Once Upon a Bookshelf

Oh, Regency period, how I love you! How you always make me feel happy and giddy and all things wonderful! La Petite Four is Regina Scott’s first YA novel, and what successful foray into YA books it is!

Lady Emily Southwell (daughter of the Duke of Emerson) and her three closest friends are about to begin their first Season. Unfortunately, Lord Robert has gotten it into his head that he is going to marry Lady Emily and whisk her off to the country, where she would not be able to take advantage of her first Season, and where there is no way she would be accepted to the Royal Society for the Beaux Arts. Not to mention the fact that he expects her to miss her friend Priscilla’s coming out ball, which is going to be the event of the Season.

Emily and her friends are convinced that there’s something amiss with Lord Robert, and are determined to expose him before the wedding. Meaning, they chase him all over town and conveniently stumble into the acquaintance of the charming James Cropper, who happens to also be investigating Lord Robert. Can the girls and James Cropper figure out what’s going on with Lord Robert before Emily has to get married?

Oh, James Cropper, you are my perfect fictional crush. I would spend the rest of the entry gushing about you, but really… words don’t do it justice. I shall just have to repeat that you are my perfect fictional crush. Really.

As I said to a few people while in the middle of this book, it was like taking some Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer and mixing in a little bit of Libba Bray (minus the magic). It’s got that woman falling in love with a man below her station that I loved greatly in Bray’s Gemma Doyle trilogy… What can I say, I’m a sucker for stories like that. And the characters are not flakes, but are strong women who don’t let men tell them what they must do with their lives. Or at least tell them that they have to marry men that are up to no good.

You could see Austen’s characters in some of the characters in this book. Especially in Emily’s friend Priscilla, who expressed a few times that love does not always matter in a marriage, and what matters for some is that they marry well. Reminded me a little bit of Charlotte Lucas in P&P.

I will admit that the book was somewhat predictable. You could tell Lord Robert was the Wickham of this book from the moment he is first mentioned. It came across as being obvious what crime he had committed, even if the girls didn’t quite pick up the clues. And you knew who Emily was going to end up with all along. But oh, it was so enjoyable.

I can’t tell if this is the first in a series. It ends on a note where it COULD standalone quite well… but it doesn’t end in the traditional girl-gets-the-guy way. I don’t know if I would necessarily WANT more books to this. It works so well on its own, and I enjoyed it so much. I’d be afraid that the rest would ruin the experience of this one for me.

That said, I’m definitely going to be looking for Scott’s non-YA regency romances soon. If they’re anything like La Petite Four, I will definitely thoroughly enjoy them.

I bought this book at the beginning of this month and have been spending some time every few days reading a story or two from it. Edited by Stuart McLean, this is a selection of short stories (or excerpts of novels) by Canadian authors about children and childhood – including stories by Robertson Davies, Timothy Findley, Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood and L.M. Montgomery. The main characters range in age from when they are quite young to when they are in their teens. The collection gives a variety of times and places to look at from the late 19th century the mid-20th-century, all across the country. While this book does span a large time range, it don’t contain any stories that take place in the current day and time. In a country where there is such diversity in different provinces, and where there has been so much change over time, it was interesting to read selections from all these different places and different times.

The first thing I did when I got home with this book was read Roch Carrier’s The Hockey Sweater, a (more recent) classic of Canadian literature. Written in 1979, this story was then made into a cartoon short by the National Film Board of Canada that most Canadian schools show to students. This is one of the few story books that I remember from when I was a kid. While never a hockey fan (Shock! Can a Canadian NOT be a hockey fan?! Is the world going to end?!), I truly loved this story, but it had been years since I last had the chance to read it. Rereading it has reminded me of what a wonderful story it is, and why this is a Canadian classic. It epitomizes the love that most young boys have for our national sport. Add to that the fact that Carrier’s narration is so humourous, and yet completely conveys the emotions and frustrations of a young boy stuck in a Maple Leafs sweater when what he really wanted was a Montreal Canadiens sweater, and you get a story that can be enjoyed and appreciated at all ages, whether you are a hockey fan or not.

Another highlight from this collection was Timothy Findley’s War. I’m not a Findley fan. I read one of his books years ago, and I really did not enjoy it. (I’m wondering if I tried reading his books now, whether my opinion would be different.) Because I didn’t enjoy his stuff previously, I was pleasantly surprised with this short story. It’s about a young boy when he first learns that his dad has joined the army (during WWII). The boy’s emotions were so tangible: the betrayal that his father didn’t tell him (but told his brother), that his father won’t be around this winter to teach him how to skate, the fear that war is where people get hurt and die because of… Let’s just say that it had me in tears for a good portion of the story.

Overall this was definitely a good selection of Canadian literature about childhood and growing up. There were some authors that I was surprised weren’t included, there were some stories I didn’t enjoy, but for the most part it seems like this book shows a good variety of what childhood in Canada has and does mean. Definitely a book that should be added to any collection of Canadian literature.

After an end-of-term party, five college housemates wake up not only with hangovers, but also superpowers. None of them are sure where these superpowers came from, and none of them really care. All that matters now is that one of them can fly, one can turn herself invisible, one is super strong, one is telepathic and one is really, really fast. And as any group of friends might do if they all discovered they had superpowers, these five friends decide to become superheroes – with costumes, code names and all. Only, things don’t go as smoothly as they’d like. First, they have to keep their identities secret, but people keep noticing that something is up. Secondly, what happens when a superhero can’t always save everyone, or is the one to hurt other people?

There was potential for this book. Sadly, it wasn’t as good as I had been hoping. There were so many things about it that bothered me.

For one thing, there were way too many characters to keep straight. Five main characters, and about five times that in secondary characters that only show up once every ten chapters (and good luck remembering exactly who they all are). Because there are so many characters, there wasn’t any time to really develop the main ones. In fact, they all were very two-dimensional with no personality – a few of them even felt rather Mary Sue or Gary Stu-ish, imo.

The narration was confusing and jarring. The first chapter of the book is written by one of the minor characters, Marcus Hatch, who is a conspiracy theorist and runs his own newspaper. He says that he’s telling the story of these five college kids because no one else believes that it was real, or knows that it actually happened. He’s telling it to prove that he’s not crazy. But then it gets into the story, and we see it from the perspectives of the five main characters. My questions is, how would he know what they were thinking when they were the main characters? How would he know when a character falls asleep in class, or when they stopped being invisible after forgetting how to turn visible again? Yes, the telepath was supposed to have told Hatch everything that was going on, but there were periods when he (the telepath) was completely overwhelmed by his power he couldn’t even figure out what he was thinking, let alone what his friends were thinking. I wouldn’t have been this picky about it, though, if Hatch just did the first and last chapters. But when every few chapters there was something by Hatch, it kept reminding me that it was supposed to be written by some guy outside of the story, and it was jarring. If he was going to interrupt every once in a while and spew how this is a true story and real journalism, etc. then it would’ve flowed a lot better had Schwartz written it less like a novel and more like an expose or something along those lines. It could’ve been really cool like that. Instead, it just felt disjointed.

Not that it was all bad. It got in depth about some issues that were really interesting to explore – like the effect that superpowers would have on your mental and physical health. It dealt with morality and laws – if you were to have superpowers and could use them to help people, but it would be against the law to do so, what would be the right thing to do? So, yes, it was interesting at points.

What it comes down to, however, is that I wouldn’t recommend reading this book unless all you had experienced of superheroes was on tv or in the movies. If you’ve read comic books or graphic novels, stick with them.