January 2017 – 2.5 out of 5 stars
My first completed book for 2017 is the book Song of the Deep by Brian Hastings. This illustrated novelization is based on the video game of the same name and tells the story of Merryn, a little girl who sets off on a quest through the depths of the sea searching for her father who fails to return home from his daily fishing one day, led only by a dream and the stories and lullabies she grew up hearing.
Merryn’s mother is dead to begin with. She died when Merryn was little, though the exact memory of how is lost to her when the story begins. What Merry does retain are the lullabies and stories that her mother used to sing at her bedside and the smell of orchids from when her mother would weave necklaces from their fragrant petals.
When Merryn’s fisherman father does not return home after a full day and night since he left for his daily course on the sea, the girl finds herself refusing to accept that the sea has claimed her father. Instead, she mines the piles of sea junk that he often catches in his nets and has allowed her to keep. Cannibalizing these parts, in the course of a day, she builds herself a submarine (sans any heavy machinery or sophisticated tools, unless she was hiding a welding torch under her raincoat that I missed).
Here is where the story stretches even my suspension of disbelief to the point of breaking. Merry sets out in her little homemade submarine with no food, no water, no way of knowing which way to go, and no way to breathe/recycle air in her remarkably airtight sub (though Hastings does provide manner of explanation for this fairly quickly). I understand the fact that this is a novel for children based on a video game, which by bent of its media format rarely offers explanations for just how things happen, but I still believe that novelizations require a degree of realism or at least believability. Not once does the book note that Merryn eats on this journey, though she harvests food for someone else (so I suppose that it is feasible that she ate some of the food herself, too). There are events that are noted as being impossible that later do in fact happen with no explanation at all as to how.
Now, for the positives: this little book is beautiful. There are ink-line illustrations and prettily drawn borders. The songs and stories are lovely and lilting, and I think it’s a nice companion piece to the video game (which my husband bought the same day that I bought this book). On its own, however, the book just doesn’t hold substantial water (pun intended).
I have found my new favorite children’s storybook – The Snatchabook. This is a story about a little bunny named Eliza Brown and all her friends in Burrow Down. Every evening, they all cuddle down in their little homes at bedtime and listen excitedly to their bedtime stories. Then, suddenly, one night, the story books start to disappear, right out of their hands, flying out the windows and disappearing. Poor Eliza Brown is shocked but determined to find out what is happening. So she lays a trap and, when the thief comes for the pile of story books she has set out, Eliza confronts them! It turns out that the thief is a little creature called a Snatchabook (looks like a kangaroo mouse with dragonfly wings), and it has been stealing books because it has no one to read to it. Poor thing!
1-9-15 –I know, I know. Another review of me happily gushing over Mercedes Lackey and her Elemental Masters series. But, as this is the first book that I have read in 2015, it rather does deserve pride of place.
6-20-14 – Finally and at long last! Ever since reading Pierce’s Melting Stones several years ago, I have hungered for more of Evumeimei Dingzai’s story. I really should have readStone Magic, as it currently sits on my shelf, the beginning of her story in that she was discovered by Briar, but I shall simply chalk it up to working backwards through Evvy’s trilogy. Now, at last, I have Battle Magic, the story of the war between Yanjing and Gyongxe that is so often referenced in Melting Stones.
I LOVED this book! It was quick enough for me to read to my fifteen-month-old daughter and the pictures were bright and colorful. Lucy Bear’s dialogue is easy to act out and made my daughter smiled for the entire reading and, moreover, stand still for most of it. 🙂
Begun 1/7/2014 – It’s been seven years in the waiting but, finally, the newest novel by Diane Setterfield is here! I adored The Thirteen Tale and have been waiting for more work by Setterfield ever since. So my Christmas was quite wonderful as this book was gifted to me. 🙂 Setterfield’s newest work, released in November 2013, Bellman & Black begins very promisingly, starting out with a boyhood proof of prowess, which leads to the death of an innocent rook and the enigmatic guilt settling upon the shoulders of the boy responsible: William Bellman. A boy in black, not to mention the strange parish of rooks, regards William from the hill where the rook fell beneath his slingshot, sending a chill over the ten-year-old boy as he runs home and applies his mind to its most difficult task to date: forgetting. But, as most would tell you, one act can haunt you for an entire lifetime.
Have you ever held a new book in your hands, fresh and clean and so ripe with possibilities? You want to start reading, immediately, leap into its pages, but you don’t know where to start, as silly as that may sound. This is one of those books. For those of you who may not know (or have forgotten), I am in love with Mercedes Lackey’s Elemental Masters books. So when her first anthology of fellow-author-written stories based in the world of Edwardian England under the veil of the White Lodge (Elemental Magic) was published, I was ecstatic. I bought a hard copy, as well as an e-copy on my Kindle. I read it to my infant daughter to put her down for naps and thrilled at it in the quiet of my private time.
I made the greatest discovery in Books-a-Million the other day. BabyLit books. These books are the classics, re-purposed for toddlers and early learners. I love this idea! These books are beautifully designed and illustrated board books, re-titled as “primers” on different early learning subjects. For example, Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky is labeled as a nonsense primer. I have already bought three of these for my daughter: Pride & Prejudice, Jabberwocky (for reading time with Daddy), and Sherlock Holmes and the Hound of the Baskervilles. So she has counting, nonsense, and sound primers so far.
Ah, the discovery. The day that you walk through the bookstore, minding you own business, only to find that a book that you have been anticipating slipped through its release date without you even noticing. That was me and The White Princess, Gregory’s latest addition to The Cousins’ War. I was being so good, purchasing only what was on my list and making record time to boot, and here was this beauty just calling to me. So I used the last of an anniversary gift to purchase it for myself and have been enjoying it in the short spurts that I get to read for myself in the midst of raising an 8-month-old. This also happens to coincide with the premiere of the Starz production of “The White Queen” series, which is based upon The White Queen, The Red Queen, and The White Princess.
A Reader Obsessed 