most people, and took it all to mean things. Even resolving to not love people couldn't stop them from dying, it seemed. Her mother, known only as Maman, faded into a pile of blue ashes. She had lost everything. Beginning with her grandmother's childhood in France and carrying the story through to her own life in Seattle, Ava Lavender's family history involves many secrets uncovered and mysteries solved. Wow, ladies, gentlemen, and those of you not clearly falling into either category (borrowing that line from Night Vale), it's been nearly a year since In Which Much Concerns Words launched itself into the sky and landed comfortably in the Internet, muttering something about The Apothecary, An Abundance of Katherines, and Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. Now, I've got 37 reviews and counting. Since I don't have a premium Weebly plan-face-thing, I have literally no idea where any of this blog's traffic is coming from, or if it's even real. Who knows--maybe I only think that IWMCW got 95 page views from five unique visitors yesterday, January 1st, and Weebly has been fabricating the data all along. It's kind of a weird experience. I post these reviews blindly. I hope you enjoy them...whoever you are. They're a little more infrequent now, often coming--when they do come--in sets of two or three, due to finished books piling up with reviews not usually possible in my busy schedule. Again, since I don't know where you all are coming from or who you are, I don't know if I have a collection of regulars, but if I do and you are one of them, many many thanks for hanging around and withstanding my weird new reviewing habits. High school is time-consuming.
Yeanyway. This has nothing to do with Mort. Carry on! On the Discworld, a boy is growing up, as they do. His name is Mortimer, known to most as Mort. Ungainly and still not used to his limbs, 16-year-old Mort has a father who is eager to find his son an apprenticeship (A.K.A. getting rid of him). Meanwhile, Death (yes, he of the voice like coffin lids slamming, like crypt stone, like ALL-CAPS) is looking for someone to whom he can pass on the business. It's a perfect match, obviously. And so Mort mounts the white horse of the Grim Reaper and begins his training. But after a solo mission to collect the soul of an assassinated princess goes horribly wrong (due to human feelings), the universe appears to be...unravelling. Reality is having a hard time. And, to make matters worse, Death is out discovering the pleasures of life, and hardly has time for his age-old duties--not even when they are more important than ever! After sitting at the bottom of my to-read stack since last Christmas, I finally decided in November to stop saving this fantasy epic, bound between its misty blue covers, and read it already (after all, it's a book. Books are meant to be read).
I must say I can't remember how I read series when I was in elementary school and series were pretty much all I read. A lot of what I read was Warriors by Erin Hunter, and so I believe that I mostly read through that incredibly long series while slipping in other books when I had something else, and not another Warriors. Anyway, I've been reading series totally broken up in the past few years. Not only that, but I've been reading books by the same author not part of the same series! Shadowmarch here is an example. I'm halfway through Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, and yet I interrupt it with a different story by the same person! Not my favorite thing to do. Good thing I can keep stories straight, or else I'd be a bit confused upon starting To Green Angel Tower Part I. Well, Shadowmarch had to be read, and I am glad. I was excited to see what Williams had done after he'd had some more experience with writing. In a stony keep, surrounded by ocean, royal twins Briony and Barrick Eddon have somehow found themselves in charge of Southmarch. With those who should have ruled before them imprisoned or dead, the teenagers are pressed onto the throne to oversee the troubles of their lands at a time when the lands have never been more troubled. In the very near north, hidden by enchanted mists, the strange fae Qar are stirring. They are no longer content to hide behind the defenses they constructed the last time they tangled with mortals... The centuries of waiting in their cold, gray world are over. They want their old homeland back from the sunlanders. Yet it seems that the Qar are not the only thing that should be worrying Briony and Barrick. Powerful human forces from the south press in, not to mention betrayal from within. Wow. Wow. I finished Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore a month ago, and I'm still amazed.
Clay Jannon used to design the website of NewBagel, a San Francisco startup that made the perfect bagel, based on an algorithm. Shape. Texture. Taste. All perfected with NewBagel's recipe. But then the Recession arrived, taking NewBagel with it. Clay was left to online reading and halfhearted searching for job opportunities in his apartment shared by a movie set designer and an android-like PR professional. One night, Clay walks into Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, a building that, in the front, appears to be an ordinary bookstore. But if you walk into the back room, you discover the towering shelves of books, three stories high, each book with a strange title... Mr. Penumbra, the establishment's elderly, sharp-witted owner, offers Clay a job as a night clerk. Clay soon discovers that the bookstore is even stranger than he was expecting--not many people come to the 24-hour bookstore, and when they do, they belong to a small group of eccentrics who check out the mysterious books on the back shelf. Further investigation and help from his friends and acquaintances, including his middle school best friend Neel Shah (who is now, conveniently, the rich founder of a middleware company) and his new Googler girlfriend Kat Potente, Clay begins to get an idea of what's really going on at the bookstore--or so he thinks. It's got a rather horrible title and the texture of the cover is shudder-inducing (it's got some weird soft coating on it). Despite these drawbacks, If You Could Be Mine is a wonderful little book, and it was about time that I read it (been sitting around since June).
Sahar and Nasrin have been in love since they were children. They're complete opposites--Sahar is quiet, studious, and steadfast, while Nasrin is popular, dramatic, and spoiled--but their love has lasted in secret for eleven years. The girls both know what the Iranian government thinks of people like them, and so they say nothing of their relationship. But when the string of Nasrin's suitors that they think of as no more than an annoyance suddenly turns into one man--one fiancee--they cannot go on as they always have. Sahar needs a way to take back her girlfriend. She finds a solution that sounds perfect--in Iran, sex reassignment surgery is encouraged for those who feel born in the wrong body. Sahar will do anything for Nasrin, even this. I was laughing with delight when writing my last review because I figured out how to hyperlink in Weebly. Hint: It's the little hyperlink insignia button in the formatting menu. Duh. I should notice things that are important, instead of that the girl halfway across the room has got a Dole banana sticker on her sweater sleeve (although who knows; maybe that was really important). Anyway, I love hyperlinking because it's almost like coding because you hide something inside a different something and it looks like the different something, but it's not as hard or confusing as coding (although over the summer I did sort of figure out how to program a Turing machine--sort of). That's why I was laughing with delight. But then I got caught up in writing about Stone of Farewell, and forgot to tell the world how much I love hyperlinking and please forgive me if I mention some of my book reviews in my other book reviews just for the sake of hyperlinking to them.
Anyway, this has nothing to do with Conversion. Make me shut up. Colleen Rowley is under a lot of stress. She's about to graduate from St. Joan's high school, and she's applying to several top-level universities, and she wants to be valedictorian--meaning she's in tenth-of-a-point competition with a classmate--and her amazing history teacher has the gall to get sick, leaving an objectionable sub to manage the class. On the day that Mr. Mitchell doesn't show up, some of the high schoolers start acting strange. Clara, the most popular and well-liked girl in the school, has what appears to be a seizure in the middle of class. Her two best friends shortly follow her to the hospital, exhibiting even stranger symptoms. As panic and rumors spread, more girls fall ill. Parents, students, the school, experts, and the health department all get involved in trying to uncover the cause of the Danvers Mystery Illness. Colleen, who's been reading The Crucible for her history sub, makes a discovery that none of the officials nor experts have come close to. Could there be supernatural elements to the sickness? Meanwhile, in 1706, a young woman named Ann Putnam tells her local reverend a strange story--when she was a teenager, she and some of her friends started the Salem witch trials. And the girls were all lying. I apologize for taking so long to both read this book and write a review for it (eek, more than two months!) but I have ben very busy discovering exactly how my high school drowns you in homework.
Anyway, I read Stone of Farewell, and now I have a bit of time to write about it. If you haven't read The Dragonbone Chair, the first book in this series, go do that. The Dragonbone Chair left Simon, Binabik, Jiriki, and Sludig on a freezing mountain, and the suriviors of Naglimund wandering the woods of northern Erkynland. Miriamele had just embarked with Cadrach on a voyage to Nabban, hoping to convince Duke Leobardis to ally with Josua, not realizing that she was already too late. When we return to Osten Ard, Williams picks up right where he left off. Binabik and Sludig are being held by the trolls under sentence of death. Simon is slowly recovering from his fight with the dragon Igjarjuk, and Jiriki's torn between speaking for his imprisoned companions and returning to his home to perform final rites for An'nai. Meanwhile, Josua's tiny kingdom of survivors flees Norns and Bukken and tries to recover from injuries with no treatment. And over it all, King Elias and Pryrates continue to do their best to destroy world order and replace it with the Ineluki's. But when Simon collapses during Binabik's trial, he receives a strange vision from Valada Geloe, and she tells him that their only hope lies in the Stone of Farewell, or Sesuad'ra, a Sithi landmark of great power and history. I actually read this one before Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, which you might have gathered from the huge gap between the reviewing of a little book like Equal Rites and something I read in a day. But I reviewed Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe before The Name of the Wind since, you know, a book that one reads in a day is a book that one has a lot of enthusiasm about. I finished The Name of the Wind two weeks ago now (keep an eye out for a review of the second book of Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn!), and I nearly gave up on writing a review about it. It sat around on my desk and I did not write about it. I actually put it on the shelf. But it's rare that I just don't review something (so far, that's only happened with The Help, which I'd already analyzed far too much since it was for school, and besides, you can find about eighty million reviews for it elsewhere), so here's my opinion on The Name of the Wind for you...
An obscure inn sits in a world ravaged by war and unholy creatures. Name anything, and it's "bad." But Kote, the red-haired proprietor of the Waystone, brings in a small crowd of regulars every night. The men eat, drink, tell stories, and complain about the state of the world while, behind them, Kote polishes bottles and his assistant, Bast, sweeps the floor. Even the late arrival of a regular who has been attacked by a strange, spider-like monster barely disturbs the inn's peace. But one night, a new man shows up at the Waystone. His name is Chronicler, and he claims to know who unassuming Kote really is--Kvothe, the legendary hero. Chronicler offers to take down the story of Kvothe's life, to get the real version out there and dispel the rumors that have flown around the world for years. And so we learn the truth of the humble Kote--how he was born the son of travelling actors, began his training in sympathy with an arcanist met on the road, moved on to the great University, and started to become the hero known by many names. I read this book in a day. I never do that--at least not since second grade, when I begun to realize that I was too old for Magic Treehouse if I went through the books that fast. To be fair, I stayed up until 1:30 AM to finish Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, but perhaps that's even more impressive.
It is so hard to describe this book. The back cover sounds so dreadfully ordinary and dull, and I don't blame whoever wrote it. It's nearly impossible to do it justice without just going into detail about everything in the book. It cannot be summarized, let alone in the way that back covers do it--designed to entice, not describe. AaDDtSotU is made up of all its parts, which is what makes it so wonderful and unique. Summer of 1987 and Ari Mendoza is fifteen and miserable. For the past eleven years, his brother has been in prison and no one will talk about him, especially not his parents. Ari doesn't even know what Bernardo did. Ari's father fought in the Vietnam war before Ari was born, and he barely knows him, silent and inexpressive as he is. But when Ari, who can't swim, goes to the pool one day to float and listen to the older lifeguards say stupid and creepy things about girls, he meets Dante, whose voice is squeaky with allergies. Dante offers to teach him to swim, and Ari accepts. Dante seems so perfect and happy. He laughs all the time. He loves art and poetry and reading. He has a wonderful relationship with his parents. He gets along with everyone. He is almost the exact opposite of Ari, and yet they become friends. Neither one of them has ever really had a friend. As the summer goes by, Dante and Ari spend time together and get to know each other better each day. But one rainy evening, a terrible accident results in a hospital visit and a lot of confused feelings on all sides, changing Ari and Dante's relationship. In the course of a year, Ari and Dante learn much about each other, their families, and living. |
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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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