Tesser well

Sigh. This seems to be another time-travel book that no one calls science fiction. It is wearing to have all that barbed wire to climb over, getting in and out of the genre ghetto. Some days you just get so tired of the snags in your socks.

But the ghetto doesn’t apply to kids’ books, right? Subvert them when they’re young, mwa ha ha, although they seem to finally be calling A Wrinkle in Time a science fiction book. Perhaps it was just to justify the dayglo makeup on Oprah in the movie.

Speaking of a Wrinkle in Time, my next middle-grade adventure is a humdinger of an homage to that very novel. In When you Reach Me by Rebecca Stead, Miranda carries her favorite book with her everywhere, and that just happens to be Wrinkle. In fact, she refuses to read anything else. (Whoa there, Missy, there were sequels, too.) Another main character in the book figures out how to tesser in time, and that fact is central to the plot and the novel’s structure. But is that what the book is about? What a good question!

No. At its heart, it’s about friendship, at that age where friendship is everything, at least among girls. How you treat your friends, how you betray your friends, how you do or do not trust other people, whether your pride prevents you from helping a friend— that’s what it’s about. But the time-travel makes it all so much more amazing, in a 12 monkeys kind of way. (If you haven’t seen 12 monkeys, go see it now. I’ll wait.)

I am late to the party in heaping praise on When You Reach Me but it deserves another heap. Anything that can get me to spend a Saturday afternoon re-reading almost the entire book to notice the clues I missed before, and working out whether the ending would have completely changed the future or not, deserves its popularity, even if it didn’t have to spend time locked up in the scifi ghetto with the other deserving books. The deft handling of clues, and the revelation of bits and pieces of the mystery was masterful. I would dearly love to know how the author kept track of when she would reveal what. If you want to learn how to write a mystery, this book is a great model of the controlled release of information.

I love this book for so many reasons, but mostly because the author played fair with the reader and gave us all the information we needed to work out what was happening, before the narrator apparently did. If you paid attention, you even noticed when the main character’s self-centered behavior may have been partially responsible for the almost-tragedy, that was a tragedy nonetheless. See how I am trying not to create a spoiler here? Whew.

Despite this, the reader is rooting for the MC, but the complexity of motives and emotions is what’s so satisfying and plausible. I’m going to make a philosophical pronouncement and say that girls can be pretty mean at that age, especially in the throes of that “you’re not my best friend anymore” warfare.

For the record, I completely choked up at the unexpected dedication in a book Miranda receives as a gift. I admit it, okay?

This was a beautiful book that makes you both think and feel, and it’s quite clear why it won the Newbery Honor Medal.

Now please, Ms. Stead, share your plot chart with us?

For extra credit, a youtube video in which Dr. Tyson explains dimensions and tesseracts in a way which lets me (and everyone else) off the hook for having so much trouble trying to visualize this in high school geometry class. Tesseracts – Neil deGrasse Tyson. Thank you, Dr. Tyson, for helping me let go of geometry trauma.

For extra, extra credit (you nerds know who you are) if you like time travel books, I can recommend the Ijon Tichy books by Samuel Lem. Start with Memoirs of a Space Traveler and once you’ve had a taste you can move on to the rest. Not only is the science right, but the books are quite funny.

Egyptian curses and a very smart girl

First up in my middle-grade adventures is the first book in the Theodosia series by R.L. La Fevers, titled Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos. The settings alternate between Victorian London and Egypt, and the author clearly knows her ancient Egyptian history and magic (with some liberties taken to create scary situations).

I’ve actually read all four books in the series now (can I get a sticker?) and am a little disappointed there aren’t more, although the last book did provide satisfying closure for secrets and questions revealed in the earlier books.

Our feisty heroine, Theodosia, has several secrets she’s trying to keep from her not terribly attentive parents, all the while hoping to gain their attention and approval. Luckily she’s resourceful, brave, and takes matters into her own hands to protect the people around her when they clearly can’t do it for themselves.

Her father runs a Museum in London, its collections in competition with those of the British Museum. Her mother is absent at the start of the first book; as a professional archaeologist, she’s off on a dig in Egypt and is sending back artifacts for the museum. Unfortunately, only Theodosia can tell when an artifact has a curse on it, and she’s devised several ways to test for this, and to counteract such spells.

She can’t explain her abilities to her parents because they simply don’t believe her and worry that she’s “peculiar.”

So when she finds she’s the target of an evil secret society (the Serpents of Chaos) bent on using magic to throw the world into Chaos and start another world war, she must hide her skills, her meetings with allies, and the real reason strange things are happening around her.

It’s left to Theodosia, and her friend Sticky Will to meet the threat of these sinister forces, since the adults have trouble believing what they see, and never quite grasp the dangers that threaten the children.

What I love most about these books is the narrative voice of Theodosia. She’s smart, assertive, and has strong opinions without that snarkiness that seems to be the bane of contemporary kidlit. LaFevers also convinces me that the narrator is British, and her word choice is appropriate for the period, with nary an anachronism. I enjoyed spending time with this smart, unappreciated child who has rollicking adventures while employing ancient magic.

Highly recommended. A girl-centered world of magic with fast pacing and suspense. My candidate for a great adventure movie for girls.

(Image Credit: A wedjat eye of Horus, an amulet of protection from the Metropolitan Museum of NY. The wedjat eye is important throughout all the Theodosia books.)

The summer of middle-grade reading

This summer, in addition to my writing projects, I will be on catching up on all the great middle-grade or early YA books that I haven’t had a chance to read yet.

One of the instigators of this was my visit to Ashland, OR, part of my quest to decide where to live during the next phase of my life.

While I was there, I stumbled across the most fabulous children’s bookstore ever, Treehouse Books! Take a look at the website to see what a magical place it is. Since it was 104 degrees outside the day I was there, it was no great hardship to spend a couple of hours raptly pulling books from the shelves.

With great effort, I kept myself in hand, selecting only what I had to have at that moment (rather than the entire store). Reviews of those books — and others—to come!

I should mention I was bowled over by the public library there, too; there’s an entire floor for YA and they have piles of current releases, unlike my local. The library in Eugene, OR also had me lusting over what was available there – they had a real poetry section. As in University presses, small presses, recent releases, not just stale anthologies of people long dead. It was wonderful to see.

I suspect the population being served by my local system is much larger and the competition more fierce (and then there’s always the question of where the budget comes from.)

In terms of bookstores and libraries, Oregon rocks. 104 degree weather? Not so much. And every time I visit I have to relearn that green and rural Oregon has much more polluted air than the urban area where I live. California’s clean air law makes a huge difference; CA gasoline doesn’t contain such high levels of benzene and other toxic hydrocarbons. Maybe OR legislators should worry less about who pumps the gas and more about what’s in it.

You lose one, you win one?

Amazon took down one of my reviews for reasons known only to them. The more I interact with their services, the more random and irrational their algorithms appear to be. I’d say this was a good argument for postponing the advent of our robot masters as long as possible. Life is random enough just dealing with humans.

But it balances out, because a great reviewer of kids’ books has just posted a review of my book on her blog, Cover2Cover, where you can check it out. Thank you, Stephanie!

Update July 21, 2018: As far as I can tell, the review was taken down because that review was written by someone I had a link to from my FB professional author page (which I don’t use, BTW.) Really, is FB anything other than a way for tech giants to spy on us and collect our data?

My book just received a wonderful review

Okay, normally boasting about a positive review is not good form, right? And this person is someone I know, so you could argue she’s biased. But…. she’s also a well-known, professional reviewer in the SF/F community and she wouldn’t risk her rep by saying she liked something if she didn’t.

Brief quote:

“All in all I thought this was a delightful read and I think kids of both sexes between eleven and fourteen would be immersed in it.”

Read more on her blog, which happens to be a great place to learn about books, stories, tv shows, and more importantly, the place to read her stories. That’s how I first met her — at a writing conference where I got to read a story she wrote that blew me away. She’s indefatigable.

It’s T-minus 11 hours and counting

The Crow book launches in about 11 hours, at least for the Pacific Coast. It will be earlier/later in other time zones, (I think Australia will actually go on sale later today) but this is the one I’ll track, because it’s all moonshine anyway until there’s a sale somewhere, and it’s all I can do to keep track of GMT with silly daylight savings putting us back on a war footing for no good reason.

All I can think about is all the stuff that was supposed to be done by now and isn’t, since I’ve had to scramble to find someone else to do my taxes this year after the first guy unexpectedly bowed out. But we shall perservere.

And that’s incentive to get everything done this weekend, right? The rain will help.
I will be doing a little bit of tweeting and FB posts, and will try to be as un-annoying as possible.
I know how that can boomerang – (“I don’t know you but I dislike you because you keep tweeting about your &^$# book!”)

We’ll see how tasteful I can be while saying “look at my book!”

My middle-grade fantasy is done. Yes, really.

It’s been a long haul, but after a thorough copy-edit by the illustrious speculative fiction writer and hardcore editor, Laura Blackwell, or She Who Requires Commas, as I shall call her henceforth, this baby is ready to spread her wings and fly.

Which is appropriate because the book is about a 12 year-old girl who talks to crows…and learns to fly.

I just had to crow a little myself, that it was finally done.