Bingo Square (Round 2): Award Winner (Newbery Medal) While I picked this novel up because of bothari43’s review (and cat picture), I’m using it for the Award Winner category. Overall, the tone reminded me quite a bit of Terry Pratchett aimed at a younger audience. I’ve only read two Pratchett novels so others more familiar with his work may not agree with that assessment but it certainly felt like that to me. I just felt like Xan, Glerk, Fyrian, Antain (and his uncle), and Luna […]
I was so very often confused, but that’s okay!
There are a lot of threads in this book moving to create a tapestry of a story. This is definitely a fantasy, as their world is much different than ours. There is a great Bog that takes over a good part of the land. The Bog is dangerous, but there is a town in the middle, the Protectorate. The Protectorate is ruled by the Elders. Every year on the Day of Sacrifice, the youngest baby in the town is sacrificed to the witch, to keep […]
Teen witches, good witches, bad witches, swamp monster witches, and more!
This was a lovely little fairy tale that had just enough familiar pieces that I thought I knew where everything was going, but just enough originality that I was intrigued throughout and couldn’t put it down, even though I was pretty sure there was sad stuff coming. Plus, two truly excellent secondary characters (I want a Glerk and a Fyrian of my very own – this book should come with a swamp monster and a Perfectly Tiny Dragon). Once upon a time, there was a […]
Hope is the thing with feathers
This Newberry Medal winning YA novel is a fantasy/fairy tale about hope’s triumph over sorrow. Kelly Barnhill writes about a world populated by witches, dragons, monsters, and humans. She writes of bogs, forests, and towns separated by fear and magic. In this world, one town in particular, the Protectorate, engages in a terrible human sacrifice every year, wherein the youngest child in town is left in the forest as a tribute to an evil witch. It is an age old practice, perpetuated by the town […]
Knowledge is power, but it is a terrible power when it is hoarded and hidden.
The Girl Who Drank the Moon won the Newberry Award in 2017, and though it was already on my list of books I wanted to read, this pushed it up the pile when I went looking for the next book to complete my “read all the Newberry Winners” goal. (A goal I’ve been terribly neglecting). I had kind of a weird experience with this book, I wasn’t particularly impressed as I read it and then I reached the end was surprised by all these tears […]
I Didn’t Mean to Read This Whole Book
As many people are aware, 2017 was on the whole, a bit nuts. My personal and professional life decided to follow suit, and while I may appreciate the travel miles and hotel points that racked up, I’m looking forward to a more stable (personally) 2018. I started at new job with the new along with the new year, and while I’m searching for housing in a new area, I’ve been staying with family during the work week. Wednesday night, I sat down to read aloud […]