The Third Eye by Mahtab Narsimhan

The Third Eye (The Tara Trilogy #1)
Mahtab Narsimhan 
Dundurn, 2007
paperback edition

Tara’s mother and grandfather disappear in the middle of the night, and soon, her father remarries, leaving Tara and her little brother, Suraj, pitted against an evil stepmother. In true fantasy fashion, the stepmother pampers her own child and neglects Tara and Suraj. It’s almost unbearable for the children, especially since their father is a mere shell of his past self, unable to spin the tales he used to tell. When a strange newcomer, Zarku, tries to usurp Tara’s missing grandfather’s place as the village healer, Tara hatches a plan to scour the dangerous forest for her missing relatives. However, the night is dark and full of vetalas…and before things are done, Tara forges an alliance with Lord Yama, the god of death.

The Third Eye won the 2009 Silver Birch Award from the Ontario Library Association for books aimed at young readers. It’s not hard to see why: Third Eye is an engrossing, fast-paced fantasy adventure that incorporates Indian culture and Hindu stories. I loved that Tara’s quest is not only to save her family (and her relationship with her younger brother is, frankly, cute), but to save the men of her village, who are Zarku’s biggest targets. How often does a little girl end up in that position? I also enjoyed how stories and storytelling were embedded within the plot, such as the inclusion of Tara’s father’s stories, which gave me a pleasant sense that the story was operating on multiple levels.

The writing is uneven at times, and I sometimes wished for more attention to introducing details at just the right time. I also wished for a little more subtlety in the struggle between good and evil. Still, when this story is good, it’s especially good. I devoured most of the book on a plane ride, and I’ll be going back for the rest of the series—this book ends on a breathtaking cliffhanger.

This review first ran in the June 2014 Sirens newsletter.

Summer of the Mariposas by Guadalupe Garcia McCall

Summer of the Mariposas by Guadalupe Garcia McCall (Lee and Low - Tu Books) read like a dozen things you've read recently and not at all like them. The story, to me, straddles that invisible, shifty line between MG and YA, since while oldest sister Odilia is well into YA, her four little sisters are younger, and there isn't anything that, to my mind, would keep it from being appropriate for a broader age group.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Summer of the Mariposas is billed as the Odyssey set in Mexico, and it's that with a side of La Llorona, the legendary woman who has drowned her children and now weeps in her ghostly way. But it's also, a lot, about negotiating borders--cultural and political borders, the border between the magical and the real, the border between love and loathing, the border between childhood and adulthood.

Odilia's father has left them. Her mother struggles to hang on to her job at a restaurant while tending to the needs of her five girls. When the girls find a body in the river, they set off on an epic road trip to Mexico to bring the dead man home--and to figure out what home means to them.

The magical elements come in and out of the story; one moment, the girls are stopping for a soda, the next, they're navigating the book's equivalent of the lotus eaters. Some of the fantasy is familiar to readers of traditional genre offerings, some is very real-world, and some in the middle, more along the lines of magical realism (worthy of its own genre, of course, and also a lovely and unexpected thing that can cross into fantasy, sometimes).

This book is nominated in the YA SF/F category for the 2012 Cybils. I had a review copy from NetGalley before the Cybils opened, and I bought a copy separately. The other disclaimer: the author will be a guest of honor for next year's Sirens; I am on the board of the parent organization and I've been a volunteer since the event's inception. 

Drive-by Reviews

Two quickies that I've read and that have been languishing in my drafts:

Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord (Small Beer Press; has also been published by Quercus; the top image is the Quercus edition, I believe) is a book that's won or been listed for a nice handful of awards. It's fantasy based on a Senegalese tale by a Caribbean writer--at least, the beginning of it is--and to me, had a lot of the flavor of the SF end of fantasy in the middle, bookended with oral storytelling and a fairy tale feel on both sides.

Paama's husband is so much trouble that she left him behind and returned to her parents. He's traveled to meet her, and his arrival heralds a string of problems: he fills empty places and paranoia in his soul with food, and his first act as a village guest is eating the prize peacock. While a familiar spider man shows up in the story, Paama has a few tricks up her sleeve as well, and this marks her as someone to receive the chaos stick...

While there are madcap bits to this story, Paama wrestles with some pretty big questions, including what she'd do if she could change the future--and what might happen if she did.

Coming in under 200 pages, this is a great plane-length read.

 I have the second version of The Conch Bearer by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (from various publishers over the years, but I'll credit Simon &Schuster - Aladdin), but it stayed on my shelf for a long time. I think that's because this was published in the middle of the Potter years. Drop me in a bookstore sometime between 2002 and 2012, and I can probably tell you the date based on the independent reader/middle grade/YA selections. For a while, the big trend was boys having magical quests; while you could argue that this never really goes out of style, there was sure a deluge in at least a few retailers for a while.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is probably best known for her adult fiction, including Palace of Illusions and Mistress of Spices. In my head, this book is MG, though it may have been marketed as YA. Anand, a young boy who works in a tea shop, is given an opportunity to be charitable, and this is the start of a grand cross-country adventure during which he must battle demons, learn from his wise old mentor, and put up with an annoying girl to protect a magical conch that must be returned to its owners.

That doesn't necessarily sound so different, I know, but the choice made at the end of the book (it's got a sequel, which I haven't read) was something I found very surprising, and not something I think gets considered in most books marketed for children.

Little Details

Sometimes, it's little details that make me feel like the author really wants me, the reader, to get it--and make me feel like I've gotten ahold of a great little secret.

In Selling Hope by Kristin O'Donnell Tubb (Macmillan - Feiwel & Friends), the detail that got me was the setting of a party on the roof of the Palmer House hotel. Hope and her father are traveling vaudeville performers, but Hope really just wants to stop in her home town of Chicago and stay there, so she starts selling anti-comet pills to unsuspecting folks who fear Halley's Comet. I had a very old ARC of this, passed on by a friend, and it's interesting to see the iterations the cover went through--my copy looks very old-fashioned, and this might be an easier sell, if a less evocative one. Pair this with A Drowned Maiden's Hair by Laura Amy Schlitz, which I was sure I'd reviewed here, but I guess not!

The other recent stop-and-pay-attention moment came in Girl, Stolen by April Henry (Macmillan - Henry Holt BFYR). I haven't finished the book; it's a new rotation into a spot in my house where I sometimes need something to do for just a minute, so I only read a few pages at a time (there are a lot of spots like this in my house, car, purse...). Anyway, Cheyenne has been kidnapped by Griffin, who just stole his very first car, and when the radio reports on Cheyenne's disappearance, there's an ad for Burgerville. Burgerville is a real thing in southwestern Washington and northwestern Oregon, and while I know most readers won't realize that, won't know how that chain is part of the landscape, I was really tickled.

The Girl with the Silver Eyes by Willo Davis Roberts

The Girl with the Silver Eyes (Simon & Schuster - Alladin, which I just read, but the version I owned as a kid was the Scholastic version, pictured right and I see that there was an Atheneum edition as well) was a book that I owned, and somewhere, in a dusty box in an attic far away, still do.

Katie can make things move. With her mind. It scares the people around her, and she doesn't have many friends. Her parents are divorced and she's been living with her grandmother--and some people suspect that she might have pushed her down the stairs to her death. So, when she goes to live with her mother in the city, and a strange man starts asking questions, Katie decides to track down the kids born to women her mother worked with at a laboratory. Maybe they're all...different.

I loved this book as...probably a kindergartener, but I reread it lots of times. I wished and wished for some special power to go along with being different, and it never appeared. Before there were Hogwarts letters, we still wanted them, I guess. My adult reread came with a sense of bemusement; I see why I liked this then, but now, I find the story kind of unsatisfying. Just when the special kids find each other, and just when they think they're in the worst trouble ever, they decide to go ask their parents what's going on. Not a bad strategy in real life, but not so adventurous in book form!

In my head, this book goes with No Flying in the House, Baby Island, Pippi Longstocking, and Cherry Ames--all books that might appeal at about the same time. And it makes me wish fervently that the library of my youth might reappear, just for an hour, so I could look through it and get the titles of all the books that I remember only a snippet of, and not enough to find them via a search. I can still tell you which shelves I'd want to tear apart--just not the authors I want to (re)read.

The Shadow Spinner by Susan Fletcher

I read The Shadow Spinner  by Susan Fletcher (Simon and Schuster - Aladdin) as part of my reading for Sirens; specifically, looking at retellings this year.  

The Shadow Spinner works backward from how you might expect: rather than retelling any of the more fantastic and magical tales from One Thousand and One Nights, this is about some unmagical people supporting the efforts of Scheherazade's frame story. This isn't about djinn or ghouls, but about a lot of other things, and perhaps most significantly, about the power of story. Stories, and their retellings, is a major theme woven through this book on many levels.

Marjan's mother abandoned her many years ago, around the same time that the sultan started murdering his wives. There's a complicated backstory about how this happened, including some abuse, fear, and pain. She goes to the sultan's harem with an "aunt" to sell jewelry, and while there, she tells some of the harem children a story. Scheherazade asks her to join the harem, because she's desperate--almost out of stories to tell, and she needs Marjan's story to spin out at least a few more nights of life for all of them. The problem is, Marjan doesn't know the whole thing, and they're going to have to smuggle her back out of the harem to put the pieces together. The sultan's mother is suspicious, Marjan's got a smashed foot that pains her, and they're all in danger--but only Marjan has the skills needed to keep Scheherazade safe.

I liked this a lot more than I thought I would. It's middle grade, and simple, but thoughtful.

Ratha's Creature by Clare Bell

I've been meaning to review Ratha's Creature by Clare Bell (currently reissued by Imaginator Press) for nearly a year. Sheila Ruth sent me a copy, and I planned to read it last summer--and I did, partly, but you know how books sometimes get interrupted, over and over? That was this book.

Ratha is a prehistoric big cat, and one who can talk. Only the Named clan of cats can do this, and they're the ones smart enough to keep their own herds of prey. Ratha starts out in the series a young, headstrong cat, and she is fascinated with fire. After a forest fire destroys her clan lands, she gets into an altercation with her clan's leader and ends up in exile. The world isn't anything like what she's been told, though, because she finds another cat--one of the Un-Named, those who only think as animals--who can talk. Who can talk to her. And her life will never be the same.

Ratha's Creature is the first in a series. I think it has enough interest to hold both middle grade and young adult readers; I'd pick it for a bridge book for that in-between time, when kids are settling in to reading all fantasy or all nonfiction or whatever, because the societies of the cat clans and the idea of a cat that can talk brings something for both groups.

I had a review copy provided by Imaginator Press for this post. Thanks, Sheila!

Ambivalency

Sounds like a book title, right? ;) I've been feeling ambivalent about adding to the Google machine, and VERY ambivalent about all of the redesign(s), so a combination of things to do and an icky feeling means blogging has been low on my priority list of late. Oh, I'm not tired of it--I really want to talk about the books I'm reading, and the books I've read and haven't blogged about that stare at me, dusty and baleful. I want to keep posting pretty pictures of Australia and explain that I maybe didn't turn out to be as much of a fool as it looked like I might end up. I want to tell you nifty things about Sirens and how programming proposals are due in under two weeks. I want to write about--but I won't--challenges and decisions and worries, closure and hope and fear.


Instead, to quote Jessica Simpson, a twofer.

   Spoiled by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan (Little, Brown - Poppy) has, I think, a great cover. I liked it so much that you get to see it even though Blogger no longer does a great job with images. No head-chopped-off girls (something that actually doesn't bother me so much, to be honest), no flowy gowns, no pale waifs waiting for their boyfriend to show up.

It was the cover that made me want to give it a try, actually. I tend to avoid reviews for books I haven't read, but I couldn't avoid seeing reviews for Spoiled. They seemed to come in two flavors: negative, from readers of the authors' site GoFugYourself, and positive, from non-readers. I fall into the latter category, with the positive reading, and I'm sort of glad, because I know how it can go. You really, really love someone's work in one realm, but when trying something else, you're disappointed--maybe because the feel is different, or it wasn't what you were looking for, or it doesn't work. I sometimes call this the "duck two ways" problem, taken from every cooking contest show ever. The chef can't decide on a preparation, or wants to show off skillz by providing two takes on a dish; all I can think is that most of the time, one of the two ways is going to be not as good as the other, and all the judges will remember is that part of your dish is disappointing. Also, I'm tired of "dish two ways" on cooking shows.

Anyway. Molly Dix is the love child of her mother, a former Hollywood makeup artist, and one of those sexiest-man-alive-type movie action heroes. Her mom has just died, and her dad--who married someone else, and has another daughter, Brooke, the same age--wants Molly to come live in California. Brooke has been waiting for her turn in the limelight and in the spotlight of their shared dad, a guy who looks like Adonis and thinks like a Ben Stiller character, so she's happy to ensure that Molly doesn't fit into competitive, glamorous, stylish Beverly Hills...not that Molly was going to fit in in the first place.

It's been a while since I read Spoiled, but here's what I really liked: 1) It was funny, in small-humor and big-humor ways, 2) it captured a particular aspect of part of California life that I recognized--and when I lived there, hated--and gave it a good poke in the eye, 3) it focused on the sibling relationship between Molly and Brooke, and secondarily, on the larger family relationship, even though there were average teenage concerns like cars and boys. For me, it has the heart missing in a lot of the over-the-top glitz-and-glamour titles for YA.

I mentioned recently that I'd been a little out of sorts about Fortune's Folly by Deva Fagan (Henry Holt). This is a duck two ways problem: for some reason, I'd thought this book was set in, like, Sri Lanka or something, so that rubbed up against my realization that this was a (very loose) take on "The Elves and the Shoemaker" with an Italianate setting. Fortunata and her father are down on their luck--her father just can't make nice shoes now that Fortunata's mother is dead and not there to trick him into thinking that magic helped him work--and they end up, after being scammed and robbed by the leader, part of a band of traveling performers, with a focus on fortune-telling.

Fortunata is the adult in the relationship with her father, and the troupe leader has them both under his thumb. To survive, she learns the "art" of telling fortunes, and soon, she's the money-maker, squirreling away a coin or two to make an escape. Before she's able to do this, she's roped into providing a prophecy for a prince, and into accompanying him on his quest, because if the prophecy doesn't come true, her father will die.

This is where the book really took off for me. The relationship between Fortunata and the price is sweet and slow-growing, and they both take an equal hand in defeating foes and solving puzzles. Fortunata has real, tricky choices to make regarding how and when she lies (never really liking it, but forced by circumstance and an inability to back down from her story), whom to trust, and how to get the things she wants for herself and others. Most of all, though, I liked the subtle interweaving of the idea that belief, faith, and magic are what you make them to be--that you make magic all on your own, and that you can make life wonderful for others.

I've added an MG tag to this post because I think Fortune's Folly is toward the younger end of the young adult category, and a crossover book for middle grade readers.