October 17, 2009 at 4:09 am (Fantasy, Ms. Ryan's Reviews)
*Check out the author’s response to this post! (Comment below.) How exciting that Michelle Zink is already working on the third book in the series. I can’t wait for the second one to come out!
In honor of Halloween, I thought I should feature a dark novel, and this one, a sort of fantasy-thriller, is absolutely perfect for a chilly October afternoon. It opens in a cemetery, on the day of Lia’s father’s funeral. She and her twin sister Alice, along with their little brother, are now orphans. Lia is grief-stricken, and her mourning is intensified by the appearance of a strange, circular mark on her wrist. It’s the sign of the jorgamund, a snake eating its own tail. Instictively, Lia knows to say nothing about it — not to her friends, not to her aunt, not even to Alice, her twin sister. Especially not to Alice.
Thanks in part to a mysterious book discovered among her father’s possessions, Lia begins to suspect that the jorgamund is part of an ancient prophecy, one that’s been turning sister against sister for thousands of years. Now, Lia and Alice have inherited the curse. One twin is destined to be the Guardian, the other, the Gate; one to protect the world from evil, the other, to invite evil in. It seems crazy at first, but when Lia meets another girl with a similar mark on her wrist, she can no longer deny the forces at work within and around her. But what exactly is her role in the prophecy? Is she the good twin or the evil twin? And what can she do to keep the demons at bay?
This novel has all the ingredients of a good gothic suspense story and then some: countryside estates, seances, messages from the dead, hellish creatures threatening the world’s ruin, and even the threat of sibling murder. I’m warning you, it’s dark. Just look at the cover! (But isn’t the cover awesome, though?)
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October 7, 2009 at 1:05 pm (Ms. Ryan's Reviews, Mystery, Realistic Fiction)
I know what you’re thinking. Hoot? Are you serious? That book is lik
e seven years old! Ms. Ryan is just getting around to reading it? And my answer, sadly, is yes; after receiving dozens of recommendations, I finally listened to Hoot this weekend, on CD, in my car. Last spring, I read Scat, which was brand new at the time. That’s right, I didn’t let the dust settle on that one.
Both novels, as some of you know, are funny, are set in Florida, and feature middle-school kids going up against big, bad corporations in the name of endangered animals. Here’s a fact. I liked Scat so much that I drove down to Southern Florida this summer and visited the Everglades. It was just as wild and weird and beautiful as Hiaasen promised. Wow. (Photos of the trip available for interested readers.)
In Scat, the animal in danger is the Florida Panther; in Hoot, it’s the Burrowing Owl. Some other characters you will encounter on the pages of these uproarious books: a barefoot running boy, a fake-fart champion, a scary Science teacher with a collection of real stuffed animals, a boy who snacks on pencils, a pancake house spokeswoman, several renegade eco-activitsts, and a few regular kids to whom you might actually relate.
Seriously, don’t wait seven years. Give these a try
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September 18, 2009 at 11:42 pm (Ms. Ryan's Reviews, Mystery)
Mystery fans, rejoice! Gilda and Enola, two of the most brilliant young sleuths in literature, are at it again. Happily for us, Jennifer Allison and Nancy Springer have been hard at work, penning new installments of the Gilda Joyce and Enola Homles series, respectively. For those of you who aren’t yet familiar with these charaters, Gilda is a contemporary high-school girl who just happens to be interested in solving paranormal mysteries. Using her psychic abilities (ahem) and her typewriter, she bravely runs into ghostly situations, while most other people are running away. As for Enloa, she’s Sherlock Holmes’s intrepid little sister who refuses to behave as a proper Victorian English girl should; instead, she wanders the streets of London alone, usually in disguise, and always on the run from her older brothers, who are determined to make a lady out of her. As if! Enola loves ciphers and codes, but her penchant for solving puzzles often leads her into dangerous — and even murderous — territory. (The second book in the series, The Case of the Bizarre Bouquets, is downright scary.) So, it’s going to be a good weekend for me. I plan to read both books by Monday. Anyone else up for the pleasure? If so, here are the latest titles:
Gilda Joyce: The Dead Drop, by Jennifer Allison
Enola Holmes and the Cryptic Crinoline, by Nancy Springer
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September 1, 2009 at 1:30 pm (Ms. Ryan's Reviews, Realistic Fiction, Science Fiction)
There is so much going on in this book that it’s hard to summarize cleverly and succinctly. So, for this one, I’m going to try a list of facts to see if I can convey the flavor of this intriguing novel:
1. Miranda, a sixth-grader, knows the streets of her Manhattan neighborhood like the back of her hand, including which corners to avoid, when to cross the street, and where the crazy homeless man stands every afternoon.
2. One day Sal, her best friend, gets punched in the stomach for no reason by some random kid they don’t even know.
3. Now, for some reason, Sal won’t talk to Miranda anymore, so she has to walk home from school alone.
4. Soon after this, Miranda’s apartment is broken into. The spare key is missing from its secret spot. Yet nothing seems to be missing. Strange…
5. Then, Miranda finds a mysterious note from somebody who says he wants to save her friend’s life. What? Even weirder, the notes keep coming, and they seem to be predicting events before they even happen.
6. Could somebody be trying to reach her from the future? And is Sal ever going to speak to her again? After all, it wasn’t Miranda’s fault he got punched!
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September 1, 2009 at 1:23 pm (Ms. Ryan's Reviews, Mystery, Realistic Fiction)
Okay, to really get into this book, you’d better like puzzles, mysteries, and math (well, at least a little bit of math). Sophie, Rebecca, and Margaret are seventh-graders at an all-girls Catholic school in New York City. They’re into dances, music, and books. They’re just discovering that boys aren’t always gross and weird (just most of the time). They think this is going to be just another ordinary school year with breakfast at Perkatory and after-school homework sessions at Sophie’s apartment. But then, a lot of stuff happens. For one thing, there’s this new girl Leigh Ann, who looks like a Seventeen model. That’s pretty annoying, especially since the boy Sophie likes seems to get all silly and red whenever Leigh Ann is around. But the main action of the novel surrounds a ring — a really old, really valuable ring that is supposedly hidden somewhere in the church across from school. Soon, the girls are decoding secret messages, digging through moldy books in the library storeroom, breaking into to secret passageways, and hiding under tables from priests! This is definitely NOT your typical middle school mystery. If you read and liked The Puzzling World of Winston Breen, you might like The Red Blazer Girls, which also provides puzzles for readers to solve along the way. If only a fun, exciting mystery would drop into my lap in the middle of a boring Tuesday afternoon.
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April 13, 2009 at 10:10 am (Ms. Ryan's Reviews, Realistic Fiction)
For the first thirty or forty pages, this novel had me totally baffled. There are a few different story lines, and it’s not at all obvious how they connect. Right away, there’s a terrible tragedy, a recurring dream with a boy in a tree, and a girl being dragged from bed in the middle of the night to some sort of underground school election. But this book has received so much critical attention and so many outstanding reviews that I stuck with it. I knew it didn’t receive the Printz Award for nothing (I always love the Printz Award winners and nominees). Besides, all of these loose pieces intrigued me. So did the main character, Taylor Markham, whose personal history is so full of heartbreak and pain that she’s blocked most of it out. All she can be sure of is her name and address. She lives on the Jellicoe Road, at an Australian boarding school where she’s a senior in high school. Where she’s responsible for the younger boarders in her dormitory. Where she participates in the territory wars, the competition for land and resources among the boarding school students, the local kids, and the military cadets. Where she loses her best friend, finds a mysterious manuscript, and falls in love.
This is a strange and beautiful novel, which had me totally transfixed. These kids are so removed from regular society (they don’t even have cell phone service on the Jellicoe Road) that a unique culture arises among them. They have their own codes of conduct, their own laws, their own systems of justice. These kids might as well be on a desert island, so separated are they from the pulse of civilization. It took some work to get into this novel, but it was well worth the effort. Reading it, I felt transported to another world and I totally escaped from this one. From me, that’s the highest praise possible for any book. Melina Marchetta is an author to watch.
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March 4, 2009 at 1:37 pm (Ms. Ryan's Reviews, Science Fiction)
Jenna Fox just woke up from a long sleep — from an eighteen-month coma. The house in which she finds herself is unfamiliar. The adults who say they’re her parents are strangers. So is the girl in the mirror. Jenna Fox. A girl with amnesia. A girl who can remember all the details of the French Revolution, but not whether or not she has a best friend. As time passes, details begin to return to Jenna’s bewildered mind. But they don’t make any sense. Where, for example, is the scar on her chin that used to be there? And why is she two inches shorter than she was before the accident? Who — or what — is she? Jenna Fox. A girl struggling to uncover the truth in a world where some people adore her — but many despise her.
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February 22, 2009 at 7:59 pm (Ghost Stories, Ms. Ryan's Reviews)
To all you eighth-graders who come into the library looking for “a book like Twilight,” look no further! I read this book over February vacation, and was completely and entirely transfixed. Basically, it’s a ghost story with big doses of suspense and romance. Although Helen has been dead for over 130 years, her spirit hovers on Earth, where the people she haunts can neither see nor hear her. It’s a lonely but comfortable existence until, one day, somebody sees her. It’s a boy (of course), his name is James, and he begs Helen to leave her current human companion and haunt him instead. I don’t want to give too much away here — I read this book knowing absolutely nothing about it, and the experience was delicious. And how is it like Twilight? you might ask. Well, it’s a great combination of the real and the supernatural, the contemporary and the ancient, and the poetic and the mundane. It’s positively eerie and will make you wonder if there are any “light spirits” lurking around in your house.
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January 27, 2009 at 11:02 am (Uncategorized)
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January 22, 2009 at 2:49 pm (Ms. Ryan's Reviews, Realistic Fiction)
It’s winter. It’s dreary. Frannie’s life is pretty ordinary. She walks to school with her brother Sean, avoids Trevor, the classroom bully, and stares out the window whenever things get too dull in Math class. Then Jesus Boy comes. He’s the new kid, practically the only white kid in school. Everyone says he looks like Jesus, and Frannie’s friend Samantha thinks he might even be Jesus. But why would Jesus show up at their school? And why does Jesus Boy - with his translucent skin and pale hair – keep saying he isn’t white? And why does he use sign language to speak to Frannie? Does he somehow know her brother is deaf? Suddenly, Frannie’s life seems more full of questions than answers. Nothings seems solid anymore. Is this what growing up means? Over the course of one quiet winter, Frannie confronts the uncertainty, fear, and – most importantly – hope that accompany the end of childhood and the mysterious journey into the future.
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