Read in August 2011

As always, titles link to the pertinent Goodreads page — feel free to add me as a friend on there if you have a Goodreads account.

1. Raven Summer, by David Almond

2. Feeling Sorry for Celia, by Jaclyn Moriarty
I love everything I have read by Jaclyn Moriarty. (So far it's all been epistolary young adult contemporary-mostly-realistic fiction.) Always entertaining and fresh and affecting, always takes me less than 24 hours to read, and never predictable.

3. Liar, by Justine Larbalestier
What a mindfrak of a book. It seemed straightforward the first time through, certainly engrossing, but then I read the designated discussion thread on her blog and realized I was trusting the narrator FAR too much. (I could probably mull this book over for days and still feel confused...)

4. Ruby Slippers: How the Soul of a Woman Brings Her Home, by Jonalyn Fincher
I'm not the target audience for this book; I just read it as part of my ongoing commitment to keeping an eye on the evangelical discourse on gender. It didn't impress me, but overall it didn't offend me either, and that in itself is mildly impressive. For the average evangelical USian woman, its ideas would probably be more refreshing than I'm able to discern.

Life list item #19: Eat a mangosteen

I have wanted to eat a mangosteen for a long time, because author and all-around awesome lady Justine Larbalestier frequently and passionately sang their praises at her blog.

I finally got a couple this summer at my produce market, with stickers informing me they'd flown all the way from Thailand. (Sorry, ozone! I won't do it again!) They have very hard outsides, and white, pulpy, squishy insides (or at least, this is how mine were by the time I ate them). I wasn't so much a fan of the texture of the innards; it made me think of aliens, but the flavor and the juice were lovely. Sort of pineapple-y.

My parents thought by the name that it must be a half-breed fruit, the lovechild of mango + something else. Nope. It is its own fruit.

I have a bunch of other obscure tropical fruits to eat on my life list (which I have been needing to rewrite for a while...the items are nice, but not all of them still compel me). Odd me.

Do they have mangosteens where you live, slash, do you have a favorite odd fruit?

Read in June

1. Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

The apocalypse with a heavy dose of British humor. I didn't find the way the plot played out entirely satisfactory, but it's smart and funny enough that it doesn't matter too much.

2. Fall of a Kingdom, by Hilari Bell

Except for some extra ethical complexity, I kind of feel like I've read this book before. Sometimes that's why I read YA fantasy, for something familiar that I can count on, but I guess I wasn't in the mood this time.

3. How Green Was My Valley, by Richard Llewellyn

One of my friends has been trying to get me to read this since last spring, and luckily for me, she gave me a copy for my birthday and left me unable to put it off any longer. It's set in a nineteenth-century Welsh coal-mining village, but it manages to avoid triteness and predictability, even when dealing with subjects like loss of innocence and labor rights movements. Bittersweet, wise coming-of-age story in simple but sometimes almost lyrical prose.

4. The Miracle of Mindfulness, by Thich Nhat Hanh

I didn't connect with every single chapter of this book, but the parts that did resonate with me SERIOUSLY resonated. Eminently wise. It's about eating a tangerine.

5. How To Ditch Your Fairy, by Justine Larbalestier

Definitely a beach read, but in a good way.

I'd like to tell you about a book I've read recently...

...but which one would you like to hear about?

Tell me which sounds the most interesting to you, and I'll write about that one for Monday.

1. A graphic novel about a survivor of the Rwandan genocide
2. The second and third books in Justine Larbalestier's Magic or Madness trilogy (click here to read about the first book and what I thought of it)
3. Trouble, by Gary D. Schmidt (New England, racial tension, and families and individuals weathering crises)

Magic or Madness

“My name is Reason Cansino. I was named Reason because my mother, Sarafina, thought it was prettier than Logic or Rationality or Intellect and had better nicknames, too. My mother believes in all those things: logic, reason, and the rest, and in mathematics..."

Reason Cansino’s name is a badge of defiance: Reason and her mother have led nomadic lives in the Australian outback for Reason’s entire life, on the run from Reason’s grandmother, Esmeralda, and her horrifying superstitions and “smoke and mirrors” beliefs. But when Reason's mother loses her mind, Reason must go to stay with her Esmeralda and attempt to stave off the influence of her dark beliefs alone. Then she steps through a door in Esmeralda's Sydney house and emerges in New York City. There, she must not only grapple with the undeniable evidence that magic is real, but with the immediate dangers of her deep entanglement in it.

The substance of Justine Larbalestier's Magic or Madness lies in what isn't said - the ambiguities and the holes in the reader's knowledge that lie in just the right places. When it comes to her ability to capture your curiousity, to create questions in your mind, and to let just the right amount of answers trickle out of the plot at exactly the right rate, Larbalestier is seriously skillful, and she really puts the story's multiple POVs to work for her. Not knowing how much to explain (and when), how to do so, and what information to withhold or let the reader figure out seems to me to be a common pitfall, especially in fantasy and sci-fi novels, when there's more than usual in the story's world for the reader to figure out, but the author's spot-on intuition in that area in Magic or Madness is quite wonderful.

I also LOVED her characters. I think Reason may be one of my favorite fictional characters. She is absolutely terrific, so original, cool, real, and likeable (she's a little bit like the character that Lyra Silvertongue would have been if it were up to me). Tom is just a dear, but he still gets a role that arouses some of those delicious questions in your head, and as for Jay-Tee - her I like because she's fierce and sad and imperfect, and because I don't like her all the time! I'm so pleased that this book is only the first in the trilogy, because this absorbing "medium dark urban contemporary fantasy" is gourmet YA.

Grade: A-

P.S. Her blog is one of my favorite author blogs.