Friday, October 30, 2015

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween


Straddling the line between fall and winter, plenty and paucity, life and death, Halloween is a time of celebration and superstition. It is thought to have originated with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, when people would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward off roaming ghosts. In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III designated November 1 as a time to honor all saints and martyrs; the holiday, All Saints’ Day, incorporated some of the traditions of Samhain. The evening before was known as All Hallows’ Eve and later Halloween. Over time, Halloween evolved into a secular, community-based event characterized by child-friendly activities such as trick-or-treating. In a number of countries around the world, as the days grow shorter and the nights get colder, people continue to usher in the winter season with gatherings, costumes and sweet treats.



ANCIENT ORIGINS OF HALLOWEEN
Halloween’s origins date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in). The Celts, who lived 2,000 years ago in the area that is now Ireland, the United Kingdom and northern France, celebrated their new year on November 1. This day marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death. Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. On the night of October 31 they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth. In addition to causing trouble and damaging crops, Celts thought that the presence of the otherworldly spirits made it easier for the Druids, or Celtic priests, to make predictions about the future. For a people entirely dependent on the volatile natural world, these prophecies were an important source of comfort and direction during the long, dark winter.

To commemorate the event, Druids built huge sacred bonfires, where the people gathered to burn crops and animals as sacrifices to the Celtic deities. During the celebration, the Celts wore costumes, typically consisting of animal heads and skins, and attempted to tell each other’s fortunes. When the celebration was over, they re-lit their hearth fires, which they had extinguished earlier that evening, from the sacred bonfire to help protect them during the coming winter.

By 43 A.D., the Roman Empire had conquered the majority of Celtic territory. In the course of the four hundred years that they ruled the Celtic lands, two festivals of Roman origin were combined with the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain. The first was Feralia, a day in late October when the Romans traditionally commemorated the passing of the dead. The second was a day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple and the incorporation of this celebration into Samhain probably explains the tradition of “bobbing” for apples that is practiced today on Halloween.

On May 13, 609 A.D., Pope Boniface IV dedicated the Pantheon in Rome in honor of all Christian martyrs, and the Catholic feast of All Martyrs Day was established in the Western church. Pope Gregory III (731–741) later expanded the festival to include all saints as well as all martyrs, and moved the observance from May 13 to November 1. By the 9th century the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands, where it gradually blended with and supplanted the older Celtic rites. In 1000 A.D., the church would make November 2 All Souls’ Day, a day to honor the dead. It is widely believed today that the church was attempting to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related, but church-sanctioned holiday. All Souls Day was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades, and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels and devils. The All Saints Day celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints’ Day) and the night before it, the traditional night of Samhain in the Celtic religion, began to be called All-hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween.



HALLOWEEN COMES TO AMERICA
Celebration of Halloween was extremely limited in colonial New England because of the rigid Protestant belief systems there. Halloween was much more common in Maryland and the southern colonies. As the beliefs and customs of different European ethnic groups as well as the American Indians meshed, a distinctly American version of Halloween began to emerge. The first celebrations included “play parties,” public events held to celebrate the harvest, where neighbors would share stories of the dead, tell each other’s fortunes, dance and sing. Colonial Halloween festivities also featured the telling of ghost stories and mischief-making of all kinds. By the middle of the nineteenth century, annual autumn festivities were common, but Halloween was not yet celebrated everywhere in the country.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, America was flooded with new immigrants. These new immigrants, especially the millions of Irish fleeing Ireland’s potato famine of 1846, helped to popularize the celebration of Halloween nationally. Taking from Irish and English traditions, Americans began to dress up in costumes and go house to house asking for food or money, a practice that eventually became today’s “trick-or-treat” tradition. Young women believed that on Halloween they could divine the name or appearance of their future husband by doing tricks with yarn, apple parings or mirrors.

In the late 1800s, there was a move in America to mold Halloween into a holiday more about community and neighborly get-togethers than about ghosts, pranks and witchcraft. At the turn of the century, Halloween parties for both children and adults became the most common way to celebrate the day. Parties focused on games, foods of the season and festive costumes. Parents were encouraged by newspapers and community leaders to take anything “frightening” or “grotesque” out of Halloween celebrations. Because of these efforts, Halloween lost most of its superstitious and religious overtones by the beginning of the twentieth century.

By the 1920s and 1930s, Halloween had become a secular, but community-centered holiday, with parades and town-wide parties as the featured entertainment. Despite the best efforts of many schools and communities, vandalism began to plague Halloween celebrations in many communities during this time. By the 1950s, town leaders had successfully limited vandalism and Halloween had evolved into a holiday directed mainly at the young. Due to the high numbers of young children during the fifties baby boom, parties moved from town civic centers into the classroom or home, where they could be more easily accommodated. Between 1920 and 1950, the centuries-old practice of trick-or-treating was also revived. Trick-or-treating was a relatively inexpensive way for an entire community to share the Halloween celebration. In theory, families could also prevent tricks being played on them by providing the neighborhood children with small treats. A new American tradition was born, and it has continued to grow. Today, Americans spend an estimated $6 billion annually on Halloween, making it the country’s second largest commercial holiday.



TODAY’S HALLOWEEN TRADITIONS

The American Halloween tradition of “trick-or-treating” probably dates back to the early All Souls’ Day parades in England. During the festivities, poor citizens would beg for food and families would give them pastries called “soul cakes” in return for their promise to pray for the family’s dead relatives. The distribution of soul cakes was encouraged by the church as a way to replace the ancient practice of leaving food and wine for roaming spirits. The practice, which was referred to as “going a-souling” was eventually taken up by children who would visit the houses in their neighborhood and be given ale, food, and money.

The tradition of dressing in costume for Halloween has both European and Celtic roots. Hundreds of years ago, winter was an uncertain and frightening time. Food supplies often ran low and, for the many people afraid of the dark, the short days of winter were full of constant worry. On Halloween, when it was believed that ghosts came back to the earthly world, people thought that they would encounter ghosts if they left their homes. To avoid being recognized by these ghosts, people would wear masks when they left their homes after dark so that the ghosts would mistake them for fellow spirits. On Halloween, to keep ghosts away from their houses, people would place bowls of food outside their homes to appease the ghosts and prevent them from attempting to enter.

HALLOWEEN SUPERSTITIONS

Halloween has always been a holiday filled with mystery, magic and superstition. It began as a Celtic end-of-summer festival during which people felt especially close to deceased relatives and friends. For these friendly spirits, they set places at the dinner table, left treats on doorsteps and along the side of the road and lit candles to help loved ones find their way back to the spirit world. Today’s Halloween ghosts are often depicted as more fearsome and malevolent, and our customs and superstitions are scarier too. We avoid crossing paths with black cats, afraid that they might bring us bad luck. This idea has its roots in the Middle Ages, when many people believed that witches avoided detection by turning themselves into cats. We try not to walk under ladders for the same reason. This superstition may have come from the ancient Egyptians, who believed that triangles were sacred; it also may have something to do with the fact that walking under a leaning ladder tends to be fairly unsafe. And around Halloween, especially, we try to avoid breaking mirrors, stepping on cracks in the road or spilling salt.

But what about the Halloween traditions and beliefs that today’s trick-or-treaters have forgotten all about? Many of these obsolete rituals focused on the future instead of the past and the living instead of the dead. In particular, many had to do with helping young women identify their future husbands and reassuring them that they would someday—with luck, by next Halloween—be married. In 18th-century Ireland, a matchmaking cook might bury a ring in her mashed potatoes on Halloween night, hoping to bring true love to the diner who found it. In Scotland, fortune-tellers recommended that an eligible young woman name a hazelnut for each of her suitors and then toss the nuts into the fireplace. The nut that burned to ashes rather than popping or exploding, the story went, represented the girl’s future husband. (In some versions of this legend, confusingly, the opposite was true: The nut that burned away symbolized a love that would not last.) Another tale had it that if a young woman ate a sugary concoction made out of walnuts, hazelnuts and nutmeg before bed on Halloween night she would dream about her future husband. Young women tossed apple-peels over their shoulders, hoping that the peels would fall on the floor in the shape of their future husbands’ initials; tried to learn about their futures by peering at egg yolks floating in a bowl of water; and stood in front of mirrors in darkened rooms, holding candles and looking over their shoulders for their husbands’ faces. Other rituals were more competitive. At some Halloween parties, the first guest to find a burr on a chestnut-hunt would be the first to marry; at others, the first successful apple-bobber would be the first down the aisle.

Of course, whether we’re asking for romantic advice or trying to avoid seven years of bad luck, each one of these Halloween superstitions relies on the good will of the very same “spirits” whose presence the early Celts felt so keenly.

Trick and Treat Safely


Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Best Twists Book List

Do you like twists in your books? Check out this book list...




1) "Double Bind" by Chris Bohjalian

Psychological thriller, crime novel and “what-if” sequel to The Great Gatsby—with significant twists.

Schizophrenic, yes, and alcoholic—but Bobbie Crocker isn’t your stereotypical street person. Bohjalian (Before You Know Kindness, 2004, etc.) invests him with mystery; when he dies in Burlington, Vt., he leaves behind photographs from 1960s issues of Life magazine. Eartha Kitt, Dick Van Dyke, Muddy Waters—they’re celebrity shots he took, combined with elegant evocations of Jazz Age Long Island. Laurel Estabrook, social worker at Crocker’s shelter, discovers something else among them: a snapshot of herself riding a bike, just as she had, seven years before, when savaged by two thugs. The attack scarring her, she’d retreated into PTSD therapy, affairs with comforting, if noncommittal, father figures and a life less of ambition than service. Crocker’s photos provide Laurel clues to their strangely interconnected pasts—and she sets out to decode them. Had the homeless man actually been to the manor born, son of Tom and Daisy Buchanan of fabled West Egg? His sister denies it, having spent most of her 70 years trying to whitewash her parents’ reputation—Tom’s brutality and Daisy’s suspicious involvement in the car crash that killed one of his lovers. Had those wealthy, morally bankrupt parents caused Bobbie’s “double bind,” provoking schizophrenia by instilling in an unwanted child love/hate mixed messages? Or could Bobbie’s father be someone yet more notorious, the darkly glamorous star of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece? And why was Laurel’s own likeness found in Crocker’s cache? Sleuthing obsessively, she discovers that Bobbie had a son himself, a boy who grew up to terrify his father. And terrify her. Conflating literary lore, photographic analysis and meditations on homelessness and mental illness, Bohjalian produces his best and most complex fiction yet.

Ultra-clever, and moving, too.






2) "Invisible Monsters Remix" by Chuck Palahniuk

Palahniuk (Damned, 2011, etc.) plays literary DJ, revisiting and updating his 1999 novel Invisible Monsters.

In a new "Reintroduction," Palahniuk explains that Invisible Monsters was never meant to be a conventional narrative, resembling in its original incarnation the Sears catalogue or an old copy ofVogue magazine, jumping forward and backward in time with the quick-cut style changes of a classic MTV playlist. The elder statesman of transgressive fiction even sounds a bit cynical—“You young people, you who think you invented fun and drugs and good times, fuck you.”—though with his skewed sense of humor, it’s generally hard to be sure. In matter of substance, there’s not much of a “remix” to be had here, just a, “Now, please jump to Chapter Forty,” Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style that doesn’t so much reorder the book as augment the disjointed, whiplash atmosphere its author intended. The book that Kirkus drubbed “Too clever by half” in 1999 is still here in its ghoulish entirety. The narrator is Shannon McFarland, a fashion model whose beauty has been obliterated in an enigmatic accident. While recovering in the hospital, Shannon meets Brandy Alexander, a voluptuous pre-surgical transsexual who adopts Shannon and takes her on the road, granting them new monikers, identities and trades in the process. Throw in some more drag queens, a knife-wielding ex-cop, plenty of drugs, sexual abuse and even a wedding, not to mention some eerie family values. The book is really a superfluous artifact, but that doesn’t change the fact that Palahniuk remains one of the most gifted writers in American fiction.

Not worth replacing your old paperback, but a nice collector’s item for Palahniuk’s cult.



3) "The Wasp Factory" by Iain Banks

Through much of this impressive first novel, almost up until the awkward and misguided finale, young Scottish writer Banks achieves that fine British balance--between horrific content on the one hand and matter-of-fact comic delivery on the other. The narrator, whose cool prose is sometimes a bit too sophisticated for credibility, is 16-year-old Frank Cauldhame, living outside a remote Scottish village--a cheerfully insane lad who tortures animals, imagines that he gets instructions from the "Factory" (the room upstairs where he cremates wasps), and fondly recalls the three grisly/farcical murders he committed from age six to age ten. Is there good reason for Frank to be so blithely unhinged, so devoted to his warfare against wildlife and his ritual killings? ("How the hell am I supposed to get heads and bodies for the Poles and the Bunker if I don't kill things?") There is indeed. His father, an ex-hippie and sometime chemist, is a shambling eccentric obsessed with measurement. His flower-child mother deserted Frank at birth, then briefly returned when he was three--and may have helped to cause little Frank's life-shattering accident. (A nasty old dog supposedly chewed off the toddler's genitals.) Furthermore, Frank's older half-brother Eric, who was deserted by two mothers, has gone certifiably bonkers--setting fires, eating dogs; his madness was triggered by a ghastly moment while working as a hospital orderly (a grotesque horror for only the very strongest of stomach); and now he has just escaped from the asylum, making his way home to Frank, "a force of fire and disruption approaching the sands of the island like a mad angel, head swarming with echoing screams of madness and delusion." Banks handles this gothic/clinical material, for the most part, with sure, deadpan restraint, echoing William Golding, Saki, and Joe Orton--while finding hilarity in fugitive Eric's loony phone-calls to Frank, in misogynistic Frank's drunken rambles with dwarf-pal Jamie. Here and there, however, the underlying themes of sex/aggression are spelled out lumpily. ("All our lives are symbols. . . women can give birth and men can kill.") And the final chapter, mixing Eric's violent homecoming with revelations about Frank's true sexuality, pushes a delicately gripping nightmare-novel over the edge into psycho-melodrama and sexual polemics. In sum: a nastily striking, somewhat uneven debut--at its dreadful best when not straining for symbolic shockers or cosmic resonance.



4) "The House at Riverton" by Kate Morton

In Australian author Morton’s atmospheric first novel, a 98-year-old woman recollects her unwitting role in a fatal deception.

Grace, a prominent former archeologist, is living out her waning years in a British nursing home, when an American filmmaker, Ursula, asks her to consult on a movie about the scandalous 1924 suicide of a poet during a lavish soirĂ©e at Riverton, a country estate where Grace once served as parlor maid to the Hartford family. Extended flashbacks excavate the mysteries that surround Grace almost from the first. Why did Grace’s mother, herself a servant at Riverton before leaving under a cloud, send her 14-year-old daughter to work there? Who is Grace’s father? The domestic servant is a convenient expository device: Grace can eavesdrop on every Hartford family crisis. Hannah, her sister Emmeline and brother David occasionally visit Riverton, owned by their uncle, Lord Ashbury. Their father, Frederick, the second son, is an automobile pioneer. But World War I upends the destinies of the Hartford clan. David, his schoolmate Robbie and Grace’s heartthrob, Alfred, a footman, all go to fight. David is killed, Robbie drops out of sight and Alfred suffers shell shock. The war also claims the lives of Lord Ashbury and his eldest son, and Frederick inherits the title. Frederick’s business is mortgaged to American bankers, the Luxtons, who force a sale of his factory. To Frederick’s chagrin, Hannah marries Luxton scion Teddy, who, after flirting briefly with bohemian ways, reverts to stodgy banker-hood. Languishing in London while her estranged father lets Riverton decay, Hannah relies increasingly on Grace, now her personal maid. Hannah’s mistaken assumption that Grace knows shorthand leads both to make a tragic error in judgment. Meanwhile, Robbie resurfaces, his psyche scarred by war. Although ostensibly courting Emmeline, Robbie is drawn into an adulterous affair with Hannah that proves his undoing.

Though the climactic revelation feels contrived, Morton’s characters and their predicaments are affecting, and she recreates the period with a sure hand.







5) "Plain Truth" by Jodi Piccoult

An uneven reworking of tabloid headlines: a young woman is charged with infanticide, and a hard-boiled attorney agrees to defend her. With one crucial distinction: the defendant is Amish.

In the Amish community of Paradise, Pennsylvania, 18-year-old Katie Fisher, unwed, is the chief suspect in the death by asphyxiation of a newborn found in the Fisher family’s barn. A medical exam reveals that Katie has just given birth, but she insists she has never been pregnant. Enter Ellie Hathaway, a 39-year-old (and single) Philadelphia defense attorney visiting her aunt Leda. Leda, also Amish, prevails upon an initially reluctant Ellie to defend Katie. Ellie moves in with the Fishers to prepare Katie’s defense, a device that allows Picoult (Keeping Faith, 1999, etc.) to juxtapose the devout Amish (or Plain Folk) and their spartan way of life with city-slicker Ellie. But as Ellie befriends Katie, unsettling inconsistencies in the latter’s story emerge. As in Rashomon, the truth proves elusive, shifting, and often unwelcome. Is Katie suffering from a genuine psychosis, repressing events too traumatic to remember? Or was she simply trying to conceal an affair and pregnancy she knew would have led to her being shunned by her own people? The drama echoes with conflicts in Ellie’s own life: her loudly ticking biological clock, the end of a tepid relationship with another attorney, and the resumption of a love affair with Coop, her college sweetheart-turned-psychologist (and eventual expert witness on Katie’s behalf). All, of course, will be tidily resolved by trial’s end.








6) "I Am The Messenger" by Markus Zusak

In this winner of the Australian Children’s Book Award for Older Readers, 19-year-old Ed Kennedy slouches through life driving a taxi, playing poker with his buddies, and hanging out with his personable dog, Doorman. The girl he loves just wants to be friends, and his mother constantly insults him, both of which make Ed, an engaging, warm-hearted narrator, feel like a loser. But he starts to overcome his low self-esteem when he foils a bank robbery and then receives a series of messages that lead him to do good deeds. He buys Christmas lights for a poor family, helps a local priest, and forces a rapist out of town. With each act, he feels better about himself and builds a community of friends. The openly sentimental elements are balanced by swearing, some drinking and violence, and edgy friendships. Suspense builds about who is sending the messages, but readers hoping for a satisfying solution to that mystery will be disappointed. Those, however, who like to speculate about the nature of fiction, might enjoy the unlikely, even gimmicky, conclusion. (Fiction. YA)




7) "Odd Thomas" by Dean Koontz

Koontz’s suspense masterpieces (Intensity, 1996; The Face, 2002) have tight plots or strikingly enclosed worlds. But you can’t win ’em all, and despite the lift he strives for, these pages go by on automatic pilot.

Suspense here turns on the life of Odd Thomas, 21, an unassuming lad gifted with the power to see dead people who cannot tear themselves from Pico Mundo, Odd’s small hometown abroil on the Mojave Desert—as neither can Odd, whose “agoraphobia” has not let him drive or step outside the town. Ever. Koontz focuses on the little world of Pico Mundo itself, its physical layout and the lovable eccentrics who fill it chock-a-block. Among others, there’s 400-pound romance-and-mystery novelist P. Oswald Boone (better known as Little Ozzie), and Odd’s landlady Rosalia Sanchez, who fears turning invisible. Odd—a flashy fry-cook—works as a kind of Tom Cruise of the griddle at Terri Stambaugh’s Pico Mundo Grille. Terri is an Elvis savant who knows what the King was doing every hour of his life. Odd’s confidential tie with Police Chief Wyatt Porter has led Chief Porter to varied murderers and artists of mayhem whose victims have hung around and pointed out to Odd just who murdered them. Then to the grille comes strangely fungoid Bob Robertson, followed about by black bodachs, hungry doglike shadows sniffing out folks scented with death. When Odd secretly steals into Robertson’s house, he finds first a housekeeping mess, then a computer workroom of Spartan order whose files reveal the mind of a mass murderer. And Odd stumbles upon a room of pure blackness—perhaps an adjunct to King/Straub’s Black House? The date August 15 is torn from Robertson’s desk calendar. Terri tells Odd, who is often followed about by the tearful and warning ghost of Elvis, that Gladys Presley died on August 14 and Elvis on August 16. Does the missing date mean Robertson will go berserk on the 15th—and kill Odd as well?

With its tender surprise ending, call it It’s a Wonderful Sixth Sense, built out of wet pulp and milk.





Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Go Pink in October!

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month! So, wear pink and support the research to stop Breast Cancer!


Breast cancer is the second most common kind of cancer in women. About 1 in 8 women born today in the United States will get breast cancer at some point.

The good news is that many women can survive breast cancer if it’s found and treated early. A mammogram – the screening test for breast cancer – can help find breast cancer early when it’s easier to treat.

National Breast Cancer Awareness Month is a chance to raise awareness about the importance of early detection of breast cancer. Make a difference! Spread the word about mammograms and encourage communities, organizations, families, and individuals to get involved.



We can use this opportunity to spread the word about steps women can take to detect breast cancer early.

Here are just a few ideas:
Ask doctors and nurses to speak to women about the importance of getting screened for breast cancer.
Encourage women ages 40 to 49 to talk with their doctors about when to start getting mammograms.
Organize an event to talk with women ages 50 to 74 in your community about getting mammograms every 2 years.












Monday, October 26, 2015

Body Image Book List

Do you have issues with your body? Do you feel like you are the only one? Check out this book list...





1) "Am I Thin Enough Yet?: The Cult of Thinness and the Commercialization of Identity" by Sharlene Hesse-Biber

A tendentious argument by a feminist sociologist that eating disorders are the product of patriarchal social and economic interests that regard women primarily as wives, mothers, and decorative objects. Hesse-Biber (Sociology/Boston Coll.) surveyed nearly 400 male and female students about their eating habits and attitudes and, over an eight-year period, conducted in-depth interviews of some 60 college-age women, primarly from white middle- and upper- middle-class families, to investigate why so many women see weight as defining their identity. She rejects the idea that eating disorders are a sign of psychopathology, finding instead that the fault lies not in the individual woman but in the messages society sends women. In her view, it is to the benefit of ruling patriarchal interests--the government, corporations, the media, and the traditional family--for women to be obsessed with their own bodies, for then they ``lose control over other important aspects of selfhood that might challenge the status quo.'' Today's cult of thinness, she argues, is comparable to the practice of foot binding in prerevolutionary China and to the wearing of tight corsets in the Victorian era, customs by which male-dominated societies effectively controlled not just the appearance but the behavior of women. Unless social activists change the institutions that have shaped our culture's view that women are defined by their bodies, Hesse-Biber asserts, the cult of thinness that now afflicts primarily upper-middle-class white women in wealthy Western societies will spread to people of color in these countries and to developing nations around the globe. She suggests ways in which women can initiate social change through personal gestures within their own circle of family, friends, and coworkers. Too academic to have wide appeal, but likely to stimulate lively discussion in classes devoted to women's studies.



2) "Looks" by Madeleine George

Even though Meghan is fat and Aimee is thin, they have a lot in common: Both use food to cauterize pain and both feel deeply wronged by the same girl. Together, they seek revenge. Meghan’s not just fat—she’s vast, enormous. Silently, she navigates Valley High’s hallways like an unreadable ocean liner. In contrast, Aimee darts from class to class, flinty, fierce and guarded. She’s hound-dog skinny, with sharp bones protruding at her shoulders and knees. George extracts adolescent fears and coping mechanisms with surgical precision. Her startling emotional and physical portraits leave readers captivated. Teens will instantly understand why Meghan and Aimee seek invisibility: When unseen, one’s far less likely to be hurt or exposed. Readers living with eating disorders will find unflinching accounts of binges and starvation as well. Luminous language places teens inside Meghan’s and Aimee’s struggling minds and bodies. (Fiction. 14 & up)




3) "Squashed" by Joan Bauer

This year's Delacorte prizewinner answers the question, ``Is growing the biggest pumpkin in Iowa grounds for a YA novel?'' with a resounding ``Yes!'' Never losing sight of her goal, the grower--Ellie Morgan, 16--lives a rich, eventful life. Her relationship with her widowed dad, corporate counselor and farming dropout, who comes to value Ellie's dedication to growing things, and with new boyfriend Wes, whose enthusiasm is corn but whose dedication to Max's cause comes to equal Ellie's; her vendetta with odious Cyril Pool, rival farmer--all are profoundly influenced by her commitment to bringing ``Max'' to his eventual 611 pounds. It's dauntingly hard work, realistically described, though the pampering of Max is also comical. There's suspense, too: pumpkins are being kidnapped as the great Pumpkin Weigh-In draws near, while Cyril's weightier monster, a threat to the finish, fails dramatically on the scales--rotten to the core. Ellie narrates with lively wit and good humor; meanwhile, nourishing themes are cunningly developed, among them the pumpkin's transitory triumph and its continuing life cycle. Delightful fun. (Fiction. 11+)



4) "The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin" by Josh Berk

This witty tale of mainstreaming, misfits and murder glitters like the “Future Diamonds” that coal-mine souvenirs promise to someday become. Sixteen-year-old Will lives in Pennsylvania coal country. Correct guesses on a hearing test and a false promise to wear hearing aids allow him to mainstream for the first time. Being fat and deaf is no social boost, and lip reading—easier for Will than for someone deaf since birth, but still sketchy—only goes so far. In a droll present tense, ironic and self-mocking but somehow also centered, Will talks about his ancestor namesake’s appearance in a history book as a ghost, his class’s field trip that turns murderous and his dry acquiescence to sleuthing, Ă  la the Hardy Boys, with eager geek pal Smiley. Dickinson and Poe receive equally keen references (a stolen “Deaf Child” traffic sign beats metaphorically under Will’s bed). Only a clichĂ©d fatness explanation (overeating) and the implausibility of such highly successful lip reading distract; but the funny, clever voice and the small but spot-on thread of deaf politics make this a winner.(Fiction. 12-16)



5) "Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty" by Nancy L. Etcoff

Is beauty truth? Skin deep? A cultural relative? All of these possibilities and more are probed in this scholarly disquisition on the nature of beauty by a Harvard Medical School psychologist. The bottom line is that the idea of beauty is biologically based, and it’s all about sex. Across all cultures (and many species), the survival of one’s genes is dependent on choosing a partner who is fit—and looks it: a male who can provide superior sperm or a potential mama who can and will do well in the caretaking business. For men, the unbeatable combination in a female may be youthful looks, shining hair, pale unblemished cheeks that can blush with ease, up-pointing, rounded breasts, and an hourglass figure—all part of a gestalt read as nubile and not already saddled with offspring. If the face is also symmetrical, and does not deviate too far from average, it may be judged beautiful and complete the formula for the ideal mate. Rather than support one formula over another for ideal beauty, Etcoff says rhat their very existence points to the high regard cultures have paid to beauty. And pay they do: with surgery, scarification, tattoos, cosmetics, nose rings, earrings, and the rest. Indeed, “the rest” forms a sizable subtext of the book as Etcoff reviews the trends for body shaping, implants, wigs, crinolines, high heels, perfumes, and all manner of artful dodges designed to make the deceiver irresistible. How those trends play out in today’s world of maxi-thin, maxi-tall runway models, anorexic teenagers, and adults obsessed with obesity also come up for discussion. In the end Etcoff wisely suggests that to focus on beauty and to want to attain it is not a sin; we should relax and enjoy it as part of our genetic heritage. But perhaps even more wisely, she notes that that is not all there is to beauty. She ends with a comforting anecdote about George Eliot, whom Henry James described “magnificently ugly.”




6) "Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss--and the Myths and Realities of Dieting" by Gina Kolata


A dose of reality for would-be dieters, laced with a dash of history, science and sociology.

New York Times science writer Kolata (Ultimate Fitness, 2003, etc.) followed participants in a two-year study at the University of Pennsylvania that compared the Atkins low-carbohydrate diet with the LEARN (Lifestyle, Exercise, Attitudes, Relationships, Nutrition) low-calorie diet. To put the study in perspective, she goes back as far as the 19th century to recount various dieting fads: eating soap, chalk or pickles, drinking camphor tea, taking ipecac to induce vomiting, chewing food 100 times a minute. Kolata also takes a critical look at society’s changing standards of beauty, from hefty Lillian Russell to svelte Jennifer Aniston, and she presents the findings of nutrition and obesity researchers in the last half-century. She sat in on the Penn study participants’ group sessions and here lets them tell in their own words of their hopes and desires, progress, setbacks and problems. At the study’s end in 2006, no miracles had occurred. The reality, Kolata reports, is that no matter what the diet and how hard fat people try, most will not lose a lot of weight and keep it off for a long time. Many will keep trying, though, because being fat in America today is difficult. An epilogue suggests that researchers may have been looking for answers to the obesity epidemic in the wrong places. Those who call it a medical disaster may be alarmists, Kolata concludes; perhaps what has been pushing up the nation’s average weights is better health.

Offers many insights into the world of obesity research and the minds of dieters, but provides small comfort for anyone hoping to discover the fountain of thinness.



7) "Fat Girl: A True Story" by Judith Moore

Grim exploration of the author’s wretched childhood and consequent lifelong relationship with food.

Moore (Never Eat Your Heart Out, 1996) had it rough as a girl. Abandoned by her father at age three-and-a-half, she was left to the mercy of a vicious, violent mother and a possibly sociopathic grandmother. These loveless formative years had a lasting impact: “I hate myself. I have almost always hated myself.” After this introduction and a long consideration of her heavy, adult body and its impact on her life, Moore begins piecing together her past. Prominently featured are the parents who quickly divorced, resulting in long stretches of loneliness for Moore in Oklahoma and New York City. Self-pity might seem all but unavoidable in discussing such circumstances, but the tone here, rather than confessional or exculpatory, has the ring of the analytical. As the author relates the trials she endured—just how fat she was, how her clothing fit, how she started each school year scanning the schoolroom for a classmate heavier than she—the episodes come together to make up a work that could be an anthropological study of the habits of obese children, or a psychological study of the effect of lovelessness on a child’s development. Moore is matter-of-fact in describing childhood beatings; nor does she spare herself, confessing childhood misdeeds that included entering the homes of adults she admired and repeatedly raiding their pantries. Her greatest and most constant love is, of course, food. Here, she offers pages of unctuous descriptions of the texture of a cheeseburger, the composition of a dinner party menu, or the southern-fried feasts she imagines her father devouring as a young man.

Moore warns the reader not to expect a triumphant ending, and she’s true to her word, though her book is strongly written and starkly compelling to the end.



Thursday, October 22, 2015

1940's Historical Fiction Book List

Do you enjoy historical fiction? Are you interested in World War II? Like a marriage of the two? Check out this book list...




1) "Between Shades of Gray" by Ruta Sepetys

This bitterly sad, fluidly written historical novel tackles a topic woefully underdiscussed in English-language children’s fiction: Joseph Stalin’s reign of terror. On June 14th, 1941, Soviet officers arrest 15-year-old Lina, her younger brother and her mother and deport them from Lithuania to Siberia. Their crammed-full boxcar is labeled, ludicrously, “Thieves and Prostitutes.” They work at a frigid gulag for eight months—hungry, filthy and brutalized by Soviet officers—before being taken to the Siberian Arctic and left without shelter. Lina doesn’t know the breadth of Stalin’s mass deportations of Baltic citizens, but she hears scraps of discussion about politics and World War II. Cold, starvation, exhaustion and disease (scurvy, dysentery, typhus) claim countless victims. Lina sketches urgently, passing her drawings along to other deportees, hoping they’ll reach Papa in a Soviet prison. Brief flashbacks, seamlessly interwoven, illuminate Lina’s sweet old life in Kaunas like flashes of light, eventually helping to reveal why the repressive, deadly regime targeted this family. Sepetys’ flowing prose gently carries readers through the crushing tragedy of this tale that needs telling. (maps, timeline, author’s note) (Historical fiction. 12 & up, adult)






2) "March Violets" by Philip Kerr

A splendid first thriller introducing Bernhard Gunther, a caustic private eye who solves a case of theft, murder, and corruption among the Nazis and their new supporters--the ""march violets""--in 1936 Berlin. When the daughter of Herr Doktor Hermann Six, millionaire industrialist, and his son-in-law, Paul Pfarr, are shot together in bed, their safe robbed of a fabulous Cartier diamond necklace, and their house torched, Six engages Bernie Gunther to recover the necklace without nosing into the family's private affairs. It's a hopeless charge, for Bernie soon finds that both Pfarr and his wife were cheating on each other; that the safe contained not only diamonds but evidence that Pfarr, secretly a storm trooper, had been gathering against Six; and that Six's young second wife, the film star Ilse Rudel, is worried that Bernie's really looking for evidence of her infidelity--and is prepared to do anything to talk him out of it. Eventually, Bernie realizes--with the help of his informer-turned-assistant, Inge Lorenz--that the murders and the theft of the papers lead in different, though equally sordid, directions. In the meantime, though, he's been pressured to take a series of even bigger jobs: one client, Hermann Goering, hires him to locate Gerhard von Greis, who has the papers from Pfarr's safe--papers Goering is intent on concealing from his archrival Heinrich Himmler; and another, General Heydrich, forces him into Dachau as an undercover agent to pry the location of the papers out of the safecracker Mutschmann. Bernie repeatedly gets set up and worked over by officials, crooks, and free-lancers, but always comes up with another wisecrack about life in the Third Reich, a rich field indeed for a private eye to work. Dark, complex, and relentlessly witty--a nearly perfect marriage of threatening background and twisted plot to a German Philip Marlowe.





3) "Schindler's List" by Thomas Keneally

Like Raoul Wallenberg, Oskar Schindler was one of those precious few ""righteous gentiles"" personally responsible for the saving of Jewish lives (estimated at about 1300) during the Holocaust. But what makes Schindler's story of compelling interest to novelist Keneally--who terms this book a ""nonfiction novel,"" an act of reconstruction and homage prompted by meeting one of the Schindlerjuden survivors in a Los Angeles store--seems to be Schindler's moral stance, a more equivocal one than that of brave, heedless Nordic-knight Wallenberg. Schindler owned and operated Nazi-sponsored factories--first one producing enamel-ware in Cracow; then a munitions plant in Brinnlitz, near Auschwitz. And the Jews whom he put on his list worked for him under S.S. guard, providing material for the Reich. Still, hardly anyone died while working for Schindler . . . and he patiently plucked Jew after Jew (by requisition) out of the deathly line of vision of Hauptsturmfuhrer Amon Goeth, commandant of the Plaszow camp in Cracow--a sadistic maniac who'd shoot a prisoner from his office window for sport; who'd ""shoot his shoeshine boy for faulty work; hang his fifteen-year-old orderly, Poldek Deresiewicz, from the ringbolts in his office because a flea had been found on one of the dogs; and execute his servant Liseik for lending a drozka . . . without first checking."" How did Schindler manage all this? Largely through frank bribery, personal charisma, sexual power, cronyism, and a kind of negligent charm in the company of Nazis. So, while Keneally's dramatization of this great man's exploits is lacking in novelistic shape or depth, the brutality and heroism are satisfyingly, meticulously presented--as plain, impressive, historical record; and if admirers of Keneally's more imaginative work may be disappointed, others will find this a worthy volume to place beside one of the several Wallenberg biographies.








4) "The Chosen" by Chaim Potok

This first novel, ostensibly about the friendship between two boys, Reuven and Danny, from the time when they are fourteen on opposing yeshiva ball clubs, is actually a gently didactic differentiation between two aspects of the Jewish faith, the Hasidic and the Orthodox. Primarily the Hasidic, the little known mystics with their beards, earlocks and stringently reclusive way of life. According to Reuven's father who is a Zionist, an activist, they are fanatics; according to Danny's, other Jews are apostates and Zionists "goyim." The schisms here are reflected through discussions, between fathers and sons, and through the separation imposed on the two boys for two years which still does not affect their lasting friendship or enduring hopes: Danny goes on to become a psychiatrist refusing his inherited position of "tzaddik"; Reuven a rabbi.... The explanation, in fact exegesis, of Jewish culture and learning, of the special dedication of the Hasidic with its emphasis on mind and soul, is done in sufficiently facile form to engage one's interest and sentiment. The publishers however see a much wider audience for The Chosen. If they "rub their tzitzis for good luck,"--perhaps--although we doubt it.




5) "City of Thieves" by David Benioff

Novelist and screenwriter Benioff’s glorious second novel (The 25th Hour, 2000) is a wild action-packed quest, and much else besides: a coming-of-age story, an odd-couple tale and a juicy footnote to the historic World War II siege of Leningrad.

It’s New Year’s Eve, 1941, and Lev Beniov is alone in Leningrad. (Note that last name: This novel was sparked by tape-recorded memories of author Benioff’s grandfather.) The 17-year-old’s mother and sister were evacuated before the siege began in September; his father, a respected poet, was “removed” by the NKVD in 1937. Lev’s real troubles begin when a German paratrooper, frozen to death, lands on his street. Lev deserts his firefighter’s post, steals the German’s knife, is arrested by soldiers and jailed. His cellmate is 20-year-old Kolya, a boastful Cossack deserter, dazzlingly handsome in contrast to scrawny Lev, who hates his telltale big nose (he’s half-Jewish); their initial hostility turns into the closest of bonds. Sparing their lives, for now, NKVD Colonel Grechko gives them a near-impossible assignment in this starving city: five days to find a dozen eggs for his daughter’s wedding cake. There’s nothing doing on the black market. Then Kolya hears of a poultry collective…behind German lines. That’s where they must go, decides Kolya, and Benioff makes his boundless self-confidence entirely credible. Over half the novel happens in enemy territory. Lev and Kolya stumble on a farmhouse where four pretty Russian girls are being kept as sex slaves by a Nazi death squad. (The connection between sex and death is a major theme.) The slave-owners are killed by Russian partisans, one of whom is the deadly sniper Vika, a young tomboy who steals Lev’s heart. Despite a “parade of atrocities,” the pace will keep your adrenaline pumping right up to the climactic chess game between Lev and a fiendish Nazi officer.

This gut-churning thriller will sweep you along and, with any luck, propel Benioff into bestseller land.




6) "Those Who Save Us" by Jenna Blum

An emotionally estranged mother and daughter are reconciled when the daughter learns the truth about her German mother’s actions in WWII.

Blum, who is half-Jewish and of German descent, worked for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation as an interviewer of Holocaust survivors—and her first fiction is suffused with details about life in wartime Germany, where her protagonists Anna Schlemmer and her daughter Trudy were both born. Trudy, now a professor of German history in the Twin Cities, is divorced and, as an only child, is responsible for Anna, who has to be put in a home soon after the death of her husband Jack, the American soldier she married at war’s end. Anna rarely talks, and Trudy, who has seen a picture of her mother with a Nazi officer and a young Trudy, believing herself his daughter, is deeply ashamed. The two women tell their separate stories here as Trudy starts work on a project that involves interviewing Germans who were in Germany during the war. Anna recalls how, at 19, and living at home with her Nazi father in Weimar, she met Jewish doctor Max Stern. She hid him in her house, but Max was discovered. Anna, pregnant with Max’s child, moved in with Mathilde, a baker helping the Resistance. After daughter Trudy was born in 1940, Anna also began working for the Resistance, delivering bread to a nearby camp for officers and retrieving hidden messages on the way home. But when she witnesses a brutal killing by Horst, an officer at the camp, and was seen by him, she became his mistress in order to save Trudy’s life. Trudy finally learns the truth of her paternity—but her mother’s long and insufficiently motivated silence about it isn’t persuasive.

An ambitious but flawed first outing.





7) "The Winds of War" by Herman Wouk

This endlessly effluent, Woukmanlike novel which runs to almost 900 pages deals with a typical American family before World War II and up to Pearl Harbor and it is conveniently mapped from Washington to Berlin to Warsaw (the siege) and London (the blitz) and Moscow and Rome and points elsewhere. Real people appear. Churchill and Attlee and F.D.R. who calls our hero, Naval Commander Victor Henry, by his sobriquet Pug and will be heard saying "Good night, old top." In the beginning Wouk almost seems to be competing with Shirer -- following not only Hitler's rise to power but explicating its mystique back to the Huns' earlier destruction of Imperial Rome via Hegel and Heine and one character here. His Commander Henry, however, a too hard working (cf. his wife Rhoda), good and considered man, restricts himself to the comment "I don't admire their treatment of the Jews" when he is Naval Attache in Berlin. The Henrys are solid middle-class Methodists and wouldn't go that far -- but then they also don't quite like the fact that their son, Byron, has fallen in love with Jewish Natalie Jastrow, niece of the great scholar and author of A Jew's Jesus who lives a Berensonian existence in Siena. Eventually though she has finally married Byron, has had his child, and will be trapped in Italy with her uncle. Then there are the two other Henry children -- and Rhoda's mid-marriage adultery -- and a good many other characters none of whom seem very alive but then you're never close enough to pinch them and find out. All of it is written in Wouk's solid wearever prose which is not to underestimate the book's happily-or-unhappily ever after ongoing readability for all those faces in the crowd, ours and theirs -- those with a lot of stickwhittling time on their hands.



8) "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society" by Mary Ann Shaffer

The German occupation of the Channel Islands, recalled in letters between a London reporter and an eccentric gaggle of Guernsey islanders.

This debut by an “aunt-niece” authorial team presents itself as cozy fiction about comfortably quirky people in a bucolic setting, but it quickly evinces far more serious, and ambitious, intent. In 1946, Juliet, famous for her oxymoronic wartime humor column, is coping with life amid the rubble of London when she receives a letter from a reader, Dawsey, a Guernsey resident who asks her help in finding books by Charles Lamb. After she honors his request, a flurry of letters arrive from Guernsey islanders eager to share recollections of the German occupation of the islands. (Readers may be reminded of the PBS series, Island at War.) When the Germans catch some islanders exiting from a late-night pig roast, the group, as an excuse for violating curfew and food restrictions, invents a book club. The “Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society” is born, affording Guernseyites an excuse to meet and share meager repasts. (The Germans have confiscated all the real food.) Juliet’s fractious correspondents, including reputed witch Isola, Booker, a Jewish valet who masquerades as a Lord, and many other L&PPPS members, reveal that the absent founder of their society, Elizabeth, loved Christian, a German captain. No one accuses Elizabeth of collaboration (except one crotchety islander, Adelaide) because Christian was genuinely nice. An act of bravery caused Elizabeth’s deportation to France, and her whereabouts remain unknown. The Society is raising four-year-old Kit, Elizabeth’s daughter by Christian. To the consternation of her editor and friend, Sidney, Juliet is entertaining the overtures, literary and romantic, of a dashing but domineering New York publisher, Markham. When Juliet goes to Guernsey, some hard truths emerge about Elizabeth’s fate and defiant courage. Elizabeth and Juliet are appealingly reminiscent of game but gutsy ’40s movie heroines.

The engrossing subject matter and lively writing make this a sure winner, perhaps fodder for a TV series.





Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Mythopoeic Fantasy Award Book List

The Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature is given to the fantasy novel, multi-volume novel, or single-author story collection for adults published during the previous year that best exemplifies "the spirit of the Inklings". Books not selected as finalists in the year after publication are eligible for a second year. Books from a series are eligible if they stand on their own; otherwise, the series becomes eligible the year its final volume appears.

Check out the book list...



1) "The Golem and the Jinni" by Helene Wecker

Can’t we all just get along? Perhaps yes, if we’re supernatural beings from one side or another of the Jewish-Arab divide.

In her debut novel, Wecker begins with a juicy premise: At the dawn of the 20th century, the shtetls of Europe and half of “Greater Syria” are emptying out, their residents bound for New York or Chicago or Detroit. One aspirant, “a Prussian Jew from Konin, a bustling town to the south of Danzig,” is an unpleasant sort, a bit of a bully, arrogant, unattractive, but with enough loose gelt in his pocket to commission a rabbi-without-a-portfolio to build him an idol with feet of clay—and everything else of clay, too. The rabbi, Shaalman, warns that the ensuing golem—in Wecker’s tale, The Golem—is meant to be a slave and “not for the pleasures of a bed,” but he creates her anyway. She lands in Manhattan with less destructive force than Godzilla hit Tokyo, but even so, she cuts a strange figure. So does Ahmad, another slave bottled up—literally—and shipped across the water to a New York slum called Little Syria, where a lucky Lebanese tinsmith named Boutros Arbeely rubs a magic flask in just the right way and—shazam!—the jinni (genie) appears. Ahmad is generally ticked off by events, while The Golem is burdened with the “instinct to be of use.” Naturally, their paths cross, the most unnatural of the unnaturalized citizens of Lower Manhattan—and great adventures ensue, for Shaalman is in the wings, as is a shadowy character who means no good when he catches wind of the supernatural powers to be harnessed. Wecker takes the premise and runs with it, and though her story runs on too long for what is in essence a fairy tale, she writes skillfully, nicely evoking the layers of alienness that fall upon strangers in a strange land.

Two lessons: Don’t discount a woman just because she’s made of clay, and consider your wishes carefully should you find that magic lamp.




2) "Doll Bones" by Holly Black

A middle-grade fantasy dons the cloak of a creepy ghost tale to deliver bittersweet meditations on the nature of friendship, the price of growing up and the power of storytelling.

The lifelong friendship of Zach, Poppy and Alice revolves around their joint creation, an epic role-playing saga of pirates and perils, queens and quests. But now they are 12, and their interests are changing along with their bodies; when Zach’s father trashes his action figures and commands him to “grow up,” Zach abruptly quits the game. Poppy begs him to join her and Alice on one last adventure: a road trip to bring peace to the ghost possessing her antique porcelain doll. As they travel by bus and boat (with a fateful stop at the public library), the ghost seems to take charge of their journey—and the distinctions between fantasy and reality, between play and obligation, begin to dissolve....Veteran Black packs both heft and depth into a deceptively simple (and convincingly uncanny) narrative. From Zach’s bitter relationship with his father to Anna’s chafing at her overprotective grandmother to Poppy’s resignation with her ramshackle relations, Black skillfully sketches their varied backgrounds and unique contributions to their relationship. A few rich metaphors—rivers, pottery, breath—are woven throughout the story, as every encounter redraws the blurry lines between childishness and maturity, truth and lies, secrecy and honesty, magic and madness.

Spooky, melancholy, elegiac and ultimately hopeful; a small gem. (Fantasy. 10-14)





3) "The Freedom Maze" by Delia Sherman

It’s 1960, but on the decayed Fairchild sugar plantation in rural Louisiana, vestiges of a grimmer past remain—the old cottage, overgrown garden maze, relations between white and black races.

Stuck for the summer in the family ancestral home under the thumb of her cranky, imperious grandmother, Sophie, 13, makes a reckless wish that lands her in 1860, enslaved—by her own ancestors. Sophie’s fair skin and marked resemblance to the Fairchilds earn her “easy” employment in the big house and the resentment of her peers, whose loyalty she’ll need to survive. Plantation life for whites and blacks unfolds in compelling, often excruciating detail. A departure from Sherman’s light fantasy Changeling (2006), this is a powerfully unsettling, intertextual take on historical time-travel fantasy, especially Edward Eager’s Time Garden (1958), in which white children help a grateful enslaved family to freedom. Sophie’s problems aren’t that easily resolved: While acknowledging their shared kinship, her white ancestors refuse to see her as equally human. The framing of Sophie’s adventures within 1960 social realities prompts readers to consider what has changed since 1860, what has not—for Sophie and for readers half a century later—and at what cost.

Multilayered, compassionate and thought-provoking, a timely read on the sesquicentennial of America’s Civil War. (Historical fantasy. 12 & up)



4) "A Conspiracy of Kings" by Megan Whalen Turner

With each volume of this stellar series, the question arises anew: How will the text deceive its readers now that we’re able to recognize Eugenides’s lies? This time, it’s through the first-person narration of Sophos, the excruciatingly honest (but underinformed) heir to the kingdom of Sounis. As civil war brews, the young man is plucked from his bookish rustication by kidnappers desiring a puppet king. Sophos escapes only by finagling himself into slavery. It’s an oddly pleasant interlude for him; after a lifetime of training for an unwanted royalty, Sophos treasures the choicelessness of his relatively benevolent servitude. Alas, he knows his responsibilities. When the opportunity comes, Sophos escapes and turns to his old friend Eugenides for help. Sophos, with aid from Eugenides and the queens of Attolia and Eddis, plots the recovery of Sounis. In a heartbreaking chain of machinations, they negotiate the responsibilities of kingship when they’d rather be operating as friends. Sophos’s straightforward stubbornness is a refreshing antidote to his world’s lies and a fascinating lens on Eugenides. For series fans, unmissable. (Fiction. 12-15)


Book Four of Four: The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, and The King of Attolia


5) "Where the Mountain Meets the Moon" by Grace Lin

To change her family’s fortunes, a poor Chinese girl embarks on a fantastical quest to discover she already has everything she needs to be happy. Minli and her parents live in the shadow of Fruitless Mountain, where they toil endlessly. Bitter and resentful, Minli’s mother complains when her husband fills Minli’s imagination with enchanting tales of Never-Ending Mountain and the Old Man of the Moon. “Eager for adventure,” Minli sets out alone seeking advice from the Old Man of the Moon. En route she befriends a dragon who joins her quest. Together they encounter a talking goldfish, a boy with a buffalo, a king, a fierce green tiger and laughing twins before scaling Never-Ending Mountain. Lin deftly incorporates elements from Chinese folk- and fairy tales to create stories within the main story and provide context for Minli’s quest. With her “lively and impulsive spirit,” Minli emerges a stalwart female role model who learns the importance of family, friendship and faith during her amazing journey. Richly hued illustrations reinforce the Chinese folk theme. (author’s note) (Fantasy. 8-12)






6) "Graceling" by Kristin Cashore

An assured fantasy debut grapples with questions of identity, authenticity and autonomy. Lady Katsa is a Graceling, with an inborn magical gift marking her as both feared outcast and exploitable resource. While her peculiar Grace—the unsurpassed ability to kill—has been honed over the years by her uncle the king to bully and punish, Katsa has also secretly used it to bring a measure of justice to the Seven Kingdoms. When she encounters a strange prince whose mysterious Grace may just be a match for her own, she learns the corrosive seduction of power corrupted, but also the courage to trust others—and herself. Katsa is an ideal adolescent heroine, simultaneously confident of her strengths yet unsure of her place in the world. Every character is crafted with the same meticulous devotion to human comprehensibility, making the villain all the more appalling in his understated, twisted madness. In a tale filled with graphic violence and subtle heartbreak, gentle passion and savage kindness, matter-of-fact heroics and bleak beauty, no defeat is ever total and no triumph comes without cost. Grace-full, in every sense. (Fantasy. 14 & up)





7) "Corbenic" by Catherine Fisher

A sullen teen is unwillingly cast as the hero in a modern replay of the Grail Quest. Cal has struggled all his life with his alcoholic, schizophrenic mother, so he leaps at the opportunity to escape offered by his fastidious uncle. But on the way to join him, he accidentally gets off the train in Corbenic, where he encounters a man who calls himself the Fisher King and whose magnificent castle becomes suddenly derelict when Cal refuses to acknowledge the Grail. Fisher ably splices the Arthurian legend into Cal’s very modern quest for self-determination, introducing a band of historical re-enactors who claim to be immortal and with whom Cal becomes increasingly involved, as he discovers the sterility that underlies the life he used to covet. It is only when Cal yields to the inevitability of his quest that he is able to free himself from the shadows cast by his mother, his acceptance of responsibility for the healing of the land an expiation of his guilt at having deserted her. The teen’s progress is rarely seen in mythic terms, but here it works just right.(Fiction. 12+)