I love portal fantasies. I’ve loved them for as long as I can remember, from Narnia to Oz to Wonderland to Amber and even for a brief moment Xanth, I have loved stories of someone from this mundane world transported to a world full of magic and wonder. Summer in Orcus is an offering in this category from T. Kingfisher, aka Ursula Vernon, and it is marvelous. The best I can describe it is a middlegrade fantasy for adults, and much like Catherynne Valente’s The […]
Read a book they said, Travel to new worlds they said.
The Palace of Glass is book three in Django Wexler’s Forbidden Library series for middle grade readers. And I find myself, once again, with the problem of trying to introduce a series to you with the middle book. I’m going to try and review this book without spoiling the series, but just in case I want to tell you that you should absolutely read it. These are excellent middle grade novels. Django Wexler skyrocketed to my favorite authors list last year, going from totally unknown to […]
A Different Look at Art
It was really hard for me to turn off my teacher brain while reading Blue Balliett’s Chasing Vermeer. The book’s intended audience is middle-grade readers, and while I think the me of that age would have been delighted with this book (it would have appealed to my snootiest, inner-art-snob instincts), 33-year-old me had a hard time getting into it. I kept looking at it from a “Would I want to teach this?” perspective, rather than from “Am I enjoying reading this?” I don’t know that […]
A few recent disappointments
Let me just start off by saying that I thought, even though I saw it was only Part 1 of the story, that Tough Justice: Exposed was going to be a complete novella, and in actuality, it really only read like a 80 or so page prologue. It was an introduction to the characters and conflicts, but very little else, and it suffered for it. More than once I made a note to myself that the author was either rushing things or telling us things instead […]
(This review contains minor spoilers for The Blood Guard series, because I can’t figure out how to tell you what I liked/didn’t like without mentioning them. They are things that come to light fairly early in the first book, mostly, so I’m don’t feel like I’m ruining anything by mentioning them, but if you like to go into a book with a blank slate, then you should probably not read this. I will spoil my own review and tell you now: I liked them.) The […]
A diverse, impressive world for the middle-grade and adult reader
(This post originally appeared in Persephone Magazine.) Akashic Books has long been at the indie forefront of interesting literature. Along with other fun releases like Simon’s Cat and Go the F—k to Sleep, they’ve expanded their stable to include books aimed at middle grade and young adult readers under their new imprint, Black Sheep. Game World by C.J. Farley is one of their first releases, and it’s a diverse, impressive world aimed at the advanced elementary school-aged reader on up to adults. My [now] 10-year-old daughter […]