I’m going to geek out a bit right now. One of my most favorite authors JUST ANSWERED MY EMAIL!!! Okay, now it’s probably not actually her but an assistant or something but I’m going to pretend it was really her. it seemed like her, anyway. Either way, how cool is that! I emailed Juliet Marillier to see if she was going to continue the Blackthorn and Grim series. If you’ve not read it and you enjoy high fantasy full of reluctant heroes, then it’s a must-read! I will put a brief description later in this post. Anyway, Juliet is an Australian author who wrote the Seven Waters series (Daughter of the Forest, etc.), Wildwood Dancing (there’s an earlier post about that one) and so many others. Many of her books are retellings of fairy tales but with many more twists and turns. Sigh…I get the same thrill when M.T. Anderson answers my posts on his Facebook page.
It is dark, dank and rat-infested in Mathiuin’s prison. She barely resembles a human much less a woman. He is an enormous lump of a man huddled in the back of the cell across the way. A guard delivers the devastating news that she is to be executed in the morning, quietly and without a hearing. She thinks she’s lost. He is afraid of losing her. As it turns out, though, fate has another idea. When the prison walls seem to explode and collapse, they make their escape but it doesn’t come without strings attached and they are held by a very powerful Fey being. She must forget vengeance for 7 years and use her wise woman powers for good. She calls herself Blackthorn and her companion is Grim. Together they must survive trials and tribulations but most difficult of all, they must survive their healing.
It’s late in World War II and Amsterdam has been overtaken by the Nazis. Henneke is a resourceful young woman who helps her family survive. Food and everyday items are in short supply but she has a reputation for being able to find anything. Officially, she does paperwork for the local undertaker but her unofficial job is to fill black market orders for her clients around the city. On her usual delivery route, Mrs. Jensen makes an unusual and dangerous request. She wants Henneke to find a young Jewish girl whose family was wiped out in a raid in which Mr. Jensen was also killed weeks before. There are a million reasons not to take on this task but there’s something deep inside that makes her need to find this girl. Accepting this assignment takes Henneke on a journey to places she never imagined she’d go and the danger she puts herself into borders on reckless but the horror of watching what is happening to her country, her neighbors and friends are too much. She must do something but there are twists and turns in this hunt and, in the end, someone is found but another is lost. Such is life in war.
Dill lives in the deep rural South where there are snakes both inside and outside. Dill’s father is a Pentecostal, snake-handling, poison-drinking preacher whose fall from grace hangs around Dill’s neck like a noose. The only things that keep him sane are his friends Travis and Lydia who hang out at the bottom of the social ladder like him and his music. Things are different this year, though. This is the year for doing things they are afraid of. Travis, a 6′ 6″ gentle giant, loves his fantasy stories and the chat rooms he hangs out in. It’s in one of these rooms he meets Amelia, and he’s smitten. Lydia convinces Dill to perform in the talent contest which has a $50 prize. Lydia is applying to colleges and working on her very popular (everywhere but home) blog. It’s their senior year, and everything is about to change in ways they do not expect.
Gregor is a typical teen, but only if the typical teen wants to save the world. Specifically, he wants to feed all of the starving children and has been working to do just that for two years. Now, though, he has the chance to kick his campaign skills into high gear. He’s been selected to attend the elite Camp Save the World along with dozens of other do-gooders from around the globe. Things start off fairly normal but quickly derail when “The Prize” is announced. Suddenly the mood turns ugly. A mural is destroyed, rumors run rampant and every night another camper is unceremoniously dumped into the lake. Regardless of how zany some of the camper’s campaigns are, they all fight like mad to get points but Gregor finds out something about the camp and its founder, Robert Drill, that changes everything for him and turns his dreams into something else.
Jade is an artist, a scholar and an all-around bright girl who knows full well that the only way she becomes successful is if she gets out of her neighborhood, maybe even out of Portland. She’s a scholarship kid at a swanky private school, where she’s one of the very few black students. She’s determined to take every opportunity that the school provides; Saturday morning SAT test prep and tutoring are in her regular rotation. One opportunity, though, she’s not sure she wants. She’s been invited to take part in Woman to Woman, a mentorship program for “at-risk” girls. Her mentor, Maxine, is a graduate of the same private school and is black but that doesn’t mean she understands what Jade is dealing with. Still, completion of the program means a scholarship to a good university so Jade decides to hunker down and get what she can out of it. Soon, though, she’s frustrated with everything and decides to teach these women a thing or two about what girls like her really want, really need to be successful. Jade finds her voice and her light which she uses to guide those around her and herself to a whole new level of respect and understanding.
“I could see where the winds yawned with silver lips and curled themselves to sleep. I could glimpse the moon folding herself into crescents and half-smiles.” Maya is a princess who has been left to her own devices for most of her life. She has free reign of the castle and grounds and takes advantage of it. This day, however, she cannot spend daydreaming. Her father has an announcement about the impending war. From her perch in the rafters, she is shocked when his solution involves marrying her off to appease the rebels. Her days of freedom are over, or so she thinks. As it turns out, being the queen of Akaran gives her the voice she’s never had and a power she never expected. Not all is as it seems in her new kingdom, however. There are doors that are locked to her and secrets hiding behind Amar’s eyes. Soon, she will make a decision that will shake herself and everything around her to the core and she must find her way through the secrets in order to save herself, Amar and the very world she loves.
The slur was nasty and Julia could not let that stand. Jordyn is her best (and only) friend so Julia paints over the ugliness with a beautiful mural on the school wall, late at night, without permission. Days later, she is kicked out of her nice, safe school for the deaf. Why? Because Jordyn snitched on her to the principal. Now, Julia is stuck in a regular public school with a t00-perky interpreter and the weight of her two mother’s disappointment. The only thing left to her is her art and she’s not about to give that up. In an effort to carve out her own space, she tags several locations only to find them changed the next day. Not just change but improved. She’s been called out and must answer but at what cost? With some unexpected allies, Julia finds herself in the middle of a graffiti war that touches more than just overpasses and water towers.
I love to read. The thicker the book the better. A few summers ago, I indulged in the re-reading of the Outlander series…all 8 books. That’s close to 7,000 pages! I absolutely loved every second. Each turn of the page made me feel like I was meeting an old friend. Tears and terror, anger and pain, love and healing kept me up late or early, again. I did this because the television series was beginning the following fall and a new book was coming out. The television series was everything I hoped it would be. The T.V. Jamie was the same man I fell in love with in 1991 when I first read Outlander. The book, however, was a different story…literally.
I have been reviewing books for about 15 years. For the last 10 or so, I’ve used a combination of WordPress for the discussion and Wikipages for my archives. Well, I went to add some reviews the other day but low and behold…Wikipages is going away! Like, poof, leaving the Internet! So, I had to embark on a quest to find a new location for all those reviews. I was forced to use Google sites because it’s a very stripped-down site manager. I can’t even install a search box for people to use to find a specific book! I have to use that because my school system has BLOCKED EVERYTHING ELSE! I’m all for protecting our children from bad stuff on the internet but this county does not allow teachers to have Youtube channels. You can’t download ANYTHING onto your school computer. We, teachers, aren’t even allowed to know the wifi password for our other devices! Boy, I sure miss my days at Lovett or even Montross!
No matter how you deal with it, losing someone hurts. It leaves a them-shaped hole in your soul. In the book Words in Deep Blue, Rachel has pushed her grief deep inside. So deep, in fact, that she feels almost nothing at all. She has finished school, for now, and has moved back to where she grew up; back to where the boy who was her best friend and secret crush (who broke her heart) lives. No one there, save her aunt, knows about her brother’s death. They do know that something has changed the once-carefree girl into a quiet, sometimes cruel person. Her one refuge is the bookshop where she works but it is also a curse because “The Boy”, also known as Henry, works there, as well. As they work together, they find a comfortable rhythm. Her job is to catalog the stories in the Letter Library. It is the heart and soul of the bookstore where people have left notes to others, known and unknown, inside of books. His job is to help his slowly disintegrating family decide whether to sell their beloved bookshop or not. Together, they reveal themselves to each other and help heal the hurt that each one caused.
Do YA Read? 