I’ve been reading Maureen Johnson’s blog for a while, and finally got around to picking up one of her books. I will admit right now that the reason I picked this book up out of all the others is that I listened to her podcast, and she mentioned that The Divine Comedy’s Charmed Life is one of the songs that best sums up the book… and well, I enjoy The Divine Comedy quite a bit, so that was a large selling feature for me.

Months after Ginny’s aunt died, Ginny’s aunt sends her a letter that leads to a journey across Europe. She has 13 letters (after the first one) that guide her first to England, then Scotland, eventually to Greece, and then back to England. In each place, she has a task that she must complete before she can read the next letter and move on to the next place. At first, it seems like there’s some deeper meaning to all of these places and tasks, but as time goes on, Ginny starts to wonder whether there actually is a reason behind everything she’s doing or not.

At each place she stops, she ends up meeting some of the most interesting people. While I was rather impartial to the main character, Ginny, I found everyone that she meets in her journey around Europe to be so vibrant. They had some sort of little story to them that left you wanting more… sadly, for the most part, the secondary characters showed up once and then never again. These characters definitely made the book that much more enjoyable.

Overall, this was a cute book, and I’ll keeping an eye out for the rest of her books.

Althought when I think of Card I automatically think of his scifi books, it’s definitely the fantasy stuff he’s written that I prefer. I’ve read this book previously, and loved it. But that was years ago, so I decided to revisit it for my third book of the Once Upon a Time Challenge.

For the first few years of his life, Ivan grew up in Russia, until his parents decide to move to America. Now, years later, Ivan is back in Russia, studying Russian folk tales. He never expected to actually live through them, but that’s what happens when his kiss awakens Katerina (Sleeping Beauty). He is forced into her world – centuries before his own time – and has to help the people there defeat Baba Yaga, the evil witch who put the spell on Katerina in the first place.

Of course, helping the people in Katerina’s village isn’t as easy as one would hope. Imagine planning on being a scholar for the rest of your life, and then being thrown into a group of people who lived centuries before you, work in the field all day, and where the only people who don’t do manual labour all day are men of the church. It’s a society so different than our own, and all these people consider Ivan to be a weakling, who by our standards today he is quite athletic. Needless to say, they have a lot of prejudices towards Ivan and don’t make his adjustment to this new time easy.

I really liked how the character development went in this book. Especially Katerina’s. She starts off coming across as a little snooty, and thinks Ivan’s completely stupid. Once they go back into his world, however, and she realizes exactly how different things are in the two times, she starts to get more compassionate.

One thing that always bothers me, though, is when people (or characters in this case) put themselves through so much pain because they don’t communicate with each other. (And that is one of the reasons I really dislike Shakespeare’s Othello.)

What I like most about this book is that it draws on more than just a fairy tale – while yes, it is the story of Sleeping Beauty, it also draws on Russian folk tales, so it differentiates itself from other retellings of Sleeping Beauty. (I think I’m almost at the point where I’m tired of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale – it’s like almost everybody author tries their hand at it in some way.) I’ve never really read any Russian folk tales, so I’m wanting to look more into them at some point in time, though am not quite sure when that will happen – we’ll just add it to that never ending list of things I want to read about.

This is my second book for the Once Upon a Time Challenge, and is the first book in the Bartimaeus Trilogy.

In a London where the government is run by magicians, a five year old Nathaniel is apprenticed to Arthur Underwood, an average-at-best magician. Nathaniel soon surpases everyone’s expectations of him – secretly, of course – in order to steal an amulet from Simon Lovelace, a magician he’s trying to get even with. This amulet turns out to be the same one that was stolen from the government not too far in the past; Simon wants it back, and will stop at nothing (including murder) to get it. What started as Nathaniel trying to get revenge on Simon soon turns into Nathaniel, with help from the demon djinni Bartimaeus, trying to save the whole government from Simon’s evil plot.

This book reminded me a lot of C.S. Lewis’s work. From Arthur Underwood being almost identical to Uncle Andrew in The Magician’s Nephew to Bartimaeus seeming very similar to Screwtape… Now, I haven’t read the Screwtape Letters in many years, so they may not actually be similar characters at all, but… Anyway, I’m going to need to reread Screwtape now.

While I enjoyed the book on the whole, I feel that the parts told from Bartimaeus’s point of view were much more entertaining than those told from Nathaniel’s point of view. Bartimeaus has such a wonderful voice – he is snarky, sneaky, and totally wants you to think that he’s only out for his own interests (all of which I seem to find irresistible in characters). As for Nathaniel, I felt he had so much potential to be a character I loved but half way through the book he sort of … went wimpy. I’m all for the underdogs rising above everyone’s expectations of them, but he was rather bland when compared to Bartimaeus.

There were other “demons” and the like in the book, and it was fun to see the antagonism between them all – or at least between them and Bartimaeus.

I’m interested to see where the series goes from here, and I’ll be picking up the other books in the trilogy at some point.