A Candle in Her Room

I'm so pleased to have picked up A Candle in Her Room by Ruth M. Arthur (Atheneum, 1966) at the book sale, despite (or perhaps because of) its dated cover. It's just the sort of book I would have been enraptured by as an eleven-year-old, one in which three generations of young women living in Pembrokeshire, Wales are haunted by a wooden doll. Even now I read it in a similarly rapt state on a rainy Saturday, and felt closer to my eleven-year-old self than I have in a long time!

I'm also pleased to have discovered the work of Ruth M. Arthur, who wrote a whole list of Gothic novels for girls in the 1960s and 70s, none of which I had previously read. How could that be? Anyway, A Candle in Her Room was the first of those, and introduces a lot of the conventions that Arthur seems to have returned to again and again: a female first person narrator; an evocative setting to which the narrator moves; a multi-generational (or parallel historical) plot; and an element of fantasy or magic, usually involving a talisman of some sort.

A Candle in Her Room actually has three narrators (they all sound remarkably alike). The first section is narrated by Melissa, whose family moves from London to the Old Court in Pembrokeshire sometime before WWI. Melissa has two younger sisters, Judith and Briony, and while it's Briony who finds the wooden doll, Judith--the artistic, sophisticated sister--is the one who becomes almost possessed by it. After Melissa falls off a cliff and is confined to a wheelchair, Judith runs off with Melissa's boyfriend Carew and the two of them are married in London.

Subsequent sections are narrated by Dilys, Judith and Carew's daughter; Melissa again, as she searches for Dilys's child following WWII; and Nina, who comes to live with Melissa at the Old Court. Dido, the wooden doll (her name is carved into her back) is a mysterious, malignant presence throughout: her origins are never explained, and ultimately Nina must destroy her and her hold on the family in a terrific bonfire (as seen on the cover).

While the plot of A Candle in Her Room is often melodramatic (I'm thinking of poor Dilys in particular), the narration of events is somewhat removed from the experience of them. There is a lot of matter-of-fact telling. Intentional or not, I think this tension only heightens the overall feeling of foreboding that makes this such a creepy book. 

Now I'm actively seeking out some of Arthur's other books, namely Dragon Summer (1963), Requiem for a Princess (1967), and The Saracen Lamp (1970). And if there are any Arthur fans out there, your recommendations are most welcome! In the meantime, it's nice to add an author to my most-wanted list for the next book sale.

[Margery Gill's distinctive pen-and-ink illustrations for A Candle in Her Room (she illustrated many of Arthur's other books as well) do a lot to enliven the text. This one is of Melissa examining Dido as Briony looks on.]

2014 Cybils Reading Challenge

One of my favorite things about New Year's Day is the announcement of the Cybils shortlists. In the past, after being on a first round panel in the fall, I've set myself a Cybils Reading Challenge of one new-to-me book in each of the other categories before the winners are announced on February 14. It hasn't caught on anywhere else, though, and this year I am abandoning it in favor of reading all of the shortlisted books in one category (my favorite): Elementary and Middle Grade Speculative Fiction.

I definitely missed being on the first round panel (I had other book award commitments and couldn't apply), but I like the list this year's panelists came up with--especially Jinx by Sage Blackwood (HarperCollins, 2013), which exemplifies the qualities of literary merit and kid appeal that the Cybils recognize. I read Jinx early last year (maybe even late the year before), so I might reread it now and then treat myself to the sequel, Jinx's Magic (Katherine Tegen Books, 2014), which comes out on Tuesday.

Anyone else want to try this year's version of the Cybils Reading Challenge? Here's the complete Elementary and Middle Grade Speculative Fiction shortlist:

Where would you start?

Books I Want: The Letter for the King by Tonke Dragt

The publisher's description of the 1962 Dutch children's classic The Letter for the King by Tonke Dragt, available now for the first time in English (translated by Laura Watkinson; Pushkin Press, 2013), is practically irresistible: 

It is the dead of night. Sixteen-year-old Tiuri must spend hours locked in a chapel in silent contemplation if he is to be knighted the next day. But, as he waits by the light of a flickering candle, he hears a knock at the door and a voice desperately asking for help. A secret letter must be delivered to King Unauwen across the Great Mountains – a letter upon which the fate of the entire kingdom depends.

[Me.] Now that's an evocative premise. Tiuri must open the door, because that's what a knight would do--but then he won't be knighted, so he may as well deliver the letter....

Tiuri’s journey will take him through dark, menacing forests, across treacherous rivers, to sinister castles and strange cities. He will encounter enemies who would kill to get the letter, but also the best of friends in the most unexpected places. He must trust no one. He must keep his true identity secret. Above all, he must never reveal what is in the letter…

[Me again.] What is in the letter? I must know. Thank goodness for Book Depository.

[Here's a review in the Irish Times comparing The Letter to the King to Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, 11/3/2013].

The Mystery of Fairy Oak

I am so curious about Fairy Oak. Why haven't the Fairy Oak books--a trilogy, followed by a series of four mysteries, by Italian author Elisabetta Gnone--made it to the United States? They seem to have been widely available in Italian and Spanish (not to mention Basque, Catalan, and Galician--Fairy Oak must be very popular in Spain) since the first book, Il Segretto delle Gemelle, was published in 2005. There's even an English translation (The Twins' Secret) by Alastair McEwen, but it's nearly impossible to find. I know, because I've been looking for it since I saw the Fairy Oak books at the airport in Rome two years ago.

Fortunately, I've been able to find out more about Fairy Oak via the Italian site and, in English, the Fairyoakpedia. The trilogy is the story of twin sisters Vanilla and Lavender Periwinkle, who turn out to be Witches of Light and Dark respectively, and together with their magical friends (I love all the character descriptions) must save Fairy Oak from its old enemy, the Terrible 21st. The world of Fairy Oak might be more interesting than the war, actually: it looks like something Studio Ghibli might have made, only frillier (actually, Gnone worked for Disney). Maybe I will have to locate an Italian edition after all, though that won't help my American nine-year-old. Who would probably love it.

Hild

I don't think if I can wait til Christmas to read Hild by Nicola Griffith (FSG, 2013), a novel set in seventh-century Britain about the girl who becomes Saint Hilda of Whitby. Griffith wrote about Hild and genre (Fantasy or history?, 11/12/2013) for Tor.com, and Amal El-Mohtar reviewed the book for NPR in the context of conversations about women in historical fiction--and historical fantasy (Hild Destroys Myths of Medieval Womanhood, 11/14/2013). The early medieval world, historical fantasy, women (and children--Hild is just three at the beginning of the  novel), warriors and saints: I have a deep and abiding interest in them all. And lo, today is the feast day of Saint Hilda!

[That gorgeous cover is by Italian twins Anna and Elena Balbusso.]

Journey by Aaron Becker

Everything you've read or heard about Aaron Becker's Journey (Candlewick) is true: it's a magical, beautiful book, more than a little reminiscent of Harold and the Purple Crayon, with detailed illustrations done in watercolor and pen and ink. And wordless, like Barbara Lehman's The Red Book (HMH Books for Young Readers, 2004), with which it also has a lot in common: crossing oceans, finding friends.

My favorite spreads are the earlier ones, of a forest hung with fairy lights and Chinese lanterns, and of the glorious loch castle on the cover: I lingered there for a long time. Unfortunately for me, Journey doesn't. Instead, it takes to the air, and I'm not entirely on board with the steampunk airships and samurai soldiers--bad guys, ordered by their emperor to catch and cage a purple, phoenix-like bird. And keep it in a golden pagoda. Hmm.

Anyway, girl frees bird, bird rescues girl (there's a magic carpet of her own making involved), girl meets boy, the end. For now. It's still a magical, beautiful book, only not quite one for me.

You might love it, though. I really wanted to--just look at it!

Waiting on Wednesday: A Question of Magic

Fans of Baba Yaga stories whose appetite was whetted by Jillian Tamaki's retelling in Fairy Tale Comics (First Second, 2013) can look forward to E.D. Baker's middle grade novel A Question of Magic (Bloomsbury), available October 1. Here's the publisher's description:

"Serafina was living the normal life of a village girl, when she gets a mysterious letter--her first letter ever, in fact--from a great aunt she's never heard of in another village. Little does 'Fina know, her great aunt is actually a Baba Yaga, a magical witch who lives in an even more magical cottage.

Summoned to the cottage, Serafina's life takes an amazing turn as she finds herself becoming the new Baba Yaga. But leaving behind home and the boy she loves isn't easy, and as Serafina grows into her new and magical role answering the first question any stranger might ask her with the truth, she also learns about the person she's meant to be, and that telling the future doesn't always mean knowing the right answers."

[Me again.] So Serafina becomes Baba Yaga! Presumably she doesn't eat any little children. I didn't know Baba Yaga answered questions, either, but maybe that's because she doesn't like to--they age her (I know how that feels). Thanks to Jennifer at Jean Little Library for her review of A Question of Magic, which made me want to read the book; I'm glad I don't have long to wait.

[Apparently there is an Ask Baba Yaga advice column of sorts! Cryptic and completely unrelated to the book, though.]

North of Nowhere by Liz Kessler

Liz Kessler's series books starring Emily Windsnap and Philippa Fisher are tween girl favorites (we like Emily Windsnap, the half-mermaid, best), but her standalone books are equally appealling: this one, North of Nowhere (Candlewick, 2013), is part mystery, part magic--but to say more about what sort of magic it might be would give some of it away, so I'll stick to what Mia knows: she is stuck in a sleepy seaside village on the coast of Cornwall (no cell phones, no Internet) over spring break because her grandfather has gone missing, and she and her mother have to help Gran run the pub.

If Mia sounds a tiny bit self-absorbed, it's because she is--she's in eighth grade, after all--and Kessler's writing, in Mia's voice, reflects that. But she's also genuinely concerned about her grandfather, and eager to make friends: with a girl she gets to know by way of letters exchanged via an old diary (I loved this part), and a boy, Peter, who's determined to help the two girls meet. She's also willing to walk the dog (Flake, a border collie--I liked him, too).

The girl in the diary (Mia knows her only as Dee) lives on the island of Luffsands, off the coast of Cornwall, which complicates matters when stormy weather makes it impossible for her to get to the mainland village of Porthaven, where Mia is waiting for her. And then Peter disappears, and Mia suspects he's gone to Luffsands to find Dee.

At risk of revealing too much, the island of Luffsands is based on the true story of Hallsands, a British village that collapsed into the sea almost a hundred years ago--but even with that information, it's almost impossible to know where the story is going until it's gotten there. And even then, you might have trouble believing it! Don't say Mia didn't warn you.

[This print is of South Hall Sands circa 1900, by Gerry Miles (2007). It's just how I imagined the village of Porthaven might look, too.]

Kibuishi's Harry Potter Covers

What do you think of the new Harry Potter covers by Kazu Kibuishi, writer and artist of the graphic novel series AMULET? Now that all of the cover images have been released (they will be on trade paperbacks in September), it's easier to see what they have in common, and how they compare to the iconic American covers by Mary GrandPre. Kibuishi's covers--my favorite is still the first, for Sorceror's Stone, but I also like The Prisoner of Azkaban--tend to look more like full shots rather close-ups, and they're all outside. The back covers are indoors and, appropriately enough, of Harry's back--as he's looking into the Mirror of Erised, for example, or a cabinet full of boggarts. I like the image of Hogwarts made by the spines of all seven books in the box set, too: Kibuishi designed the whole package.

It's my understanding that the new editions will retain GrandPre's chapter art (also known as "decorations"), which is good news for people like me who love black-and-white illustrations in children's books and wish more of the newer ones had them.

Horn Book Recommended Fantasy Books

There's a long list of recommended fantasy books on the Horn Book blog today, ranging from picture books and primary to fiction for intermediate and older readers (all published within the last several years). Here are some of my favorites from each category, most of which I meant to review when they first came out!

Picture books
The Boy in the Garden by Allen Say (Houghton Mifflin, 2010). A beautiful garden, a bronze statue, a Japanese folktale come to life. I'm always interested in Allen Say's work, and this is particularly lovely. I couldn't remember having seen any other picture books by Say since this one, but it looks like The Favorite Daughter (Arthur A. Levine) just came out on May 28; maybe I will review that one!

Primary
Earwig and the Witch by Diana Wynne Jones (Greenwillow, 2012). A great introduction to DWJ and a Baba Yaga story to boot. Ordinarily I love Paul Zelinsky's illustrations, too, but these are a little creepy. Maybe that's why we preferred the audio.

Intermediate
I love middle grade, but apart from A Cabinet of Earths by Anne Nesbet (HarperCollins, 2012; how have I not written about Cabinet here? I've already read the sequel, A Box of Gargoyles), I'm not too excited about the books on this list. Sage Blackwood's Jinx is on it, at least.

Older fiction
Perhaps I've aged into this category. I loved everything about Seraphina by Rachel Hartman (Random House, 2012), and there are quite a few others here I also enjoyed. Not to mention one I'm reading right now: A Corner of White by Jaclyn Moriarty (Levine/Scholastic, 2013). Review to follow, really.

Waiting on Wednesday: The Watchers in the Shadows

I'm waiting on not one but two books titled The Watcher in the Shadows this spring. The Watcher in the Shadows by Chris Moriarty, which comes out May 28 from Harcourt Children's Books, is the sequel to The Inquisitor's Apprentice (2011), an alternate--magical--history set in early-twentieth century New York City. I liked The Inquisitor's Apprentice lots (we shortlisted it for the Cybils that year), especially the representation of immigrant Jewish culture, and the line illustrations by Mark Edward Geyer: it was sort of like a fantasy/boy version of All-of-a-Kind family. Which is to say, not at all like All-of-a-Kind family, but with line illustrations.

The other Watcher in the Shadows is by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, who is probably more familiar as the author of the bestselling adult novel The Shadow of the Wind (trans. by Lucia Graves; Penguin, 2004) and its sequels. This is more of a gothic middle grade or YA, the third in a thematic trilogy originally published in the 1990s, in Spanish. It's set in a toymaker's mansion on the coast of Normandy in the 1930s: of course I'm going to read it. I read the first, The Prince of Mist (Little, Brown BFYR, 2010), in a cottage on the coast of Maine, as close to on location as it is possible to be this side of the Atlantic. The Watcher in the Shadows comes out June 18, so I will probably have to read it on the Metro.

The Mystery of the Fool and the Vanisher

It's as difficult to pin down The Mystery of the Fool and the Vanisher by David and Ruth Ellwand (Candlewick, 2008) as one imagines it would be to photograph a fairy (Cottingley fairies aside). Which is precisely what nineteenth-century photographer Isaac Wilde attempted to do while on an archaeological dig of a Neolithic flint mine somewhere in the English Downs. Wilde's account, transcribed from wax phonograph sound recordings, is documented here alongside photographs of the contents of a wooden box discovered by David Ellwand while walking on the Downs (in the footsteps, incidentally, of none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle); and framed by Ellwand's personal journal with additional notes from his photographic notebook.

All of this fails to capture the creepy gorgeousness of The Mystery of the Fool and the Vanisher, recommended to me by Zoe of Playing by the Book (via Myra of Gathering Books; thanks to you both!) because of my interest in manipulated photography and photographic processes--many of which (bromide, gold-toned albumen, gelatin silver, etc.) are represented in this book. According to the copyright page, however, the photographs were made "with necromancy and magic." And I'm inclined to believe it.

[All the more so because the book's website has disappeared. How long ago was 2008 in Internet years? You'll just have to take my word for it, or track down a copy for yourself (it's currently available for a bargain price on Amazon). Apart from the photographs, the artifacts are fascinating: my favorite are the spectacles with the lenses removed and replaced with holed flint stones. Or the mussel shell suit of armor.]

Olive and other Halloween book+costume ideas from Penguin

Welcome to Penguin's Halloween blog tour, which pairs spooky middle grade books with great costume ideas! I love the idea of dressing up as a character from a book, and I know lots of families and schools choose to celebrate Halloween this way, too. Today's (seventh and final) tour stop features the first book of one of my favorite middle grade series (my review), plus a fantastic giveaway! Here's Penguin with the details:

Step into some creepy stories this Halloween and become your favorite middle grade character…from the ghoulish undead to mischievous pirates, the costumes are endless.

The Book: Books of Elsewhere: The Shadows by Jacqueline West

When eleven-year-old Olive moves into a crumbling Victorian mansion with her parents, she knows there's something strange about the house - especially the odd antique paintings covering the walls. And when she puts on a pair of old spectacles, she discovers the strangest thing yet: She can travel inside the paintings, to a spooky world that's full of dark shadows. Add to that three talking cats, who live in the house and seem to be keeping secrets of their own, and Olive soon finds herself confronting a dark and dangerous power that wants to get rid of her by any means necessary. It's up to Olive to save the house from the dark shadows, before the lights go out for good.
The Costume
Halloween is the perfect time to be Olive and travel through paintings and beyond! This costume is great for a school-day costume:
  1. Olive wears a red striped shirt over a long-sleeved white shirt, jeans, and red shoes. Don’t forget her yellow headband!
  2. Find the oldest, biggest glasses you can find. A grandparent might be able to help with this one!
  3. Now comes the fun part! Find a big piece of cardboard and cut out the shape of a BIG picture frame. Make the edges curvy and decorate with markers and paint. 
  4. You’re ready to be Olive! Carry around your new picture frame and wear your glasses for quick escape – but keep an eye out! There are people who might want to make sure your Halloween is full of more tricks than treats….
Find The Books of Elsewhere online at thebooksofelsewhere.com
Purchase The Books of Elsewhere here: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, IndieBound 
And check out the rest of the blog tour for more great book+costume ideas:

M 10.22 In a Glass Grimmly by Adam Gidwitz
T 10.23 Gustav Gloom and the People Takers by Adam-Troy Castro
W 10.24 Undead Ed by Rotterly Ghoulstone
Th 10.25 Deadweather and Sunrise:Chronicles of Egg by Geoff Rodkey
F 10.26 The Creature from the 7th Grade by Bob Balaban
M 10.29 Wereworld: Shadow of the Hawk by Curtis Jobling
T 10.30 Books of Elsewhere:The Shadows by Jacqueline West
right here at Books Together
 
[Me again.] And now for the giveaway! Courtesy of Penguin, I'm giving away a set of all seven books featured on the blog tour to one lucky reader (and commenter) on this post. Just leave a comment by midnight Friday, November 2 to enter [deadline extended due to Hurricane Sandy!]. If you'd like, let me know who you're going to be for Halloween, too. Olive, perhaps?

Movie Night: Miss Minoes

Milly and I would like to recommend for your viewing pleasure Miss Minoes (2001), a Dutch film based on the children's book Minoes by Annie M.G. Schmidt (published in the United States as Minnie; Milkweed Editions, 1994). I love the premise--a cat turns into a young woman, instead of the other way around as so often happens in fantasy books. And I love Miss Minoes's green fur-lined coat.

But back to the premise. It's a fun one for cat-lovers in particular, as Miss Minoes retains a lot of her feline qualities: she climbs trees, rubs noses, hides under the table, sleeps in a box. She purrs even! There's a plot, too (it involves a shy newspaper reporter), but it's the cat-as-young-woman part that makes me want to track down the book, which is bound to be better than the movie. And to ask about other children's books featuring animals that turn into people (not just anthropomorphic animals, which are a dime a dozen). I know there must be lots.

Princess Academy of Art

Anticipating the August release of Princess Academy: Palace of Stone by Shannon Hale (Bloomsbury, 2012), I recently read the first Princess Academy, a 2006 Newbery Honor book. I wonder why I hadn't read it before, because it's just the sort of book I like, and probably would have loved as a ten-year-old girl: it has a classic feel and an ordinary-girl heroine in Miri Larendaughter, it's set in a village on a snowy mountaintop--beautifully evoked throughout the book as well as on the original cover, shown here--and there's a boarding school. Where you have to study to be a princess. After learning to read (no one in Mount Eskel knew how before the princess academy), the girls study Danlander History, Commerce, Geography, and Kings and Queens. And then there are the "princess-forming" subjects: Diplomacy (which proves useful on more than occasion), Conversation, and Poise. I want to go to princess academy!

I also want to add Princess Academy to the Middle Grade Gallery (where I think about how paintings work in fiction), even though Art isn't one of the subjects the girls have to study. But one winter morning, their tutor Olana shows the girls a painting; like the silver princess dress they've already seen, it's meant to make them work harder at their studies, to remind them of their goal:

Olana removed the cloth and held up a colorful painting much more detailed than the chapel's carved doors. It illustrated a house with a carved wooden door, six glass windows facing front, and a garden of tall trees and bushes bursting with red and yellow flowers.
"This house stands in Asland, the capital, not a long carriage ride from the palace...It will be given to the family of the girl chosen as princess." [87]

And the painting does its job: Miri, for one, spends hours imagining her family inside the house and garden, so different from their mountain home.

At the end of the book, Olana reveals the truth about the painting, and gives it to Miri. Spoiler alert (after seven years, I don't think I'm spoiling anything, but just in case): the house never existed. And Miri doesn't marry the prince (although she is academy princess). It's not until Palace of Stone that she goes to the capital at all. I wonder if she will remember the painting when she gets there?

Fairies and changelings

I'm currently reading (among other things) Some Kind of Fairy Tale, a grownup fantasy by British author Graham Joyce (Doubleday, 2012). It's not a changeling story, at least not so far, but a kidnapped-by-the-fairies one, in which teenaged Tara Martin disappears into a dense forest known as the Outwoods, only to return twenty years--or is it six months?--later.

Forests are my favorite magical places (castles or old houses are a close second), and Tara's description of the forest on the day she disappeared is especially evocative:


After a while I found a rock covered in brilliant green moss and orange lichen. I sat among the bluebells and put my head back on the mossy pillow of the rock.

The bluebells made such a pool that the earth had become like water, and all the trees and bushes seemed to have grown out of the water. And the sky above seemed to have fallen down on to the earth floor, and I didn't know if the sky was earth or the earth was water. [42]

Then a man on a pretty white horse appears, and you know that boundaries are going to be crossed. As it turns out (I'm on page 132), they are crossed in ways I'm not so interested in reading about. Instead I'm rereading my favorite Zilpha Keatley Snyder book, The Changeling (Atheneum, 1970): "I am a princess from the Land of the Green Sky," Ivy said. "I have discovered the Doorway to Space."

The Changeling isn't a fantasy book, although Snyder did eventually write the Green-Sky Trilogy (beginning with Below the Root; Atheneum, 1978) based on the Tree People game that Martha and Ivy play in Bent Oaks Grove. But Ivy herself is such a magical character, I almost believed that she was a changeling. And that I was, too.

[Why, why is The Changeling out-of-print? I'm adding it to my list of books to reprint when I start my own small press.]

The ballad of Long Lankin, for Poetry Friday

Debut author Lindsey Barraclough's YA novel Long Lankin was inspired by the eponymous old English ballad (Roud Folk Song Index 6) in which Long Lankin, aided and abetted by a nursemaid, murders a lady and her infant son--by pricking him all over with a pin (shiver):

"Where's the heir of this house?" said Long Lankin. / "He's asleep in his cradle," said the false nurse to him.
"We'll prick him, we'll prick him all over with a pin, / And that'll make my lady to come down to him."

The baby's cries bring his mother, and she dies in Long Lankin's arms.

Barraclough sets her retelling of the ballad in postwar England: Sisters Cora and Mimi are sent from London to stay with their great-aunt Ida in the coastal village of Bryers Guerdon, but Auntie Ida, stern and secretly terrified, doesn't want them there. Of course, Cora and Mimi disregard her warnings (Ida doesn't even want them in the great big house alone) and go straight to the forbidden church and graveyard. Don't they know they're in a gothic horror story? Sigh. Poor Mimi.

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?

A Monster Calls: A novel by Patrick Ness, inspired by an idea from Siobhan Dowd (Candlewick, 2011) is a heartrendingly beautiful book, one of the year's best. It's being considered for all sorts of awards, including the Cybils, where it's a finalist in the Middle Grade Fantasy and Science Fiction category.

But is that where it belongs? If the monster is real, existing as a physical entity (that's the definition in Webster's Dictionary), then yes: the book is fantasy. But if the monster is only metaphorical, then no, because otherwise it's set firmly in the real world, the one where mothers die of cancer, and there are bullies at school, and you're only thirteen. That one. Ours.

I happen to think that the monster is both real and metaphorical: that's the source of its power. But if I had to categorize the book itself, I think it would be fantasy, on the strength of passages like this one:

It had been a dream. What else could it have been?
    When he'd opened his eyes this morning, the first thing he'd looked at was his window. It had still been there, of course, no damage at all, no gaping hole into the yard. Of course it had. Only a baby would have thought it really happened. Only a baby would believe that a tree--seriously, a tree--had walked down the hill and attacked the house.
    He'd laughed a little at the thought, at how stupid it all was, and he'd stepped out of bed.
    To the sound of a crunch beneath his feet.
    Every inch of his bedroom floor was covered in short, spiky yew tree leaves. (11)

This monster leaves more than a trace--he leaves a floor covered in needles, or in red yew tree berries (37).  Those aren't metaphors (Conor has to bag them up and throw them in trash, after all). Or if they are metaphorical, they are also, definitively, real.

The multiple meanings of the words real and fantasy complicate these arguments.  Emotions are also real, even though they don't exist as physical entities. And it seems paradoxical that the more real something might be, the more firmly a book that is all about raw, real emotion becomes (just?) a fantasy book.

Now, whether this is a middle grade or a young adult book is also up for debate (Monica Edinger of educating alice originally nominated it as YA Fantasy). I don't think this is necessarily a coincidence: extraordinary books are often difficult to categorize. A Monster Calls isn't even the only book on our list that begs these questions. Many thanks to Zoe of Playing by the book for bringing them up (in the comments on another post). Now it's your turn.

Dragon Castle

After all was said and done, I was honored to write the text to accompany Dragon Castle by Joseph Bruchac (Dial) on this year's list of Cybils finalists in Middle Grade Fantasy and Science Fiction. Writing these little paeans to literary achievement and kid appeal is tricky; they have to be concise (mine is 111 words, not counting the exclamation) yet convincing, and above all, they have to make you want to read the book. Which I hope you do.

By the head of the dragon! It’s a good thing Prince Rashko, the sensible second son, is around to defend the royal family’s ancestral castle when Baron Temny and his army of invaders move in, because he’s not going to get much help from his parents (called away to the Silver Lands) or his brother (bewitched by the beautiful Princess Poteshenie). Drawing on Slovakian proverbs and folklore, Bruchac alternates—and eventually intertwines—Rashko’s story with that of the hero Pavol, also depicted in a mysterious tapestry that hangs on the castle walls. The result is high fantasy laced with history and humor, action and adventure, as Rashko and the reader alike uncover the secrets of Dragon Castle.

I like to think I'm getting better at writing these (this is the third year I've been a first-round Cybils panelist; I wrote the blurbs for Fever Crumb by Philip Reeve (Scholastic) in 2010 and Odd and the Frost Giants by Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins) in 2009), but there's always more to say. I'm still sorry I wasn't able to work the giant, telepathic wolves into the final copy.

I would love to know, though: Would you read Dragon Castle? Why or why not? Because, ahem, you should.