Kid's Choice: Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs by Mo Willems

My second graders loved this winking Goldilocks tale with a twist. There are no bears here, just three innocent dinosaurs who go for a walk (they are definitely not hiding in the woods nearby), leaving their door open and their chocolate pudding out, with absolutely no thought that a hapless little girl might wander in and provide them with a chocolate filled snack when they return.

Willems has a lot of fun here with the original story: hot, cold or just right, Goldilocks eats all of the pudding (it is chocolate pudding, after all.) And the chairs? The first and second ones are too tall. The third one...still too tall.

Will Goldilocks get out before the dinosaurs return from their...er...walk? Or will she be a chocolate pudding-filled bonbon for the hungry dinosaurs when they return?

As a bonus, the endpapers are covered with (presumably) rejected ideas for Goldilocks stories. Goldilocks and the Three Plumbers? Goldilocks and the Three Wall Street Types? If anyone could make it work, it would be Willems.

Blood Oranges by Kathleen Tierney

Urban fantasy and paranormal romance (whether for adults or teens) have taken on a lot of baggage post-Twilight: attractive monsters, love triangles, power hierarchies, destined mates, curiously irresistible protagonists and wildly improbable happily-ever-afters. A generation ago, a romance with the monster would have been teased, but now, dear reader, she has married him.

Blood Oranges has taken that baggage and run. The other way. When Siobhan Quinn accidentally falls into the role of monster hunter, she finds herself part of an old grudge match between two powerful players. Her mentor, Mean Mr. B, disappears suddenly and leaves Quinn to walk the thin line between hunter and monster, dual roles she is unlikely to survive.

In the world of Siobhan Quinn, monsters are grotesque (though not always unattractive) and becoming a vampire/werewolf doesn't make you a special snowflake; it makes you a killer. All of the players are amoral, at best, and no one is out to save anyone else.

I enjoyed Quinn's voice in this book, her unreliability and constant need to question everything. The plot, such as it was, was less interesting than the world-building and Tierney's constant interrogation of genre tropes.

Funnily, the notion of getting back to the basics of horror tropes (our vampires are scary, not sparkly!) is a well-established trope in itself. The retreat to a darker plot and tone is a well-worn device; when it comes to monsters, attractive and otherwise, the pendulum swings back and forth. I would love to see more explorations of these tropes, in both their fantasy and horror aspects.

Quote

"If a man walks in dressed like a hick, and acting as if he owned the place, he's a spaceman."

Lorenzo Smythe
Double Star
by Robert A. Heinlein
1956

Kid's choice: That Rabbit Belongs to Emily Brown

by Cressida Cowell

Emily Brown and her stuffed rabbit Stanley are in the midst of a series of adventures when she receives some unexpected visitors: first the Queen's footman, then the army, then the navy. And they all have one (courteously worded) demand: that Emily Brown hand over that Bunnywunny, which the Queen has decided is the finest toy she has ever seen. Emily Brown politely declines. Then not so politely declines. Despite offers of a gold bear, talking dolls, rocking chairs, and more, Emily Brown refuses to hand over her stuffed friend (his name is not Bunnywunny!), even if the Queen is the poshest person in the kingdom.

But the Queen must have that rabbit...and so Emily Brown must take matters into her own hands.

This ode to the power of toys and imagination is a pleasure to read to children, but the illustrations are probably the real star here. Emily's and Stanley's color-saturated adventures captivate young readers, and the second to last spread actually drew gasps of wonder from one group of first graders when I read it to them.

Children will reach for their own toys when Emily takes pity on the silly Queen and tells her how to have a stuffed friend as nice as Stanley.

Thoughts: American Gods by Neil Gaiman

Some stories are smooth and satisfying, easy to follow, thematically consistent, and tie the plot threads into a neat little bow at the end.

American Gods is not that story.

When Shadow, waiting to be released from prison, learns that his wife is dead, he finds himself free but at loose ends. He takes a job from a old man who seems to be strangely fixated on him. While driving Mr. Wednesday around, running errands for him, and helping him run con jobs, Shadow meets an assortment of very odd people. He comes to believe they are ancient gods struggling to survive in the America's cultural desert. Short memories have begotten flashy, dangerous new gods: media, technology, credit. With Shadow's help, Mr. Wednesday is gathering an army to fight them, so the elder gods can reclaim their rightful place.

But all is not as it seems. Shadow has been left in a small northern Wisconsin town to wait for Wednesday: a friendly, helpful town with a place for everyone and a wrongness at its very center. A secret third organization, trying to foil Wednesday's plans, kidnaps Shadow, threatening to torture him. Meanwhile, Shadow's dead wife, Laura, has come back...

American Gods is a tangled knot of mythology, mystery, horror and warped Americana. Woven through Shadow's story are short, fascinating, interludes on how some of the elder gods came to America and what the newer gods are up to as they ascend to power. 

Gaiman's writing is lively and his deep understanding of myth make for an thoughtful read. Oddly and significantly, many of the meetings with the elder gods are quite banal, while scenes like that of Shadow foolishly trying to walk to town during a dangerous cold snap, take on a mythic quality. The plot winds around its subject matter in coils, rather than a straight line.

But the many, many story threads stubbornly refuse to jell into a whole, and Shadow's passivity doesn't give the story much of a rudder. (Humorously, even Mr. Wednesday comments on it at one point.)

There is much to like here, and readers who like fiction that grapples with philosophy will find much to challenge them. But readers who like their stories to be plot driven with tidy endings may be frustrated.

"Clean" by Alex Hughes

Clean by Alex Hughes is an enjoyable piece of science fiction noir, sharing its sensibilities with many popular urban fantasy series, but committed to its near-future environment and characters. If I could have wished for more exploration of the villain's telepathic crimes (how did he do that exactly?) and of the telepaths' powers in general, it was gratifying to see another voice on the science fictional side. I like my fantasy just fine but it has been subsuming everything lately; I love to see some science fiction breaking through.

I don't enjoy entertainment reviews or plugs that say, "It's x crossed with y!" But I have to admit,  Clean does make me want to use the phrase.

I picked up the book because the premise reminded me of Alfred Bester The Demolished Man, one of my favorites. Playing in the yard with Bester's toys strikes me as good fun, and a fine place to start a novel. Telepaths, telekinetics, a powerful Guild: it's all here.

But the (almost) unnamed protagonist is about as far from the confident, powerful Lincoln Powell as you can get. He is a drug addict living on the seedy edge of tomorrow, thrown out of his Guild and distrusted even by his own colleagues. Sound familiar? It put me much in mind of George Alec Effinger's Marid Audran books. A very good thing.

I'm curious as to how much the series will delve into the criminal element; Clean's protagonist is much more of a boy scout than Marid ever was; even his addiction stems from a scientific experiment performed inside the Guild, though it's grip on him makes him no less dangerous. He wants to commit to rebuilding his life after nearly destroying himself; will he stay on that path?

I look forward to reading the next book, Sharp, in April.

Quote

"For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."

Carl Sagan

World within world within world...

"Hazel wished she had something in her hands to throw. She looked away and sat down.

"She opened up the new library book she'd brought for the bus ride and willed her thoughts to disappear in the pages. The girl in it was reading A Wrinkle in Time. She was best friends with a boy who lived in the apartment below. And then one day the boy stopped talking to her. Hazel closed the book."

Breadcrumbs
by Anna Ursu
p. 131

Hazel, the main character of Breadcrumbs, reading Newbery winner When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead, in which Miranda, like Hazel, loves A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. Cute.

Jellyratfish

“Morphologically, we’ve built a jellyfish. Functionally, we’ve built a jellyfish. Genetically, this thing is a rat.” 

Kit Parker, a biophysicist at Harvard University.

There's a SyFy channel movie here somewhere.

Debris by Jo Anderton

I don't read as much as I'd like during the school year. Lack of focus more than lack of time, I think. So the mark of a good novel has become "when I put this down and pick it up a week and half later, do I still want to read it?" Inertia can get me through a lot when I have the brain wattage, but leaden prose and plot meandering just kill me when I am tired.

Debris by Jo Anderton passed the test quite well. Anderton has an enjoyable authorial voice, a welcome relief in a genre with too many plodders. Her plot, while probably spread a little thin for 450 pages of novel, nevertheless takes the reader through a fascinating world that has amazing technology (pions, little lights that build, fix and heal) but that has mostly forgotten how it all works. 

Much like Daniel Abraham's Long Price Quartet, Anderton creates her own wonderfully original fantastic world. I have no idea if this is fantasy or science fiction and I don't much care. It's so nice to see contemporary authors using the genre's freedom to build really cool things -- and being rewarded with publication.

Quote

"It would just draw attention. Nobody likes a blonde in a hamster ball."

Veronica on Veronica Mars
"Happy Go Lucky"

Quote

"I am Locutus of Borg."

Captain Picard
Star Trek: the Next Generation
"The Best of Both Worlds, Part 1"

Quote

There's no such thing as a bad idea. Just poorly executed awesome ones."

Damon
Vampire Diaries
"The Dinner Party"

Quote

"Pardon me, by why is Lieutenant Barclay being referred to clandestinely as a vegetable?"

Data
Star Trek: The Next Generation
"Hollow Pursuits"

The Muppets

The Muppets is either a charming, sweet movie brimming with the best kind of nostalgia, or a rather disturbing look into Jason Segel's mind.

Either way, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Sad

Anne McCaffrey 1926-2011

Anne McCaffrey was without doubt one of the five writers who most influenced my reading of science fiction and fantasy. Where many people see Pern as fantasy dressed up as science fiction, (with an implicit sneer, as if that's a bad thing) I see fantasy transformed into the science fiction idiom, with all the necessary rigor that entails.

This is particularly true in the earliest Pern stories and books, which feature not only science, but sophisticated politics and characters who need cunning, not magic, to save themselves. If you start with the The Dragonriders of Pern, you find yourself plunked into a medieval society sorely in need of scientific advancement and, dare we say, enlightenment. Just look at how poor Menolly is treated at the beginning of the Harper Hall trilogy.

Along with the Pern books, I most fondly remember Crystal Singer and Killashandra, two lovely and original science fiction romances.

She will live on in the pantheon of the greats.

Quote

"Fantasy, unlike science fiction, relies on a moral universe: it is less an argument with the universe than a sermon on the way things should be..."

Rhetorics of Fantasy
by Farah Mendlesohn
2008

Quote (Classic)

"What color are their hands now?"

Beauregard and Miss Piggy
The Great Muppet Caper

Quote (Classic)

"I'm not bad. I'm just drawn that way."

Jessica Rabbit
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
1988

Rosemary Kirstein

Where is my next Steerswoman book?