Ms. Rapscott's Girls by Elise Primavera

I don't read as much for early readers as I should, but I couldn't help being intrigued by the cover of Ms. Rapscott's Girls by Elise Primavera (Penguin - Dial). I found it under a pile of mess the other day--what good book doesn't live in a pile of mess, at least some of the time--and decided to flip through it. Illustrated more than many chapter books with pencil pictures, it sucked me in with its mysterious illustrations, and then with its charming text. Basically, imagine that Mary Poppins and Lemony Snicket had an optimistic child that decided to write stories when she grew up.

Ms. Rapscott has a school for Girls of Busy Parents, and sends out five pre-paid boxes; parents need merely insert their children and send them away. Four of the boxes arrive with disgruntled, neglected girls; one has arrived sans girl, because her parents were too busy to close it properly.

The rest of the girls find themselves at school having an adventure, and some of it is finding the missing girl, and some of it is finding themselves. There is a perfect age for this book, and that's just when you're a good enough reader to understand wordplay and have enough of an understanding of fiction vs. reality to not be frightened of the idea of your parents sending you away (possibly the same age as you'd need to be for Nancy and Plum).

Some older readers have marked this out as too twee for love. I can see that, but it just skirted the border there for me, and I couldn't help giggling now and again. Maybe, too, I know enough girls with neglectful parents, and maybe I liked the idea of bossy, impervious, fearless Ms. Rapscott, and maybe I liked a flock of irrepressible, unlovable, isolated girls finding their true independence, and maybe I liked the found family aspect. Maybe. Okay, a lot.

I had a couple of momentary dislikes; I thought that a couple mentions of fat people weren't nuanced, and I definitely wished for more diversity among the set of little girls (surely there are busy, distracted families with histories that can be traced to all corners of the world?). Still, because of the particular reader that I am, I was delighted on the whole, because it's so rare to find girls in a pack in books--in so many ways, we are only allowed to exist as different, only, chosen, friendless. And I think the world could use a little more sticking together.

The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf and Station Eleven

Well, what do you know; while I've been busy elsewhere, Blogger has reinvented that who-you-follow part of its back end, which was one of the reasons I started posting about books here. Once the RSS feed-thingy went away, I didn't have so much of a sense that I was contributing to a community, or any easy way to read what other people were blogging about.

I spent nearly all of this week in bed, and while I was too busy sneezing and trying to clear my head enough to breathe most of the time, I did a little reading. And, because I need to keep myself awake for a few more hours in the middle of an ambitious sleep-shifting back to "normal" hours while not overtaxing my blurry brain, I'll tell you about some of it, though I confess I didn't absorb as much as I normally would have.

One of the books I read: The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf by Ambelin Kwaymullina (Candlewick). This is one of those nifty books that sits somewhere in the space between traditional science fiction and traditional contemporary fantasy by making both a part of the story. Ashala leads the Tribe, children who have developed abilities that society doesn't like in the years following an Earth-wide environmental apocalypse. If she's captured, can she save them--and if she can't, will anyone else? Kwaymullina infuses the story with elements drawn from her Palkyu (Aboriginal Australian) heritage, a bit of which I recognized as I read, and much, I'm sure, I didn't. It's an interesting, twisty, non-linear sort of story.

The other: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (Knopf) is about a plague, so of course I read it while ill. (Other books in my sordid illness reading history include The Stand and a handful of books by Robin Cook.) Basically, the world ends in a very literary sort of way, and there is only after, so I felt odd reading the story on an e-reader... I wanted to know what would happen to everyone, and like The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf, Station Eleven isn't told in a linear fashion. Shakespeare surrounds the story, which kicks off with a death, and the rest of the book unravels how it touched the lives of those still living. This sounds kind of boring, but there are escapes, kidnappings, cults, and the like, too. It's about I can't help thinking that there's a little something Cloud Atlas in Station Eleven, though the difference is I actually liked all of the not-quite-so-sectioned-off pieces of Station Eleven and read it in two sittings, one some time ago, and then as soon as I had a free day due to illness, the rest. I recommend, if nothing else, its spot-on descriptions of the Pacific Northwest (as opposed to the sketches of certain other speculative fiction books that do not get it at all).