Thornspell by Helen Lowe

Ah, fairy tales. This book I picked up on a whim (okay, it was on display at the library, face-out, and the cover drew me in. And the title. And the description on the back..."A forbidden wood, an enchanted castle, a sleeping princess...and the prince destined to break the spell." Ooh!).

So, as you might guess, this is really the story of Sleeping Beauty - or rather, the prince who wakes her up. It begins well before he wakes her, and revolves around the efforts of his caretakers to keep him both alive and free from the control of Margravine zu Malvolin (pretty awesome name, btw). She's the evil witch (really of the Faie) who cast the original spell on Princess Aurora.

Anyway, this book is great. I loved every minute of it. The main character is both believable and flawed, brilliant and, at times, completely idiotic. In short, very human. He's surrounded by a cast of interesting characters, the most significant of which is Balisan, his master-at-arms, who teaches him everything a prince needs to know about defending himself - from understanding who your enemy's family is, to knowing how to swordfight. He's totally awesome.

Of course, fairy tales re-told can be awfully predictable - but this one is fresh and full of little details to keep the reader's interest. I can't wait to read more from this author (this is her first novel).

Inkdeath by Cornelia Funke

I loved Inkheart and Inkspell. Meggie and Farid, Mo and Resa - funnily enough, it is the everyday characters from our world that speak to me the most, despite their being surrounded by the fantastical creatures of the Inkworld. (Okay, okay, so Farid is technically from A Thousand and One Nights, or something, whatever.) This world is breathtaking - Funke is truly a master artist. The world she paints is vivid and shocking, at once beguilingly innocent and treacherously evil. Meggie is just a beautiful character - of course, we see a lot of her point of view; she's just the age of the target audience for this book. And it's really a story about how she grows up in the completely frightening world inside a book. Her father, Mo/Silvertongue/Blujay, has the power of reading aloud and making characters from books appear in our world. And of making things from our world disappear into books - which is what happens numerous times to various characters during this series.

But back to Meggie. I could listen to her thoughts all day. She's strong and brave (quality character traits for a young girl, and she wears them well). She's fiercely loyal and loving. People seem to act differently around her. She's special - I can't seem to put it any other way.

Yes, terrible things happen. Though Meggie is in love with Farid, his feelings are unknown. He clearly likes Meggie a good deal; but then, he doesn't seem to mind kissing the maids terribly much. His motives are beyond my ken. (I love that expression.) I hope to find a happily-ever-after for Meggie and Farid, Mo and Resa, but I'm not exactly holding my breath. The Inkworld is fraught with peril and bloodshed, and I'm a little nervous that not everyone will make it out alive.

Update: Yes, there is a happily-ever-after (of sorts). The resolution with Farid made me sad, but he should have seen it coming. It was really his decisions that led to the outcome.

Funnily enough, though, I can't really see this story as a happily-ever-after that way. I wonder if the author has some more Inkworld tales up her sleeve, perhaps to do with Meggie's little brother...I'd read them.

Climbing the Stairs by Padma Venkatraman

I read Climbing the Stairs this week. The time period is so fascinating - around the time when Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese, but in British-occupied India. The main character is a girl named Vidya. Her family is progressive and open-minded; her father even tells her he plans to send her to college. But a terrible accident causes her father to become mentally incapacitated. Her family goes to live at the home of the very traditional grandfather and his sons' families. There, the men live upstairs, and the women live downstairs. The women cook and clean and tend to children, while the men work and study and listen to the wireless. Only during festivals do the sexes mingle.

There, Vidya discovers her grandfather's off-limits (to the women) library, and meets a young man named Raman. In a fairly predictable fashion, Vidya pushes her boundaries and receives permission to study in the library, and Raman falls in love with her.

The setting is what is so intriguing and beguiling about this book. The customs and culture of this place - so completely foreign to the world I live in - are so fascinating. I couldn't get enough. The ending is fairly conventional, in terms of coming-of-age stories, but it is the richness of India itself that will remain with me long after the names and circumstances of the characters fade away from my memory.

One caveat: I wanted Raman to be the man Vidya expected him to be, and I was a little disappointed by some of his ideas and expectations. But I loved that he was willing to consider himself in the wrong - that he allowed his ideas to change - based on his friendship with Vidya. It is so rare that a strong female character can have that kind of influence on a male character, especially given the time period.

I'd love to find more interesting books set in India. Got any suggestions?

Howl's Moving Castle

I recently read Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones. I very much liked the characters and the setting. Sophie is the eldest daughter of a hatmaker, who dies and leaves the girls - and their mother - without adequate funds to live on. The two younger sisters apprentice out, and Sophie stays at home to make hats for her mother's shop. One day, the Witch of the Waste comes into the shop and turns Sophie into an old woman. Sophie, realizing she can't continue her narrow, confined existence any longer, sets out to make her way in the world. She marches off, and finds a job - actually, forces her way into a job - cleaning castle for Wizard Howl. He may be infamous for eating the hearts of young, beautiful girls, but Sophie thinks she'll be safe with him, since she now has the body of a ninety-year-old woman (and she wasn't much to look on in the first place).

I really dug these characters. Sophie goes from a quiet little mouse of a girl who can only make hats to a strong, determined, fierce woman. Michael, Howl's apprentice, is a hoot. He seems as baffled by his master as Sophie. Calcifer, the fire demon who is bound to serve Howl, is amazingly developed for such a being - he has personality, likes and dislikes, and he definitely has a heart, whatever the story says.

The secondary characters and storylines are also compelling. Lettie and Martha as Sophie's sisters develop from cardboard cutouts into interesting people, and Howl's mysterious past could merit another book. (I'd love to find out about his life in Wales before he became Wizard Howl.) Everything eventually gets woven together into a big, confusing, mysterious story that, ultimately, makes sense together. It's fun to read. Also, there's a hint of romance and some very keen scenes wherein Sophie realizes something very important about herself.

I took a look at the manga based on the novel, and I was disappointed. The characters are all jumbled up, the story line has been muddied with some kind of bizarre modern warfare that completely destroys the bucolic setting of the novel, and it's just weird. Starting and ending at the same place as the novel, but completely going off the rails on a crazy train in the middle. If I get a chance, I'll watch the movie the manga is based on, but I'm not expecting anything much from it.

The Gemma Doyle Trilogy

I recently finished books two and three of the Gemma Doyle trilogy by Libba Bray. I really, really enjoyed book one (A Great and Terrible Beauty), and was so pleased that book two (Rebel Angels) continued to shine. However, I was so disappointed with the ending of the story (as told in The Sweet Far Thing), that it fairly ruined the series for me.

Okay, so I always had some serious misgivings about certain aspects of the stories. Such as how Gemma and her friends seem extremely cavalier about how they use the magic, both within the Realms and in our own world. Also, Gemma and her friends are shockingly unsupervised for young ladies of breeding in Victorian England. Don't even get me started about the implausibility of some of the things they do.

Here's my major problem, though: I'm just a sucker for a good coming-of-age love story, and this one had a doozy. Gemma and Kartik are lovely characters, and their developing romance is sweet and real. The fact that any relationship between them is impossible in the society in which they live - Indians at that time being considered by the English as lowly, inferior beings fit only for service - makes it forbidden and dangerous. But, as with so much in the Realms, anything seems possible. SPOILER ALERT! I so dearly wanted them to end up together. The climax of the book, when they go to the Winterlands to destroy the Tree of All Souls, made me feel cheated and betrayed by the author. Seriously - I don't know how she can consider that an acceptable ending. It doesn't even make sense.

In short, I can't recommend this book. I wanted so very much to like it, but in the end, I was disappointed by the completely bizarre ending.

The Tapestry trilogy

I just finished reading the second book in The Tapestry trilogy, The Second Siege (the third book is due next year). I had a lengthy discussion with C about whether or not the series was a Harry Potter rip-off. While I have to say that there are many similarities, there are a number of differences.

The major difference, to me, anyway, is that The Tapestry books are rooted firmly in mythology. Now, don't get me wrong - Rowling is also clearly a student of mythology, and she draws on that knowledge. But The Tapestry books draw on these myths for major characters and story lines. The main character, Max McDaniels, is Cuchulain reborn, and he's frequently referred to as "the Hound of Rowan" (also the name of book one of the series). He and his roommate at Rowan, an academy for "gifted" students (really those with a talent for magic), get themselves caught up in incredible and very dangerous adventures to protect their school and the world at large from the Demon Astaroth.

Although some of the characters come across as stock characters, these are pretty good reads, and I enjoyed them. I'll be looking forward to book three.

Twilight series

I just re-read the first two books in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series, Twilight and New Moon. I certainly don't classify this series as classic literature or anything like that - even I was a little freaked out that I was reading a romance story that revolved around vampires and werewolves. But I do have to say that Meyer definitely tells a good story and gives you realistic characters to sink your teeth into. (Har.)

I've read some reviews that really pull Bella apart as a character, claiming she's not a believable character and that she's selfish and lets Edward tell her what to do. (This is actually why I re-read these books - I didn't remember feeling that Bella was such a whiny push-over.) And I have to say that while the Bella in New Moon is definitely a complete basket case over Edward, it's not without reason - he did leave her, and manage to convince her that he'd never come back. Other than that, I found Bella to be a very strong, believable character. She continually holds her own against vampires and werewolves, and her plan for escaping James in Twilight is way more realistic than any of the vampires'.

Edward, however, does tick me off in New Moon. I mean, for a guy who professes undying love for Bella, what the hell is he doing leaving her all alone and completely undefended? Even if he felt he had to leave, he definitely should have had some sort of contingency plan for keeping an eye on Bella, who is, after all, incapable of going anywhere or doing anything without falling down and hurting herself. Oh yeah - and some vampires have already tried to kill her.

I keep thinking back to my reading of the last two books in the series as well (I read the fourth book when it came out in August, so that's pretty fresh in my mind). Two comments: first, what the hell is with the name Reneesme?!? Second, Jacob imprinting on Reneesme still freaks me out. Not even just that he'd been all about Bella until R. showed up (by being born), but just the fact that she's an infant. I mean, come on. I know it's not even necessarily supposed to be a romantic thing on the werewolf's part, but it's still icky.

But, all criticisms aside, I loved these books. Stephenie Meyer is an amazing storyteller, and Bella and Edward are great characters. I could wish that they weren't quite so inward-oriented, since that leads to bad things; and also, the pace of Twilight is almost laughable. They dance around one another for months, barely speaking and brooding almost continuously, and then suddenly they declare that they're beyond boyfriend/girlfriend and Bella is part of the Cullen family. And then, practically the next minute, they're racing to save Bella from the tracker James. But then, it's fiction - which many reviewers don't seem to have a strong grasp on.

The Sisters Grimm

I just finished the fifth and sixth books in the series The Sisters Grimm, called Magic and Other Misdemeanors and Tales from the Hood. Each of the books in this series (there are six already published, with at least two more to come) is a fast read. There's lots of action, mystery, suspense, and fairy tale characters who turn out to be real. The Sisters Grimm are two young girls (Sabrina and Daphne) who are descendants of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, who wrote the fairy tales.

Some of the characterizations within the series can be a bit one-dimensional, but at least some of this is due to point of view issues (the main character is Sabrina, and she's got some serious issues with trust and her inability to allow certain other people to have an opinion or make a contribution). I really enjoy this series, and I especially love when fairy tales are "twisted" and you get to see an alternate version of what might have happened in the story.

These are fun reads, and I definitely recommend them. I have enjoyed reading these books as a bit of a break from some of the more serious fare that I read.