Once Upon a Bookshelf

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.

Julia James has made a living writing books for single women - Table for One, Spaghetti and Meatball and 101 Ways to Cheat at Solitaire - which help them to be happy with being single. Everything is going great for Julia’s career - until her credibility gets threatened. The tabloids run a story on Julia and Hollywood’s new “it” man, and now her fanbase is split down the middle, with women who feel they’ve been following a phony, and women who believe that this shows them that there really can be love for them after all. Now, Julia must try to regain her credibility while she is hiding from the paparazzi, as well as having to deal with the “it” man who followed her home and is hiding out with her.

I’ve read one of Carter’s other books (I’d Tell You I Love You but Then I’d Have to Kill You), and I loved that, so decided to give this one a go too. And I’m happy I did, because I really enjoyed it. It’s quite different, but still good. It was cute, it was fluff, it was good way to spend a few hours over the weekend.

I get annoyed with TV, movies and books that tries to give me the impression that I can only be happy if I have a man in my life. While Julia does end up hooking up with the guy, and realizes during the book that if she continues in the way she’s going in life that she’ll end up like an aunt she doesn’t particularly like…. and while she does notice a huge difference in how the world treats her when she’s with a man than when she’s single, Julia comes across as a character who is perfectly contented with being single. While it is commented that Julia has a problem with commitment, it in no way comes across that she needs a man to be happy in life, which is so refreshing compared to a lot of stuff out there today. SO refreshing. It was a really nice change to read chick lit like that.

This the second book in the Merlin Codex (Celtika being the first). The series is loosely based on characters in Greek mythology, and Arthurian legends. In this installment, Merlin is again helping Jason (the Jason from the Jason and the Argonauts stories) find one of his sons, as well as helping to defend Urtha’s kingdom from ghostly (read: the Dead and the Unborn) invaders. (Urtha had been sailing with Merlin and Jason on Argo in the first book, and is one of King Arthur’s ancestors.)

Urtha’s kingdom (what will become what is known as Britain) is alongside the Otherworld, and apparently used to be a part of the Otherworld - a place inhabited by the Dead and Unborn. While Merlin, Urtha and Jason have been away on their adventures, the Dead and Unborn have been trying to reclaim Urtha’s kingdom.

Although Jason is still rather angry at Merlin for actions in the previous book, he still needs his help in the search for one of his sons - the sons Medea had fooled them into believing she had killed. He has been told that his son is “between sea-swept walls,” and has come to the belief that his son is hidden somewhere in Urtha’s land. It turns out that his son isn’t exactly in what-will-be-Britain, but is in the Otherworld, and he has a rather large role to play in the attacks on Urtha’s kingdom.

I found that this book was more difficult to get into than the first book - it’s been almost 6 months since I read the first book, and a fair bit of the story seems to have faded from my mind. So trying to remember what part each character played in the previous book was a little difficult, especially when there were many characters and some only showed up for a couple of pages and then disappeared again for the majority of the book. Other figures from Greek mythology and Arthurian legends also made small appearances in this book - Uther Pendragon as well as Hylas and a few others who were the original Argonauts. I think it was these small appearances by these characters that I really enjoyed about the book, because I had a hard time liking any of the original characters in this installment, save Urtha and Merlin themselves.

A good portion of the book took place in the Otherworld, and what did take place there was the most exciting parts of the book, in my opinion. I think I would have liked to explored itd a little bit more - especially why Merlin wasn’t able to use his magic in the Otherworld. Also, time didn’t flow in the same way that it flows in the real world, which was cool. You could be in the Otherworld for what felt like days or weeks, but what turns out to be a season.

I didn’t like the Iron Grail quite as much as Celtika, and I think I will have to set this universe aside for a little bit before I decide whether to continue on with the series or not.

This is my first book for the Once Upon a Time challenge.