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!
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. 🙂
I started this book before the end of last school year and quickly became distracted with the end-of-year goings on and then summer. I have picked it up again at the behest of some of my new students and I am very much enjoying it.
Having adored Alison’s portrayal of one of the most underwritten young women of the Tudor Era, Jane Grey, I was very excited when I saw Captive Queen on the shelves at Target. I grabbed it up immediately and began reading as soon as we got back to the car.
My mother bought me this book around the age of 14 or 15. I had fallen in love with Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women at age 12 and adored her prose, her beautiful stories. Mom had also begun buying me the collections of Alcott’s sensation stories and was very excited when she found this on a vacation with her friends. It’s beautiful, beautiful little book. Written at sixteen, it is quite a romantic little tale, though the characters rather 1-dimensional and archetypal. Still it’s very prettily written.
I own four of Emma Donoghue’s books: Slammerkin, Life Mask, Kissing A Witch, and The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits. Donoghue’s writing is rich and rife with emotions and portraits of people who we quickly become obsessed with. She is well-versed in her history and fashion and her descriptions are so rich as to draw the reader into the world she is working with. You do not read Donoghue’s work, you inhabit it.
A new publishing by a 16-hyear-old, the style of the book’s cover is what capture me when I saw in in Meijer, I must confess. I’ve read the first chapter and found Kluver’s writing to be interesting. I am not yet impressed but her descriptions are rather nice. ^_^ We shall see how it goes, no?
A Reader Obsessed 