They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. I beg to differ. See that cover over there on the left? Kind of amazing, right? And the hand drawn goodness wraps around to the back as well. In all honesty, it almost didn’t matter what this book was about. I fell in love with the cover art and had to bring it home.
Thankfully, the story is just as delightful as the paper it’s wrapped in. Wonder Show tells the tale of a young girl, Portia, whose father leaves the dust bowl in search of work. Her aunt takes care of her for a while, but ultimately puts her in a home for “wayward” girls under the watchful eye of a man known only as Mister.
Without giving anything away, events transpire and Portia runs away to join the circus. Literally. Actually, she meets up with the “wonder show,” which is basically a sideshow of human abnormalities that travels alongside any circus that will have them. As she adjusts to circus life she makes friends and enemies, confronts fears, and learns to be a part of a very unusual family.
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Tags: book review, circus, coming of age, depression era, dust bowl, hannah barnaby, intermediate reader, recommended, wayward girls, wonder show, young adult
In high school, I wasn’t awkward at all. I had all the right clothes, hung out with all the right people, and got invited to the best parties. Plus I dated the hottest guy at school.
Okay, so none of that is true. Especially since my school was all girls.
If you don’t think about high school (whether it was years ago or you’re still there) and cringe, this book may not be for you. But I’m pretty confident that most people feel out of place and awkward during their teen years, and this book understands that feeling perfectly.
Mackenzie is bookish and clumsy, but is mostly okay with that because she has her ridiculously high GPA and close group of equally nerdy friends to keep her company. So what if she attends study sessions instead of parties on the weekend? There’s nothing wrong with that. (I mean, that’s what I did, and look how I…oh, never mind.)
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Tags: awkward, book review, coming of age, humor, marni bates, young adult
I read this book in one night instead of sleeping.
Things you should know: Daniel Handler also writes children’s books as Lemony Snicket, best known for A Series Of Unfortunate Events. Maira Kalman is an artist who has published books of her own work along with illustrating books written by other people. (We previously reviewed one of her picture books here.) Together they create a physically beautiful book, with glossy pages, full color illustrations, and gorgeous endpapers. There was basically no chance I wouldn’t buy myself a copy.
The story itself is a letter from a teenage girl, Min, to her boyfriend-for-six-weeks, Ed. It starts with a box of things that symbolize the relationship to her, which she is unceremoniously dumping on his doorstep. Each chapter starts with a full-page illustration of an item from the box, followed by a somewhat stream-of-consciousness retelling of how it became important.
If a six-week relationship seems insignificant to you, and definitely not worth being heartbroken over, you may be an adult with a very bad memory of what it’s like to be a teenager. Min and Ed’s story is full of firsts and lasts, at times painfully awkward while otherwise being perfectly sweet. Mistakes are made, lessons learned the hard way – and yet, from an outside perspective, the experience gained in six weeks of Min’s Junior year is invaluable.
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Tags: art, book review, coming of age, daniel handler, david levithan, first heartbreak, first love, lemony snicket, maira kalman, series of unfortunate events, stream of consciousness, teenage angst, why we broke up, young adult
I watch a lot of NCIS, where 40 minutes and one amazingly talented forensic scientist are enough to solve even the most horrific of crimes. Real life, however, takes longer and doesn’t always yield such clear-cut results.
Enter Frank Bender. He came upon his calling as a forensic artist almost accidentally, when he attended an autopsy in lieu of taking an anatomy course to help with his sculpting. In the storage room, there was a body of a woman who had not been identified – he was told, “We have no idea what she might have looked like.” Looking at her skull, however, Bender realized that he did know what she looked like. And he asked permission to sculpt a bust of her face.
Five months after he completed her bust, the woman was identified as Anna Duval, a missing persons case from Arizona.
With a successful ID came more skulls needing faces. Bender learned more about forensic reconstruction and streamlined his technique. He visited the Mütter Museum to study differences in skulls (and later exhibited some of his completed busts there – leading to the identification of yet another victim). He set up a studio for his unusual hobby. And when the Mexican government asked the U.S. for help in identifying some of the more than 400 women killed since 1993, Bender was a natural choice for the task at hand.
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Tags: art, book review, forensic artist, forensic reconstruction, forensic scientist, forensics, human faces, non-fiction, ted botha, the girl with the crooked nose, true crime
You can tell this book is unusual just by looking at it. Its shape is a perfect square, it is bound in cloth with no dust jacket, and the cover art is strangely wonderful. The contents do not disappoint – this is a tale of children living in a dystopia, looking for adventure and causing a bit of mischief. It also defies a brief description or easy packaging, but I’ll try.
The world of The Wikkeling is really just an exaggerated version of the rapidly accelerating and expanding world we currently inhabit. Schools are standardized to the point of homogeneity, with constant, instantaneous performance evaluations. If any student or school falls behind, the consequences are dire. Children are kept “safe” and “secure” through continuous monitoring to account for their movements throughout the day, an elaborate seat belt system on the bus, and even a camera trained on their beds to watch over them in sleep. Old houses are destroyed to make way for plastic edifices and books are done away with completely in favor of computers. Traffic never lets up, with near-total gridlock even in the middle of the night. It all adds up to a scary, but not completely unbelievable, vision of the future.
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Tags: book review, daniela j. terrazzini, dystopia, gps, intermediate, steven arntson, technology, the wikkeling, urban expansion, urban sprawl, young adult
Without checking, I think I can safely say that John Connolly is the most-mentioned author on this blog. But that’s for a very good reason – he’s one of my all-time favorite authors and people. Plus he’s been kind enough to publish two books per year recently and still finds the time to tour and do interviews to talk about them. So we, in turn, keep reviewing his books and posting his interviews.
Normally I don’t like to review books in a series, unless it’s the first title. I’m the kind of person who has to start a series from the beginning, and unfortunately I often abandon some series because they have too many books and I too little time. This being the 10th Charlie Parker PI novel that Connolly has put out, I can understand that it’s easy for people to feel overwhelmed if they haven’t read any of his previous mystery novels.
Have no fear. You can start the series at the beginning, with Every Dead Thing, and enjoy your way up to the newest installment. But The Burning Soul, more than any of the others in the series, I believe, can be read on its own without the preceding books. Of course, once you’re done, I still recommend spending the next year reading the series from the beginning in anticipation of his next release, but hey – I’m biased.
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Tags: book review, charlie parker, evil, ghosts, john connolly, mystery/thriller, series, supernatural, the burning soul
The immortal Oscar Wilde said that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.” It’s all I can think about when I read a Castle book.
Castle is a show on ABC about a mystery writer, Richard Castle, who is on a perpetual ride-along with NYPD detective Kate Beckett. Being a fan of the mystery genre and writers in general, this show appeals to me quite a bit. It’s generally a good mix of drama, comedy, and good old-fashioned sleuthing (though I could do with a bit less drama at times). It doesn’t hurt that Nathan Fillion (of Joss Whedon’s short-lived but much beloved Firefly) plays the title character.
But what made me really fall in love with the show is that they have been publishing the books that Castle is supposedly working on each season. And they have become bestsellers, these books written by a fictional author. (I always wonder if real, live mystery authors get upset about that.) With so many shows and movies ripping their stories from books, or series of books, it’s a fun change to see the show itself producing an original series of books as a tie-in.
That series is the Nikki Heat series. Book 3, Heat Rises, was released in September and is on my “currently reading” stack. This year they went even further, however, and released two books. Deadly Storm is a graphic novel interpretation of Richard Castle’s novel of the same title – the first in a series that supposedly shot him to fame and fortune. Except the original novels don’t exist, making this “adaptation” yet another layer of fabrication. Have we gotten stuck in a metacognitive loop yet?
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Tags: abc, book review, castle, deadly storm, derrick storm, graphic novel, nathan fillion, richard castle, tv show, tv tie-in
A monster calls on Conor just after midnight in the shape of a yew tree looming over his bedroom window. But Conor is not afraid. “I’ve seen worse,” he says. And he has – his waking life is filled with helping care for his mother during another round of cancer treatments, a father who has largely disappeared to be with his new family in America, a gang of bullies at school, and losing faith in his one true friend. Amid all this turmoil, it is almost a relief to be visited by the yew tree at night. Or at least it’s a nice change of pace from the monster in his other nightmare – the one that truly frightens him.
The idea for this book came from a Young Adult author named Siobhan Dowd, who unfortunately passed away from breast cancer in 2007. (I am not familiar with Dowd’s work, but will certainly be looking it up now.) Patrick Ness was called in to shape the idea into book form, along with illustrator Jim Kay, and the result is something special. The language is simple but haunting, and Conor’s pain and uncertainty show in stark and heartrending ways. The illustrations are dark, textured, and expressive, and add immeasurably to the overall atmosphere of the book. Simply put, this is a beautiful volume in terms of story, prose, and presentation.
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Tags: a monster calls, book review, cancer, jim kay, monsters, must read, nightmares, patrick ness, siobhan dowd, young adult
I have to come clean – when I read the first book in this series, The Magicians, I had very mixed feelings about it. The writing was excellent, no doubt about it, and I read through the book very quickly. But at the end, when I put it down, I couldn’t tell if I had liked it or not.
The problem is: Grossman takes fantasy worlds similar to Harry Potter, Narnia, and others, and brings them into a very modern setting. Young magicians are given an entrance exam to see if they will be accepted into the magical college of Brakebills. A fantasy world from a series of children’s books, known as Fillory, turns out to be real. And the magicians must learn their own powers to navigate in this magical world. Except along the way they get lost a lot, and there is quite a bit college-age experimentation with drugs, alcohol, and sex. The characters make an unending list of pop culture references. Their adventures seem to meander around with no clear objective. This is not how I expect my fantasy novels to play out.
I like Harry Potter because none of the wizards uses a cell phone, even outside of Hogwarts. They don’t use magic to throw crazy parties fueled by controlled substances. There’s a timelessness about the Harry Potter books, and the Narnia books, that is quaint and comfortable. Is it more realistic that young people would misbehave a bit when learning to harness great powers? Sure. But that’s not what I’m used to finding in my fantasy novels.
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Tags: book review, fantasy, folklore, humor, lev grossman, mythology, the magician king, the magicians
The liquidation book fairies were very kind to me last week. As I was cleaning up what was left of our Kids’ department for the umpteenth time one morning, I stumbled upon this lovely version of Goldilocks, as told by Lauren Child. When I saw that it was illustrated with photographs of handmade dolls posed in a handcrafted cabin, I knew that I had to buy a copy for fellow bookseller and reviewer hardboundandgagged. In case you don’t know her in real life (which I imagine most of you don’t), she is not only a fantastic kids’ bookseller, but she also does some very unique artwork. A lot of that artwork utilizes dolls, and she poses them for photographs that are works of art in and of themselves. So, basically, this book could have had her name written on it.
After I bought it and brought it home, however, I realized that I had a problem. Although this book was perfect for her, after looking through it in more detail, I realized I was going to need a copy for myself. And that is the really impressive part – somehow, the very next day, while cleaning up the Kids’ section yet again, a second copy materialized in front of me. A liquidation miracle! That kind of magical discovery would never happen while buying books online. Suffice it to say, we both have our own copies now, and she kindly allowed me to write the review.
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Tags: art, book review, children's books, creepy, emily l. jenkins, fairy tales, goldilocks and the three bears, humor, lauren child, must read, photography, polly borland
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