Author: Rachel Hartman
Publisher: Random House Children’s Books
Date: July 10, 2012
Pages: 467
Genre: YA- Fantasy
Source: Book Fairy

From Goodreads: Four decades of peace have done little to ease the mistrust between humans and dragons in the kingdom of Goredd. Folding themselves into human shape, dragons attend court as ambassadors, and lend their rational, mathematical minds to universities as scholars and teachers. As the treaty’s anniversary draws near, however, tensions are high.

Seraphina Dombegh has reason to fear both sides. An unusually gifted musician, she joins the court just as a member of the royal family is murdered—in suspiciously draconian fashion. Seraphina is drawn into the investigation, partnering with the captain of the Queen’s Guard, the dangerously perceptive Prince Lucian Kiggs. While they begin to uncover hints of a sinister plot to destroy the peace, Seraphina struggles to protect her own secret, the secret behind her musical gift, one so terrible that its discovery could mean her very life.

I’ve been stewing over writing this for days. I honestly didn’t know where to begin because it can be hard to write what’s in your heart when what you feel is just a big ball of love and light with no words. There have been many enjoyable books in my reading life, but very few that stay with me past the initial honeymoon phase after reading them. But this book, this little book…well it’s one of those books that move in. A small earthquake happened in my house, which is odd considering I don’t live some place where those things happen. Upon closer investigation, the rumbling was discovered not to be an earthquake but was instead coming from the locked book cabinet that is the top half of my antique secretary desk. It was the Favorites cabinet, and it was clearly shaking. The books were afraid. They felt it. They knew. They knew that one of them would most likely be leaving the over-full case because upon closing the book after the final word, we both knew that Seraphina had claimed a spot.

This book has dragons in it. Who amongst you can deny that when you hear tale of a story about dragons, your inner child’s little face doesn’t still light up with that dreamy glow of wonder? It’s about dragons and there’s a lot of magic in that alone. I could spend hours chattering on about the many, fantastic, little idiosyncrasies that add up to make the marvelous whole that is Hartman’s idea of a dragon. I forever picture them, studying mankind with their own, fake humanoid heads cocked slightly to the side in awe and bewilderment at how we are ruled by our emotions when to them the deciding factor should only ever boil down to what is logical.

      “Do your people pass emotions through your blood, mother to child, the way we dragons pass memories? Do you inherit your fears? I do not comprehend how this persists in the population- or why you will not crush it,” said Eskar.
      We prefer not to crush our own. Call it one of our irrationalities,” said Prince Lucian, smiling grimly. “Maybe we can’t reason our way out of our feelings the way you can; maybe it takes several generations to calm our fears. Then again, I’m not the one judging an entire species by the actions of a few.”

Seraphina was a marvel of a main character. Flawed from start to finish and hampered by society’s idea that she shouldn’t even exist, she doesn’t just overcome nearly impossible obstacles (like a trumped up female superhero), she does the bravest thing anyone with nearly insurmountable odds against them can do and that is to get on with her everyday life. Tied to both the dragon and human worlds, in ways she dare not speak aloud, Seraphina finds herself in a position to exert considerable influence upon some of the celebration’s key players. Her love of music, inherited from a mother she never knew, has led her to the royal court where, as music mistress, she keeps close company with the royal family. On the other hand, she coexists easily with the city’s dragon population, thanks in part to a loved one who saw to the more secretive aspects of her education. But even with the key role she ends up playing, Seraphina’s actions were never once focused on bettering her situation or easing her struggles. She was entirely selfless…save for that one kiss.

A beautiful fantasy, set in a rich world, teeming with extraordinary creatures, and a heartrending and heartwarming tale of self-acceptance.

“The world inside myself is vaster and richer than this paltry plane, peopled with mere galaxies and gods.”

I want that tattooed on my body.

A bit of a spoiler- highlight to spoil: Reading Seraphina’s thoughts and feelings on her well guarded secrets and struggles, I couldn’t help but to relate it to one I carry, and perhaps to one any of us carry. Maybe we’re not flawed. Maybe we’re not imperfect….maybe we’re just dragons. And I can live with that.

Author: Leigh Bardugo
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Date: June 5, 2012
Pages: 368
Series: The Grisha Trilogy
Genre: YA- Fantasy
From Goodreads: Surrounded by enemies, the once-great nation of Ravka has been torn in two by the Shadow Fold, a swath of near impenetrable darkness crawling with monsters who feast on human flesh. Now its fate may rest on the shoulders of one lonely refugee.
Alina Starkov has never been good at anything. But when her regiment is attacked on the Fold and her best friend is brutally injured, Alina reveals a dormant power that saves his life—a power that could be the key to setting her war-ravaged country free. Wrenched from everything she knows, Alina is whisked away to the royal court to be trained as a member of the Grisha, the magical elite led by the mysterious Darkling.
Yet nothing in this lavish world is what it seems. With darkness looming and an entire kingdom depending on her untamed power, Alina will have to confront the secrets of the Grisha…and the secrets of her heart.

You’ll have to pardon me whilst I go all fangirl for a second:

This. Book. Was. Amazing.

It was impossible to read it slowly. I wanted to take my time with it, what with it still about a month until the release date, (meaning I’d have to wait even longer for a sequel) but I totally lacked the willpower to do it. It’s like when you bake a cake or cookies and you know it says “Let cool for X number of minutes.” You don’t. You eat it while it’s hot and dripping with gooey, chocolatey, melty goodness.

It would be easy to spend the next few paragraphs gushing about what a gem Alina is, and how unique and extraordinary her powers are. Several lines could also be spent in praise of Mal, who would go to great lengths in the name of friendship- even if it might never turn into anything more. Entire tomes could be penned about the world Bardugo so expertly crafted, with its brilliant, vibrant colors that constantly reflect the contrast between dark and light, the good and the evil that rules the world the Grisha live in. Yeah, all that was great but for me, nothing mattered much beyond the Darkling. Really. What a fabulous character. His quiet, unassuming presence was so intensely powerful that I swear he just ATE every scene he was in. The author could have left off all the other details because for me, NOTHING was more important than the Darkling. And oh, so many ohs, how I wanted the story to play out differently than it did.

There’s an ever so brief whiff of a love triangle that’s its own subtle sexy. It’s both unexpected and expected and very much wished for but ultimately not at all what I wanted it to be. I can’t even cite that as a reason to dislike it because what I was wishing for actually wasn’t the right thing. I kept waiting for the catch, for the say-it-isn’t-so, which that would have been the easy way out- and one thing Bardugo doesn’t do in this story is give anyone an inch until she absolutely has to.

We had a nicely inconspicuous fairytale undertone in Alina’s hunt for the stag, what with the whole sacrifice-in-exchange-for-power thing. I liked this little inclusion. It softened things a bit- the subtle reminder that while the world is wrecked by the changes brought about by man’s magic, this magic is what the world is made of, and even the Darkling can’t escape his need for it.

Love.

Enchanted

Author: Alethea Kontis
Publisher: Harcourt Children’s Books
Date: May 8, 2012
Pages: 305
Genre: YA- Fantasy

Sunday is the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter and her mere existence is its own, special kind of magic. Sunday loves a good story. She lives for the tall tales told to her by her father, and the myriad of stories about her infamous older siblings. Sunday also likes to write stories and she writes true stories of her family, but only the ones that have already come to pass. Stories from the past are safe, because her writing can’t hurt what has already happened. Sunday’s stories, once written, become true.

She begins to read her stories to Grumble, an enchanted frog that she meets in the woods. This is nothing out of the ordinary. It happens from time to time when a human angers a fairy and pays the price for it with his form. It’s also widely known that the only cure for such an enchantment is true love’s kiss. Sunday does indeed come to care greatly for her friend and at his request she gives him a kiss in hopes that it will set him free. At the end of every story she gives Grumble a kiss but still he remains a frog. Wanting only to help him, Sunday does the one thing she can think of to save him and writes her love in a story.

     Sunday was nothing until she met Grumble-a beautiful man, with the soul of a poet. He was her best friend in the whole wide world, and she loved him with all her heart.

And as Sunday’s stories are truth, so is her love and Grumble will be released from the spell. But the form he returns to isn’t one that Sunday could ever allow herself to love.

________________________________________________________________________________

Stories can be intensely powerful things. A good story, once told, wriggles its way inside you, settles in and begins to work away, taking what it needs to become a living, breathing thing. Stories are greedy, and they feed off of belief. Oh how I love books that focus on the power of stories! There’s nothing that can pull me into a book like the suggestion that words can indeed create something that didn’t even exist until it was believed. Terry Pratchett has told me time and time again that, “You need to believe in things that aren’t true. How else can they become?” Books are so powerful and stories are so meaningful! Just think about the things you believe (or really really want to) because of a book.

Enchanted is a true fairy tale, of the old sort where not everything is pretty and more stories end badly than not. Nothing is ever as it seems in fairy and it’s always good advice to be careful what you wish for. Kontis takes all of the places you’ve ever visited in fairy tales and weaves together a richly imaginative world where all the make believe is truth. I was loath to give it up in the end because having caught glimpses of such places throughout my reading life, it rather felt like home. It’s a hodgepodge of many stories but the characters are entirely original creations, intermixed with classic heroes to such an expert extent that it was easy to believe that all those stories, written oh so long ago, were only ever about the characters in this book. It takes a highly advanced magic to completely alter the way you’ve envisioned something you’ve held fast to since childhood. I have so much love for Sunday, who embodies everything you could ever want in a fairy tale heroine.

This is one of those “happy sigh” books, because you feel quite content after reading it. I had a great deal to think on after the last page. It’s always interesting when an author seems uncomfortable with the idea of having a “bad guy” in a story. No, I’m not talking about redeeming a bad guy. I’m never a fan of that. If you’re going to write evil, let evil be evil just for the sake of being evil and refrain from the urge to save everyone. I’m talking about evil in terms of the end justifying the means, so to speak. I won’t go into too much detail here because it will spoil it but the king and Sorrow’s story is a perfect example and an oh so very sad one.

Five points for use of a variation of the word susurrus.

*Quote taken from an ARC of Enchanted and may differ in the finished copy. Thanks to the publisher for this truly amazing gift.

Retro Friday is a weekly meme hosted by Angie @ Angieville and focuses on reviewing books from the past. This can be an old favorite, an under-the-radar book you think deserves more attention, something woefully out of print, etc.

Small Gods

Author: Terry Pratchett
Publisher: HarperPrism
Date: 1992
Pages: 344
Genre: Fantasy
Source: A much loved, battered paperback that I keep with me always.

Dear Reader,
There are some books that are nearly impossible to talk about. The silence that follows the reading of such books isn’t because they are bad books, or even worse, books that you feel nothing for, so in turn you have nothing to say. It’s quite the opposite in fact. There are books, that once read, are no longer just paper between, er- thicker paper. They become something else entirely. These books seek out the little empty places in your soul, places you don’t even know exist because they’ve never had anything fill them that you would miss if they were to up and leave it vacant. These books slide right into those little empty soul pockets, settle and suddenly, just like that, there’s a little more you. They become…books that move in. It makes them difficult books to talk about because, well, not many of us can accurately and eloquently express who we are. There in lies the problem. You can no longer make a distinction between yourself and the book.
Small Gods is one of those books, so please forgive me as I fumble inexpertly through this post.

- Laura

______________________________________________________
It is once again time for an Omnian Prophet to appear. A prophet that will impart to the people the will and commandments of the Great God Om. There’s been a whole slew of prophets and they all amble up to the pulpit, like their prophetic predecessors, and decree a new set of rules that they swear were handed down to them by the Great God “Holy Horns” Om. It’s rather difficult to refute the prophet’s claim when the church fully backs the prophet and his commandments- most often at knife point. The Omnian church prides itself on the efficiency of The Quisition, a division of the church whose responsibility and privilege is to uphold enforce the will of God.

“…they were engaged in religion. You could tell by the knives (it’s not murder if you do it for a god).”

So the Omnians believe. They believe like their lives depend on it. Belief gives Om strength. The more belief, the stronger the God. So it comes as a great surprise to the Great God Om when he wakes up in the body of a mere turtle, with powers equal in size and strength of any small, shelled reptile. This shouldn’t be! He has many believers! Or he did. In his absence, the people haven’t stopped believing, oh no, the Church would never allow that. They believe. They believe in fear.

“Fear is a strange soil. It grows obedience like corn, which grow in straight lines to make weeding easier. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground.”

I know I’ve talked about this before, but let’s just rehash. Pratchett writes what on the surface appear to be fantasy novels, stories about his made up Discworld and the people in them. And while they have a nice neat fantasy setting, each book is in fact, a very clever little satire on something the human race holds dear or more often than not, something we take for granted. They are a gentle little nudge, an OK of sorts, to question what we are told to believe. This little number does of course, poke fun at religion, one in particular but essentially all of them, and if you aren’t too tightly wound on the subject (and more so if you are) it contains a great deal of wisdom that outlines centuries worth of “what the fuck?” You’ll follow Brutha, Om’s chosen prophet as he faces the harsh realization that simply believing in something doesn’t make it truth and expecting the world to only see things as you and yours do, isn’t going to do much more than get more knives pointed at you. And I liked the little poke at Om, in which he is basically told that if he’s going to be God, and all these people are going to go to the trouble of believing in him (he gets something out of the deal too- he gets to exist) then he has a bit of a responsibility to his people, to uphold his end of the deal.

“It’s hard to explain,” said Brutha. “But I think it’s got something to do with how people should behave… you should do things because they’re right. Not because gods say so. They might say something different another time.”

But anyway. This is one of those books that move in for me. It’s with me always, shapes how I think and feel which in turn affects how I live. This isn’t exactly rare. After all, so many of us have our thoughts and feelings shaped by a book, and the book affects how we live. Just remember, there are lots of different books.

Sloppy Firsts

Author: Megan McCafferty
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Date: August 28, 2001
Pages: 298
Genre: YA- Contemporary

I’ve been rather out of sorts with reading lately. A few DNFs found me, as well as some that I was able to complete but still left me feeling underwhelmed and booklonely. And even though I have this massively huge TBR shelf, and an ever growing review stack that stares dauntingly at me whenever I approach the bookshelf, I needed an oldie but a goodie- something to take me away and fill me with the book love I’ve so missed over the past few reads. A palate cleanser if you will. I went browsing through the stacks and pulled out one that I haven’t visited with in a while.

I bet you didn’t know, but when I first picked this book up in 2001, it was actually on the regular fiction shelf. This was back when I didn’t even know that such a thing as a YA section existed. I guess it’s fitting in a way as I sort of see this novel as a YA book for adults, a coming-of-age for the already gloriously aged and if you chose to read it, and continue with the series, you’ll more than understand.

The unfortunately named, Jessica Darling, track star, brainiac, surface goody-goody and closed-door malcontent is finishing out the last semester of her sophomore year sans one best friend. Hope and her family have traded the Jersey shore for the wholesomeness of Tennessee, in hopes of leaving behind the heartache of losing a loved one to a drug overdose. Without her BF, Jessica is faced with the reality that she’s let very few people in, forcing her to examine old friendships and family relationships and her place in them. She uses her journal to chronicle her life, confiding in it as she would a best friend. The result is a very witty, funny and all too real account of the things she feels she can’t say outloud, up to and including the time when she eventual does- very loudly, at the top of her voice and in print too.

There are so many, many things that I love about this story. Loving Jessica is easy- she’s not perfect, she gets no easies or gimmes in life, and she deals with that the way most people do- grudgingly, with perserverance and just enough snark to keep an edge. This is not a “poor me” journal, it’s more of a “Why me?” journal and at times a “Why the hell NOT!” journal. You can love Jessica, because I guarantee you know one. A stellar character coupled with McCafferty’s shamelessly crass, politically incorrect storytelling and dialogue make for a winning combination. Jessica isn’t written as an ideal teenager, with carefully constructed, overly-descriptive sentences and trite, patronizing wording, she writes what she really feels and at times it’s oh so refreshingly impolite.

So yeah, you have to read this one. It stays with you. I’ve been thinking about this story for almost 12 years. We have a good solid friendship. And if you don’t read it, I’ll always have something you won’t- Marcus Flutie, and in a way, that’s ok too.

“My thanks to you
for being in on my
sin”