Holiday gift giving is upon us!

Don’t know about you, but I tend to ignore most of the marketing in my inbox, most of the time.

So here’s a blog post for intrepid souls who have ventured this far into my lair.

This week is marketing week, to get the word out before the supply chain for printing books is overwhelmed. Here’s your reminder (for anyone new to my site or my newsletter) that I have 3 kid-appropriate books available that would make great gifts.

The Crow Magic series follows the adventures of a young girl who discovers that not only does she have magical powers she must learn to control, she inherited the ability to shape shift as well. During her second adventure, she is joined by a young girl who has abilities Suli has never heard of, but which are key to restoring the magic to their world.

The third book, The Wharf Rat Guild,is appropriate for slightly older teens and adults, with a fifteen-year-old protagonist who also has unusual abilities. It’s based on the true history of the Restoration period in England, a time when “surplus labor” and radical ideas of liberty, freedom, and democracy were the cargo exported to the new world.

“Oh, just one more thing…”

Lately my life has been a Columbo episode. Just one d### thing after the other.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back the water, just when you thought that pesky morphing alien was dead, just when you were sure that the vampire had a stake through its heart, just when you thought Gojira had sunk to the bottom of the ocean…something gruesome lifts its slimy head and…the to-do list gets longer. Again.

I am talking about getting a book out the door, and the pesky tasks that happen in its wake. I think I’ve swept all the broken glass from the floor, but be careful where you step.

I need to say a big sparkly heroic THANK YOU to all the folks who’ve helped me on the way. Here’s the list:

For services above and beyond the call of duty, my beta reader extraordinaire, Bryan-Kirk Reinhardt. Not only did he read more than one draft, he cheerfully said he’d do it again.
Laura Blackwell, the copy-editor on The Third Kind of Magic, who didn’t work on this last book but whose suggestions I absolutely took to heart for the second. (All extra commas and British spellings are my own.)
Julie Dillon, the cover illustrator, who brought older Suli and her gang of friends to life and accepted my passion for purple without a murmur.
Mary Auxier, the copy-editor who turned around the copy edit on The Cursed Amulet well before the promised date, and pointed out where logic was missing or stuff just didn’t work. Painful, but much appreciated.
Robin J. Samuels, who did the final proofread and made my revisions so much better.
David Blatner, who doesn’t know me from Adam, but whose lynda.com tutorial on book covers in InDesign has saved my life a couple of times. Thank you for making life-saving videos free, David!
I have to thank my Russian publisher, EKSMO, because if they hadn’t insisted I provide them with a sequel,”and when can we have it?”, I probably wouldn’t have prioritized the half-finished ms.
The crows in the local park who have advised me on questions of Crow protocol and laws.
And last but never least, all the fans and reviewers of the first book who posted reviews and emailed me to tell me they liked the first book and why. Words can’t express how much it meant to me to receive that encouragement.

Thank you all. Deep bow.

The proof is in the pudding

I am in the middle of trying to pull together all the editions needed to publish the next Suli book, The Cursed Amulet.

The ARC version is ready to go, but naturally that means PGE will shut off my power for a couple of days (again), so if I want to actually send out newsletters and emails, I have to figure out some other place to be.

This is a better option than death by wildfire, but so far it seems wildfires start just as easily in the areas where the power is off as it does anywhere else. The last outage here (two weeks ago) we had a grass fire on the hills not that far from where I live (see photo above), but because the power was out, no one got a phone notification from the FD or PD or from Calfire.

Including me and I signed up my landline for precisely this reason — so if the cell towers were down I thought I’d still get a phone call. Nuh uh.

Luckily someone in that neighborhood noticed, and folks started knocking on doors in the dark, and blowing car horns.

But there’s not much point in my grumbling when most of the state is in the same fix, and people are losing their homes in Sonoma and SoCal. It’s eerie here because so many folks have left. The smoke is getting pretty oppressive, too, and that may be what forces me to leave if the power isn’t back on within 24 hours. No power = no HVAC filters (and no hot water for coffee. Must acquire camping equipment.)

The final final version of the book attends the proofreader’s leisure, but if you’d like a fairly well edited advanced reader copy in exchange for a review, let me know.

I’ll be excited about it again when I’ve survived natural disasters and software I use so rarely I’ve forgotten how.

Dragons with attitude

More Middle-grade adventures

I’ve been spending time reading through the best-selling Wings of Fire series by Tui T. Sutherland. Very entertaining, and great examples of story-telling craft.

Narrative voice and well-defined characters are why these books are so successful. Sutherland clearly lays out “here’s this character’s temperament, attitude, goals” and you know by the end of the story the crises will directly challenge all of those things.

I have enjoyed all of the books so far but I didn’t *like* all the main characters. Some I like a lot more than others, and I suspect the author did too. That, to me, is actually the most interesting aspect of the series, because it tells me what I as a reader wanted from the story. And what makes a successful hero.

I should explain that each book is told from a different character’s point of view. So you may really love one character, but boom, in the next book you have to identify with a new one.

I want courage and heroism and character growth if I am going to identify with the point of view character. If they’re cowardly, betray their friends, refuse to help others in need, then I don’t want to identify with them. And yet some of these characters do just that. I was shaking my head, wondering why we had to go there. Sure, it leaves a lot of room for character development, but it also leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Who gets to be a hero?

And yet my favorite character in the series so far is a mass murderer. There’s a lot of violence in the series, and I am ambivalent about it. But it doesn’t seem to have the same impact as it would if these were human characters. Dragons are naturally violent; or so the dragons invested in the ongoing war claim. Our heroes don’t agree with this familiar human argument.

Peril burns everything she touches; she can’t help it, it was the way she was born. An evil queen uses her as a weapon of punishment. Peril obeys her because she doesn’t know any better, until someone points out she doesn’t have to do this, that she could choose something else. How do you stop being a weapon of mass destruction? Now that’s a moral journey.

This happens in the first book of the series. When we get to Peril’s own book, we see her attempts to change who she is, as she tries to figure out how to be a good, likable dragon, even though most dragons shun her, hating her for what’s she’s done in the past.

Peril says what other people think but would never say out loud. She’s rude, blunt, and funny. She’s also smart. We don’t mind identifying with her — she’s trying, she helps others, she would do anything for the dragon she’s besotted with, and in the end she proves she really has changed, because of the choices she makes.

Peril’s character is transgressive – she doesn’t bother to be socially appropriate and polite, because that’s not going to work for her anyway. She will never be ‘acceptable.’ And we can vicariously enjoy being rude and dangerous and courageous at the same time.

She’s a great hero. I just wish she’d come back in another book.

Middle-grade point of view

It’s my second summer of reading middle-grade books and I’ve been having a great time.

A couple of marvelous books stand out.

The first is The Truth as Told by Mason Buttle. I am usually not a big fan of realistic novels for this age group because they tend to be reductionist (“here’s the bully, here’s the inattentive parent, here’s our hero battling odds, here’s the specific trendy problem that appeals to NY publishers…”) and at first glance this seems like it fits all those categories.

But someone told me this was a great book, so I tried the first few pages and was hooked.

So how is this different? Mason’s narrative voice.

Leslie Connor pulled off something extremely hard to do: she gave us a first-person POV with an unreliable narrator who is extremely appealing. Mason doesn’t understand everything that he records as part of his story–but we do. Mason is fun to hang out with, and we end up liking him a lot, just as most of the people around him do. Yes, there are quite a few adults who should be paying more attention, but the reasons they don’t see what’s happening are believable, and mean no one except the actual bad guy looks anything other than human.

Mason has some pretty serious problems: extreme dyslexia, abnormal sweating, he’s too big for his age, and his parents are dead. Kids call him stupid, and it seems he doesn’t read other people’s emotions as well as we can, just from his descriptions. He lives with his grandmother and his uncle. Their lives were turned upside down by the death of Mason’s parents and by the death of Mason’s best friend — in mysterious circumstances. It is this mystery that’s the spine of the plot.

I won’t give too much away because it’s such a fun book to read you should discover it for yourself. My only quibble is that the villain was so completely villainous, and I wasn’t comfortable with the implication that his bad behavior was caused by an absent father. But we don’t really know much about the villain’s motivations, and it doesn’t really matter, because Mason is the star.

It was great to spend time with him, with Ms. Blinny (I loved Ms. Blinny) and the people in Mason’s world.

It’s the end of the world, and I feel fine

Summer is just about over, but we still have some middle-grade adventures to complete!

I wasn’t initially enthusiastic about the concept for City of Ember, because I have read a lot of survival after the end of the world stories. But the author was profiled in the local newspaper and I was intrigued by the story of how she came to write it, and it’s not a dystopia.

I was charmed when I began reading it. The book reminded me of Robinson Crusoe, with that exacting level of detail of how people live, what they eat (potatoes and turnips), and what they wear. For them it’s entirely normal to live with no sky, and with lights that go out at a certain time of night. The emotional heart of the story are the explorations of two young people finding their way in the world, when everything is an adventure, not gloom and doom. Although there’s plenty of gloom when the lights go out. And of course the satisfying middle grade trope of adults in power being a threat, even to themselves.

I wanted to find out how the kids would get out of their predicament, and what had caused it (being of the duck-and-cover generation, I naturally assumed nuclear war) and by the end of the book I still don’t know why the underground city was built, or why they had to stay there for several hundred years. Apparently I must read the next book, The People of Sparks.

Our brains are wired to look for experiences that will help us survive; maybe that’s why we never tire of imagining what we’d do when the apocalypse finally comes. I recommend the book, especially for younger readers, because there’s nothing too scary in it, yet the suspense is satisfying.

Books for kids (and adults) who love animals

My middle-grade adventures continue. This time I’m revisiting two books I’ve read before. The point of the exercise is to learn from the masters, to recognize what’s done well, and these books do so many things well.

In How to Speak Dolphin, Ginny Rorby creates a complex and emotionally honest story about Lily, the older sister of an autistic brother. Never sentimental, this book is deeply moving, presenting Lily’s dilemma of whether to help Nori, a young dolphin being held in captivity for human use, or ignore the animal’s suffering because relating to Nori is one of the few things that make her autistic brother happy.

Lily’s friend Zoe, who just happens to be blind, keeps pushing Lily. She has no doubt that keeping social animals like dolphins in captivity is cruel and never justified. I won’t provide any spoilers but will say the ending wasn’t easy or simple but felt true to the realities of the world we live in.

This was the second book of Ms. Rorby’s that I read. The first one was much more emotionally wrenching thanks to my own experiences with animals kept for medical research, and the kinds of research I was exposed to in my primatology courses.

That book, Hurt Go Happy, won Ms. Rorby the Schneider Family Book Award. Joey Willis is deaf and her mother won’t allow her to learn sign language. That changes when she meets the chimp Sukari, who signs, and Joey secretly begins to learn it too. When Sukari is moved from a relatively loving and safe situation to a prison-like facility where animals are “stored” for medical experimentation, Joey has to decide what to do. The book can be hard to read, but everything is based on fact and the story is immediately relatable for kids and adults alike. The human characters are placed in difficult situations and Rorby’s characters always have enough complexity for us to empathize with them as well as the animals that are trapped or endangered by humans.

Well-researched, powerfully written, and based in fact, I highly recommend both books to readers of all ages.

Diana Wynne Jones’ Last Book

The next book in my middle-grade adventures is a book that was left unfinished at the time of the author’s death. I was absolutely thrilled to find a new book by Diana Wynne Jones on the shelves of my local library.

It’s sad we won’t have any more adventures from Ms. Jones, a wonderful storyteller, but this last book, finished by her sister, Ursula Jones, is a great read, with all the surprises and inventiveness you’d expect. The afterword, describing how the book was finished was marvelous, too. This reader saw no indication that anyone besides the original author had written any part of it, a great tribute to the care and inspiration of Ursula Jones.

The Islands of Chaldea tells the tale of Aileen, a twelve-year-old girl who thinks she hasn’t inherited any magical powers, causing inevitable disappointment to her magical family. Her aunt Beck, the Wise Woman of Skarr, has been raising her and its about time for those powers to manifest. Aileen’s island and her life have been disrupted by a magical barrier that keeps anyone from approaching one of the islands of the title. Unfortunately, her father and her country’s prince in waiting were both taken hostage and hidden behind the barrier. Aileen and her aunt set out on a quest to free the hostages and lower the barrier, traveling from island to island and meeting interesting characters and magical figures along the way. With magic a common occurrence, nothing is ever as it seems, and as usual in one of Diana Wynne Jones’ books, you can’t anticipate what will happen, although you know in the end Aileen will make a difference, and the hostages will be freed.

I thoroughly enjoyed this lovely tale about a girl reclaiming her family and claiming her power by seeing through the intrigue and lies of the adults around her. Highly recommended.

Let the animals speak

In children’s books we aren’t surprised when animals take center stage, or when they speak. We find that unusual, or “odd” in adult literature (the major exception seems to be fantasy where there are a *lot* of talkative dragons, but that’s another post). And even in kidlit, in a realistic story, the animals have agency and a voice only figuratively.

We don’t need animals to talk to tell us their side of the story (although I like it when they do.) We know what dogs are feeling without any verbal explanations, and they seem to know our feelings too.

Next up in my middle-grade adventures is a story about a girl on the autism spectrum who finds companionship with a stray dog. Rain Reign by Ann Martin takes some pretty big risks. The biggest risk is having an autistic child as the viewpoint character. While that helps us feel her concerns and worldview with great intimacy, Rose’s repetitive interests (homonyms!) and constant repetition of the same questions and thoughts risks having the reader react just as Rose’s father or the other teasing kids do – with annoyance or impatience. I love words, but even I was daunted by intro pages that launched into an explanation of the difference between homonyms and homophones as my entree into this world. Maybe my attention span has been eaten by the Internet, but this felt like an uphill climb for the first pages of a book aimed at 8-12 year-olds.

I enjoyed the book, but because I react differently than an autistic individual would, it was all too easy for my reactions to diverge from Rose’s. I was baffled by her constant nagging of her father who clearly had a hair trigger temper and was dangerously close to being violent. It felt so wrong to me that a child wouldn’t read that. Of course that is “showing” that Rose can’t read feelings, but again, I felt distanced from her.

What was absolutely great? Descriptions of her relationship with the dog she’s named Rain, and the physical descriptions of Rain’s affection for her. When Rain is lost during a hurricane (Rose suspects her father let the dog out deliberately so she’d run away) there is a Quest to locate her again, and Rose does find her dog. I won’t spoil the plot by revealing more, but by the end of the book Rose chooses to sacrifice her love for Rain to follow the “rules” and I felt unsatisfied by the ending. Losing both her parents, and the dog she loved, we don’t know whether Rose’s future will be better or worse.

This book reminded me strongly of another book that deals with autism and moral choices about animals, How to Speak Dolphin. Again we have a less than sympathetic father, and an autistic child dependent on a relationship with a captive dolphin to be able to interact with the world. There are major differences, though, including the fact that in Dolphin,we see the world through a sibling’s eyes, and the moral choice is whether to privilege the needs of that autistic child over the rights of a captive dolphin. I think that makes that a good candidate for my next middle-grade adventure!

Is education a waste of time?

I was idly listing out all the supposed “children’s books” that deal with fascism or totalitarianism in one form or another, and as the list grew longer I wondered why this lesson is never learned. Maybe my post-war generation was just especially saturated with it, like war movies.

Then I remembered how little I can recall of the vast swathes of education and reading I’ve been exposed to. In fact, my title is probably the start of a Socratic dialogue in Plato somewhere. As in, is there any point in paying these peripatetic teachers for their supposed knowledge and subsidizing their drinking at banquets? Maybe I do remember something about it.

Here’s a beginning list:

1. Animal Farm, Orwell. “Some animals are more equal than others.”
2. The Harry Potter books. Hello, I loved the Weasley brothers creating a swamp in Hogwarts as part of their Resistance to Umbrage. Resistance theatre.
3. A Wrinkle in Time. L’Engle. I don’t have to spell this out, do I?
4. The Tripod books by John Christopher, a dystopian’s dystopian.
5. Yes, yes, Fahrenheit 451 one of my least favorite of Bradbury’s books. A fine writer reduced to agitprop. Not really a kids’ book, but a godsend for teachers since it has a “message.”
6. I’d add Lord of the Flies if it had a coherent point, but I think it was simply an excellent example of misanthropy, appealing to those who find children nasty, brutish and short.
7. Hunger Games, of course, although that might be a bit reductionist.

I’ll leave you to guess why I’ve been thinking about totalitarianism, but I will say I’ve been having ongoing conversations in my head with my WWII and Korean veteran father (no longer with us) who was a keen reader of Western world vs. Soviets espionage and thriller books, especially those set during WW II. In fact you could argue that one proximate cause for my existence was McCarthyism and the hysterical fear of communists during the 50s which prevented the State Department from hiring anyone while my father was waiting to hear back about his Foreign Service application. Instead of doing sneaky things at embassies, he ended up marrying my mother and embarking on a completely different career. But he never lost his interest in that east/west conflict and the realization that we had enemies that could annihilate our country. I wonder if he would find our current situation more comprehensible than I do, having been schooled in the genre that deals with KGB-generated disinformation campaigns and tactics. Yeah, Dad, you were right, I should’ve paid more attention.

(For those of you who didn’t waste your impressionable youth reading Mad magazine, the above images are from Spy vs. Spy, a regular feature providing an intellectual challenge similar to that of Wiley Coyote and Road Runner.)