Cassandra prides herself on being ready for anything, but she’s not ready for the Symphony of Smells – a strange chest full of vials that once belonged to a magician, and that appears one day at her grandfathers’ antique shop. With her new friend Max-Ernest, Cass investigates the magician’s disappearance – and finds herself battling an ancient society, the Midnight Sun, that is seeking the key to immortality. Soon Cass and Max-Ernest join the benevolent Terces Society along with their new friend Yo-Yoji, but the plots of the Midnight Sun grow ever more diabolical, and the mysteries surrounding our heroes grow ever more complex.

There’s a lot to like about these books. They are a blatant Lemony Snicket ripoff, true, but unlike many copycats, Bosch apes the style well. They’re engaging, the mythology is fresh and interesting, and the main characters are all likable. For the most part, I really enjoy reading these books, and did they not possess a couple of troubling elements, they’d probably run a strong four cupcakes. But those elements are so problematic that they overshadow the basically decent core of the books:

1. There are supporting characters in the series, most prominent in the second book, If You’re Reading This, It’s Too Late, called the Skelton Sisters. They’re a pair of twins, Romi and Montana, who are actress-singers with a huge media empire. They are most directly a parody of the Olsen twins (which is weird enough on its own, because the target audience for this books is not old enough to remember the Olsen twins at their tweeny peak), but more generally a parody of tween girl culture and marketing, with a nod towards Hannah Montana.

Just on the face of it, that’s problematic because Bosch is mocking things targeted at tween girls, and all the tween girls who like those things, and that’s half of his audience, so I’m fairly uncomfortable with the Skelton Sisters to begin with. But the bigger problem is the issue of food. The Skeltons are members of the semi-immortal Midnight Sun and thus don’t need to eat – and don’t eat, thus making themselves so skinny that they are described as grotesques. However, they’re obsessed with food and at one point force a 12-year-old girl to eat a cupcake so that they can watch (after first trying to build up her resistance by telling her she’s a fat pig).

So, first of all, issues of eating disorders and food consumption are extremely complicated, especially for women. In a culture where girls are told they must be thin at all costs, the problem is with the culture and not the girls. So maybe, just maybe, we shouldn’t be mocking people struggling with eating disorders? Eating disorders aren’t fun or funny. People don’t have them for kicks. They are serious medical issues. And since there are plenty of fat jokes in these books too, maybe these conflicting, poisonous messages shouldn’t be fed to the 10-year-olds who are going to be reading these books? “You must be thin without trying to be thin, or you’re a bad person,” is a pretty shitty moral for a kids’ book.

But more specifically, the Skelton Sisters are a very, very obvious parody of the Olsen twins. And Mary Kate Olsen’s eating disorder is public knowledge. So Bosch isn’t just making fun of eating disorders generally, he’s publicly making fun of one particular real life human being with an eating disorder.

And I don’t care if the kids today don’t know about Mary Kate’s medical issues or if Bosch didn’t really think through what he was saying. It’s reprehensible.

2. This Book Is Not Good for You features a little girl named Simone who is stolen from her family on the Ivory Coast and brought to America, where she’s kept in a cage and forced to taste chocolate. The climax of the book takes place at a cacao plantation, where the villains force presumably stolen African or African-American children to dig through monkey feces in order to find cacao beans that have been digested by the monkeys. At one point, the Skelton Sisters grab one of the little boys and try to take him home, because they’re very good with pets. Later, Cass discovers a sculpture of that same little boy.

Now, I’m aware that all of these atrocities are committed by the villains. The book does not condone any of these actions.

It does, however, make light of them.

Simone’s abduction is impossible to separate from its historical context, where African children were taken from their families and forced to labor for Americans. And the plantation is impossible to separate from its current context, where such things actually happen. Bosch even mentions the concept of “blood chocolate” (chocolate made with slave labor), but in a flippant way that completely dismisses and trivializes the issue.

Look, some things just aren’t funny. And joking about the very real, current issue of slave labor normalizes it. It turns an atrocity (abducted children being forced to dig through feces) into a punchline (they throw it at the bad guys! ha ha, poop is funny!). The scene where Cass happens upon the chocolate sculpture, an image that perfectly literalizes the commodification and consumption of third world children, made me sick to my stomach in a way that I doubt was Bosch’s intent.

Again, I’m aware that Bosch isn’t endorsing slave labor, the blood chocolate trade, or stealing children. But the total disregard for the seriousness of the issue and the insensitivity of making characters like Simone minor plot points to add (no pun intended) color to the narrative of his white heroes is appalling.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this review, The Secret Series is, for the most part, enjoyable. The characters are likable, the prose is funny, and the story is strong. But the problematic treatment of eating disorders and child slavery bring the grade way down. The Name of This Book Is Secret gets four cupcakes, while If You’re Reading This, It’s Too Late and This Book Is Not Good for You get two cupcakes each, bringing the series average down to two and a half cupcakes. I’ll probably finish reading the series, but I’ll be doing it through the library and not spending money on the rest of the books.

Immortal Nastasya has been a party girl for over four centuries, numbing her feelings in an effort to forget the tragedies she’s seen – and caused – in an endless lifetime. But when she realizes the shallow callousness of her friends, she turns her back on them and seeks refuge at River’s Edge, a haven for immortals seeking to turn over a new leaf. There she struggles with her own fears and dark memories – not to mention her attraction to the handsomest, jerkiest immortal she’s ever met – and comes to terms with her birthright, her power, and herself.

I couldn’t discuss the biggest problem with the book without spoiling part of the end, so be warned: uncovered spoilers lie behind the cut.

I tried really, really hard to write a fair blurb for this book, because any attempt to summarize it makes it sound a lot stupider than it is. I actually put off reading it for months because the blurb on the back is so dreadful – and yet it’s completely accurate! There is almost no way to describe this book without making it sound like some kind of awful Twilight/Gossip Girl bastard child. And it’s actually pretty good!

To be fair, there is some stupid going on that can’t be avoided. The heroine’s name really is Nastasya – “Nasty” to her friends. (At least, that’s the name she’s currently going by; immortals tend to switch it up.) Her best friend’s name is Innocencio (“Incy” for short). Really. The love interest, described snarkily by Nastasya (and completely earnestly in the blurb, which was part of what made it look so awful) as a “Viking god,” is named Reyn. It’s all kind of overwrought and silly.

Worse, the book takes an awful lot of narrative shortcuts. It begins with Incy using magic to break a cabdriver’s spine, just because the cabbie was a jerk. Nastasya is horrified and runs off to, essentially, immortal rehab. The thing is, Nastasya comes off kind of…incredibly naïve and stupid for someone who’s been around 449 years, and been friends with this guy for a large portion of that. It’s not like she just met him. Yet suddenly this one action is, as the first line of the book tells us, causing her “whole world” to come “tumbling down.” She gradually comes to realize how awful her friends have always been, but we never find out why this one event changed everything for her.

Then, once she reaches River’s Edge, the plot pretty much…stops. She just goes through the rehab program. Everything else is learned via flashback, and super-accurate dreams and visions, both of the “flashback” and “see what other characters on the other side of the world are doing” varieties. Lazy, lazy plot structure. Give us a character, show us why we should care about her, show her fall from grace, and then you can show her painstakingly putting herself back together. The truth is that a redemption arc is really hard to do with the protagonist; that’s why we get them with characters like Darth Vader and Angel from the Buffyverse, who we already care about because of how they interact with the protagonist.

In keeping with the lazy plot structure is lazy character building. Nastasya herself is fine, but River’s Edge is inhabited by a parade of racial and cultural stereotypes. The Japanese man is tidy and quiet. The Italian man is flamboyant and expressive. The black woman is a “cheetah” and “incredibly vibrant, a hot-house flower.” The gay man is always “trim and dapper.” Yes, I’m glad to see minorities and a gay character in a YA novel. But I wish they got to do more than fill up the ranks (the major characters are all originally Western European, and Nastasya and Reyn in particularly are Scandinavian and thus super Aryan), and I wish the one or two character notes they each got didn’t derive so blatantly from accepted stereotypes.

All this, however, pales in the face of the biggest element of fail in the book: the rape apologia. See, it turns out that Reyn was part of a raiding party that killed Nastasya’s family, four hundred and fifty years ago. Their two families basically slaughtered each other; though neither Reyn nor Nastasya killed anyone, they were both left with identical scars. Some years later, Reyn – who had become a legendarily evil raider, the Butcher of Winter – came through the village where Nastasya was living, slaughtered most of it, almost killed her infant child (who died a few months later of disease), and almost raped her before being called away by his men. He has killed hundreds of people, and is accused of committing many rapes, which he does not deny.

Now, of course, he’s at River’s Edge trying to turn his life around, and has spent the past couple hundred years trying to not be evil. When she realizes who he is and what he’s done, Nastasya says she will never forgive him – but there’s an enormous physical attraction between them that leads to a couple of enthusiastic make out sessions, and by the end of the book she seems pretty willing to let bygones be bygones. And River, the book’s font of wisdom, tells her “how much worse it is for the people who actually committed such atrocities…As bad as it is to be a victim, and believe me, I know how bad it can be – the inescapable truth is that it’s even worse to be the perpetrator. To have to live with that…”

No.

No, no, no.

Do not ask me to feel sorry for rapists. Do not make apologies for them. Do not tell me how hard it is to be a rapist, and feel super-guilty about all your rapey ways. This sort of “he did bad stuff but now he feels really bad about it” thing worked for, say, Angel in Buffy (forgive my using the comparison again, but it’s relevant) because a) that wasn’t really him, and b) VAMPIRES AREN’T REAL. Rapists are real, and this plea to see things from the poor misunderstood rapists’ point of view instead of the victims’ is a pervasive and disgusting element of rape culture, and unacceptable in any form of media, let alone a book aimed at teenage girls.

By all means I should have disregarded Immortal Beloved as stupid, carelessly crafted, and offensive. But as I mentioned above, it’s actually…pretty good. The writing is incredibly compelling – I didn’t want to put it down. Nastasya is a quirky narrator, but in an enjoyable way, not a trying-too-hard way – she comes across as genuinely witty. Since the comparisons to Twilight were inevitable in my head, I loved that she was allowed to be the most interesting person in the book (unlike sad sack blank slate Bella Swan); she’s led a rich life full of interesting historical fiction from all over the world, and we get to see a lot of it. I also loved that she got to own her sexuality; she feels desire and is not chided for it by herself, the other characters, or the narrative. There is some very good stuff happening in this book.

In the end, Immortal Beloved is fairly difficult to grade, because I really enjoyed it and yet I had so many problems with it. I’d rate it a respectable four cupcakes, but the rape apologia really knocks it down to two cupcakes – and yet I’ll be picking up the next book in the trilogy. Hopefully it will be just as gripping and a lot less infuriating.

Finbar Frame is pale, skinny, broody, and allergic to the sun – but it’s not until a vampire-novel-obsessed girl on the train mistakes him for a vampire that he decides to become one. Or at least pretend to become one. After all, girls dig vampires, right? But when his masquerade gets underway, sorting out who he really likes, who really likes him, and why – not to mention figuring out who he really is – gets a little more complicated.

Okay, this book isn’t technically fantasy, but I’m reviewing it here because it plays on the most popular trend in YA fantasy right now. (And because I haven’t read anything else remotely applicable recently and I need a blog post. Shh.)

When my friend gave me this ARC, I was more than a little leery. Now, I don’t particularly care for vampires in general, am waiting impatiently for the current vampire trend to be over, and despise Twilight with all of my soul. But at the same time, these are female fantasies written for teenage girls by women (for the most part), and when I looked at Bloodthirsty, I saw a man trying to make money off of teenage girls by making fun of that fantasy. “Hey, girls! That thing you like is dumb! Give me money.”

And yes, that is part of what’s going on in this book, but that aspect wound up not bothering me as much as I thought it would. Partially this is because it turns out Flynn Meaney is a woman – whoops, initial preconceptions! But mostly this is because the vampire parody is…rather defanged, if you’ll pardon the expression. While she tears into romance novels (which pissed me off, because guess what? I read those too, and there are excellent ones out there) she mostly just references Twilight, True Blood, and the like, rather than mocking them. So it’s mercenary, but it’s not necessarily any more mercenary than a straightforward book about vampires would be – it’s just cashing in on a trend.

I was bothered more as I read by the Nice Guy issue. Finbar repeatedly describes himself as nice and sensitive and blames the fact that he doesn’t get girls on these characteristics. Well, fine, except he doesn’t actually behave in a nice fashion. When he says “nice,” what he really means is “tries to hard and comes off creepy,” like when he has a disastrous first meeting with a girl he knows on the internet. She asks him to meet at a coffee shop. He gives her the address of an expensive French restaurant instead and brings a present, turning a casual meet-up into a formal date and blindsiding her. I don’t blame her for no longer wanting to have anything to do with him, but all he can think about is how much money he spent and how horrible she is for not appreciating it. Um, no, dude, you’re creepy.

He also spends a lot of time comparing himself to his twin brother Luke, who is handsome and athletic and popular, and blaming the fact that he’s not as popular on his skinniness and intelligence – but Luke is generous, cheerful, and selfless, while Finbar spends an awful lot of time taking potshots at his brother’s learning disability in his head. Yes. That’s very nice.

Shockingly, Finbar eventually actually kind of realizes he’s not always nice and thoughtful. He’s spent the book in pursuit of the beautiful, cool Kate, while palling around with the geeky Jenny, who obviously has an enormous crush on him. Finbar doesn’t twig to this until the end of the book, though, at which point he realizes how obvious it was – and that if he was really the thoughtful, caring person he always believed himself to be, he would have noticed. It’s actually kind of an amazing revelation, given how incredibly common Finbar’s character type is and how rarely they realize that they’re actually self-involved, whiny jerks. So kudos to Meaney for that.

So the “cashing in on a female fantasy” issue wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected, and the Nice Guy issue was actually dealt with a little. And yet the book infuriated me. Why?

Well, remember that beautiful, cool Kate? She tells Finbar she transferred to their school because she wanted better AP classes. show

On top of the appalling, misogynistic slut-shaming, there are also a handful of casual transphobic jokes for no reason, and a couple of lines make light of sexual harassment and domestic abuse. Because these things are all hilarious, you see. It all fits in with the prose of the book, which is 20% legitimately funny, 80% trying too hard. Example: at a fantasy convention, a guy is described as wearing a mask with devil horns “the color of foreskin.” I don’t know what that means, but I do know Meaney is trying way too hard to be shocking there.

There were nuggets of good in there – Finbar’s semi-realization of his own jerkiness, and a handful of good jokes. But that doesn’t overcome an obnoxious narrator and the infuriating resolution of the romance, and that’s why Bloodthirsty gets two cupcakes.

By Frank Beddor [LibraryThing]

The day Princess Alyss Heart turns seven, exiled Queen Redd attacks and takes over Wonderland. Forced to flee for her life, Alyss falls through the Pool of Tears and lands in England in the 1850s. Abandoned and alone, she loses her magic. Meanwhile, Redd rules Wonderland with an iron fist, and only a small band of rebels resists her. Their only hope is that somehow, Alyss can be brought home to take back the country that is rightfully hers.

This is a frustrating book. It’s got plenty of good ideas in it, but it reads like Beddor just had a bunch of awesome Wonderland-related ideas and threw them all into the book, without actually picking anything to focus on. The book starts and stops repeatedly: first it’s about Alyss’ escape and what’s going to happen to a war-torn Wonderland. Alyss shows up in England, and the book seems sort of like a riff off of Oliver, but with a girl — who has magic! I would love to read that book. But Looking Glass Wars is not that book either, because then there’s a really lengthy segment about how Alyss (now Alice) grows up and is adopted and forces herself to forget Wonderland and marries a prince (no, really, a real prince), and then it starts again when she gets back to Wonderland and has to remember how to use magic to save everyone. That is too many stories. Any one of them (except the dull middle section) would have made for a fine novel, but all together, it meant the novel was scattered.

The worldbuilding was also shaky. Part of it is that Wonderland isn’t really designed to be a physical, mappable place; it’s more like a dream than a country. Elements like Redd’s evil casinos and the urban decay imagination-drug addicts don’t fit into the fantasy world, and way more time was spent explaining things like how the looking glass worked than was necessary. My very smart older sister just read it and pointed out that the book can’t even decide if the strange things in Wonderland are real or not; on the one hand, the White Rabbit has been reimagined as an albino human with enormous ears, whose name anagrams to “white rabbit,” and the Mad Hatter is actually a bodyguard named Hatter Madigan; but on the other hand, you have an actual walrus wandering around the palace.

Also, because it’s Wonderland… Look. It’s long-established around these parts that Jess is the blogger who likes whimsy where I tend to shy away from it, but this book needed some whimsy. It didn’t feel at all like the Wonderland that Carroll created. I know it was meant to be a darker, grittier story, but it retained none of the fun of the actual Alice novels.

But my biggest frustration was the end: it was too easy. Spoiler! show

All that said, the book as a whole improved as it went on; despite finding it very, very frustrating, I enjoyed actually reading it well enough. There were even elements I liked — particularly Homburg Molly, a pre-teen rebel who will eventually, presumably, take over the Hatter’s duties. Unfortunately, she wasn’t introduced until almost the end, but she’s the main reason I’m planning to read the sequel. So, even though I am planning to read the next book, this only pulls off two cupcakes.

Pandora and her friends have collected Jealousy and Vanity, but now they must travel to the Atlas Mountains to collect Laziness. To make matters worse, Pandora is quickly separated from her friends, all of the heroes are quickly enslaved, and Hera has kidnapped Pandy’s beloved dog. Alone for real now, Pandora must use her wits to free herself and find Laziness, but that’s no easy task when the sky is, quite literally falling.

The Pandora series is shaping up to be like the Sisters Grimm books, in that I start out charmed by the concept, with only minor quibbles, and find those quibbles growing with every book until I’m just deeply irritated by the whole thing. (Please, Sisters Grimm fans, hold your angry comments.)

There’s not much to say about the details of this one. I did like that Pandora found herself taking care of two little boys on her adventure; she stepped very naturally and likeably into the role of protector, and the boys were cute without being cloying.

But that’s about all I liked. The prose is seriously weak. I don’t know if it’s gotten worse or if my tolerance for it has gotten lower, but there’s way too much telling-not-showing, point-of-view switching, characters knowing things they couldn’t possibly know because Hennesy can’t keep track of whose point of view she’s writing, poor transitions, and awkward descriptions. The cutesy way the characters talk is incredibly grating: peppering teenage girls’ conversation with “Duh!” just makes it sound like you’re talking down to the audience, Alcie’s “cursing” by yelling out fruit names is annoying, I don’t know why Homer’s a Valley Boy, and smart people do not sound like they’re reciting a thesaurus from memory. I am looking at you, Iole. No one says “You’re being obdurate and obfuscatory,” no matter how smart they are.

Furthermore, there seems to be no point in separating Pandora from her friends, ostensibly making her mission harder, if you’re going to have Dionysius, Apollo, Hephaestus, Hermes, and, oh yeah, her immortal Titan father show up and help her (not to mention the indirect assistance of Athena, Ares, and Zeus). That is cheating. I want to read a book about a girl accomplishing great things, not a girl letting the gods help her to accomplish great things.

There is potential in these books. I will say again that the idea of reclaiming the Originally Sinning woman as a protagonist is a great idea and I’m glad someone is writing it. But the execution is sadly lacking. Two cupcakes, and I’m done with this series.

Title: Nightmare Academy #1: Monster Hunters
Author: Dean Lorey
Genre: Contemporary fantasy
Pages: 310

Summary: Charlie has nightmares… And bad things happen. After a horrible thing comes out of his dreams and tries to kill his family, he’s recruited by the Nightmare Division, to be trained at their Academy, and learn how to control his powers. Because people like Charlie bring monsters into this world — but they can also stop them.

Thoughts: Bleh. This book tries too hard to be wacky and hip, and the two characters who were supposed to be funny were pretty much detestably sexist. (Hint: calling your female coworker “sweetheart” after she’s asked you not to is not funny and charming, it’s demeaning.) The book had a good premise, and once the action picked up the execution was fine, but it did nothing for me (except make me irritated).

Two cupcakes.

(And now a note: because I’ve only got an hour and a half left, and the last book in my TBR pile definitely won’t fit into that time, I’m totally going to cheat and pick up an old favorite to skim… *g*)

Title: California Diaries: Dawn, Diary 1
Author: Ann M. Martin
Genre: Teen drama llama.
Pages: 180
Summary: As Dawn moves from the middle school to the high school, she finds her world changing as her circle of friends shift to include some and exclude others.
Thoughts: The CA Diaries series was a Baby-sitters Club spinoff that featured Dawn and her California friends in a somewhat more adult setting, with eating disorders and drinking and words like “breast” and “gynecologist.” Shocking! I’ve been reading through all the BSC books, including spinoffs, here, but I’d never read a CA Diaries book before. It didn’t charm me. Dawn is pretty much horrible (and seems to have lost all of her interests and convictions from the BSC proper), all the girls treat each other like crap, and the scene where a 17-year-old ogles a 13-year-old’s bra-less breast through her wet t-shirt is way gross. The brightest spot was Dawn’s brother Jeff being a hilariously sullen little brat. I love that kid.

Two cupcakes.

ETA: I am heading to bed now, because I have to be up for MoCCA Fest tomorrow, but when I return tomorrow afternoon, the reading and blogging shall recommence!

Jess and I decided that our co-written review for HP7 was so much fun, we wanted to do it again! And since this series was, at least in part, the inspiration to start this site, it seemed like a great series to co-review. So here we go!

Since their parents disappeared a year and a half ago, Sabrina and Daphne Grimm have been shuffled from foster home to foster home. That is, until their grandmother, a woman they thought was dead, comes out of the woodwork to claim them. Granny Relda tells them that they are descended from the famous Brothers Grimm – and what’s more, that all of the characters their ancestors wrote about are real, and living in the girls’ new home of Ferryport Landing. Soon Sabrina and Daphne are running from giants, eating dinner with the Big Bad Wolf, and matching wits with Puck, the Pied Piper, and Prince Charming. Granny Relda is eager to train the girls to follow in her footsteps as fairy tale detectives, but for Sabrina and Daphne there’s one mystery that’s the most important of all: can they rescue their parents from the fairy tale conspirators who kidnapped them – without falling into the bad guys’ clutches themselves?

Jessica: Okay. The thing you have to understand is that we love these books. When I found the fourth book on the shelves of a bookstore before the official release date, I totally jumped up and down excitedly before buying a copy for each of us. We are waiting with bated breath for the fifth book, which comes out in December. We are big Sisters Grimm fans.

All that said…the books aren’t that good.

The concept is fairly brilliant – two little girls solving fairy-tale-related mysteries! awesome! – but the execution falls down in some major ways. Most of these ways have to do with Sabrina, the focus of the series’ limited third person perspective.

Rebecca: Sabrina in and of herself isn’t a bad character; she’s only eleven, and she’s got a responsibility complex from the loss of her parents and having to take care of seven-year-old Daphne. She’s also quick to temper and would rather punch than talk, but again, that’s understandable given her situation. The problem is that the arch of every book is Sabrina Learns A Lesson. In all four, she’s given an abruptly applied attribute (Sabrina needs to learn to trust! Fair enough. Sabrina learns not to be racist! Well, good, except see Jess’s note on that. Sabrina learns that addiction is bad! Gosh, no kidding.) And it gets exceedingly annoying. And then, as all this is going on, there are some obvious lessons she should be learning, but completely misses. Like listening to Daphne–Daphne gets the Everafters (fairy tale characters) in a way Sabrina doesn’t, and her instincts are right more often than not. And yet, despite the myriad times Daphne’s been correct, Sabrina ignores her, gets something wrong, gets in trouble, and swears she really will listen to Daphne next time. And then utterly fails to do so.

Jessica: Plus there’s no consistency to Sabrina Learns A Lesson. In the second book, where Sabrina is Learning A Lesson About Racism, there are several asides like this: “She hated when magic was used to fix problems, especially when the problem involved humans.” In the third book, where Sabrina is Learning A Lesson About Addiction, she becomes addicted to magic. Say what?

Plus, Sabrina’s racism in the second book isn’t entirely unjustified. This is of course not to say that racism is ever okay, but the concept doesn’t map well onto Everafters. At that point she’s only encountered Everafters she thought were good guys but who turned out to be bad guys, or Everafters she thought were bad guys who turned out to be good guys, or Everafters she thought were bad guys who turned out to really be bad guys. Plus she knows some Everafters are responsible for kidnapping her parents, and quite a few Everafters want her entire family dead (thanks to a long-ago conspiracy to overthrow humans, the Everafters are trapped by a spell in Ferryport Landing as long as a Grimm remains in the town). Buckley doesn’t show that Everafters are largely good or even neutral; Sabrina doesn’t walk away from the first book with a single good feeling about any of the Everafters, and thus neither do we as readers. Why shouldn’t she be prejudiced against the people who’ve been traumatizing her for the past hundred pages?

The kicker, though, is that Sabrina doesn’t actually shake her prejudice. She realizes that Mr. Canis, her grandmother’s best friend and bodyguard and, not incidentally, the Big Bad Wolf, is a member of her family and that she loves him. She relaxes around major supporting players like Puck (more on him later), Hamstead (one of the Three Little Pigs), and Snow White. Yet when she discovers that there are Everafters in New York City, where she grew up, and that her mother, a Grimm by marriage (like Granny Relda), helped these city-dwelling Everafters in secret, she feels physically ill. She is literally sickened by the idea of Everafters in her hometown, and infuriated by the suggestion that her mother might have been sympathetic towards them. No, Sabrina doesn’t shake her prejudice. She just shuts up about it, so that Daphne and Granny Relda can lecture her about the next book’s Lesson.

Rebecca: So there’s that. And then there’s the other major, sincere flaw with Sabrina, which is that as a heroine…well, she’s not very active. Or rather, she runs around a lot, and she manages to get herself in trouble frequently, but Sabrina is utterly unable to get out of it. At least once a book–the more adventure there is, the more often it happens–she’s rendered utterly helpless or comes up against an enemy she can’t face, and someone has to come save her. More often than not (in fact, almost always), that someone is Puck. Which is annoying in and of itself (we here at Active Voice like our heroines actively saving themselves, thanks) but is made infinitely more so because Puck is Sabrina’s romantic interest.

There are several problems with this. Let’s start with the basic: Sabrina is eleven. Puck, while technically hundreds of years old (Everafters are immortal, or so close that it makes no difference) is emotionally and maturity-wise eleven. The fact that there’s a romance in any way is disconcerting, as they’re kids. The book makes a big point of talking about how Sabrina is entering puberty, as a way to justify this, but it doesn’t work; instead, it just seems out of place and jarring. Most fantasy doesn’t include a, “What’s happening to my body?” lecture, and while I’m sure it could be well done, it, um, isn’t, and reads as only being there to justify an awkward romance. [Jessica: Plus, Puck is never shown to be entering puberty. And I don't need to see my heroine coming up on eventual statutory charges, thanks.]

And the romance itself is played up more and more as time goes on, built up into something giant and inevitable and creepy. I normally enjoy a good all-they-do-is-bicker romance, since such things are built on loads of unresolved sexual tension, but being kids, there’s no sexual anything to it. So all they do is fight, and even that is annoying, because Puck always wins and Sabrina always ends up with mud in her eye (figuratively, and once literally). Which brings me back around to that point several paragraphs ago, which is that, since Sabrina and Puck are apparently in twu wuv 4evah, and he is constantly rescuing her, it takes her out of the role of being the hero and puts them both into traditional gender roles where he’s the knight in shining armor and she’s a damsel in distress. Which would be a mild irritation if the books were about Puck, but they aren’t; they’re about Sabrina, and her constant need of rescuing and their bizarre and mildly gross romantic subplot takes the story away from her.

Jessica: The fact that they’re terrible detectives doesn’t help with the whole “being active” thing. (I mean, you’ve got a little girl in a red cloak jabbering about her grandmother and you can’t figure out which fairy tale character she is? Really?) When you’re a detective who can’t figure out who the bad guy is until he starts monologuing, you don’t have much to do before the denouement but run around coming to erroneous conclusions. Which not only prevents you from being active, but makes you look downright stupid.

Rebecca: And–I swear we’re almost done with Sabrina now–there’s some strange subtext to the way Sabrina is treated, which is very, very easily overlooked when (as we did) you devour the novels quickly and don’t realize there are massive flaws until a later, closer reading. Specifically, of the two girls, Sabrina is the protector; she’s a tomboy who excels in gym class; she takes no attitude and is quick to fight. All of these are traditionally male-associated traits. On the other hand, Daphne is a peacemaker who spends her time on hairstyles, who concentrates very hard on being nice and sweet to everyone, and her hero and role model is Snow White (who is held up as the pinnacle of femininity through the series). The contrast wouldn’t be a problem at all, except that Sabrina is always wrong, and Daphne is always right; and Sabrina is frequently punished or humiliated for her masculine traits, while Daphne is rewarded and praised for her feminine ones. Combined with the books’ inability to switch Sabrina and Puck out of traditional gender roles I already mentioned, it taints the book with a subtle but disturbing message of reinforced gender roles, one which you would expect a series about a spunky female heroine to break out of.

Jessica: Yeah, the treatment of women is all over the map in these books. On the one hand, I like that the Grimm family is represented almost entirely by women. Relda is the matriarch, the girls’ mother was the secret Manhattan branch, and the girls’ themselves are, of course, the future of the family, while the girls’ father walked away from the job, and their uncle is basically a well-meaning screwup. Not only does that show a strong maternal line, it emphasizes the importance of choice in the Grimms’ lifestyle, as opposed to genetics. However, this motif of the male protector is continued through the series with the minor characters. Snow White does buck the trend as a martial arts expert, and Granny Relda’s reliance on Mr. Canis is understandable enough, considering her age, but Hamstead’s romance with a nightclub singer in the fourth book really tried my patience. Though she has a mobster boyfriend (a fairy godfather, and yes, the pun made me groan too), she falls for Hamstead after said boyfriend abandons her in a fire and Hamstead rescues her. Hamstead then has to fight the boyfriend multiple times throughout the book. It doesn’t seem like Bess’s love is conditional on who emerges victorious; still, the book doesn’t bother to, you know, point out that she doesn’t belong to whoever happens to win each fight. This is just how they roll in the Grimmverse, apparently.

Not cool.

Rebecca: Speaking of not cool…child abuse is not cool! I mean, no kidding, but man. So during the year in which the girls were believed to be orphans, they were stuck in a Dickens-esque orphanage, where they ate gruel and scrubbed floors. Every so often, their case worker would try and get them adopted, sending them out to foster homes where the parents turn out to be abusive, emotionally and physically; the girls are chained to a radiator, starved, and forced to work as slave labor. It’s reads as an attempt to capture a Harry-Potter-lives-with-the-Dursleys feeling, but fails. The series is largely about the contrast between the real world and the fantasy elements hidden from it, but to make that contrast work, the real world has to be, well…real. And in the real world, child abuse of the magnitude Sabrina and Daphne survive isn’t funny. It’s disturbing. Now, fairy tales are often disturbing, but whether Buckley was trying to capture that, or simply give the girls a wacky backstory to escape, it doesn’t work.

Jessica: Changing gears for a minute here. Now, lest you fear Rebecca and I are a total hive mind, there is one aspect of the books that we disagree on. As you’ve probably noticed if you’ve made it this far, Buckley doesn’t just use strictly fairy tale characters for his Everafters. There’s Snow White, the Big Bad Wolf, Prince Charming, and the rest of that crew, but he also uses public domain fantasy characters with strong pop cultural resonance. So we’ve also got Captain Hook, Dorothy Gale, the Queen of Hearts, and the Little Mermaid. At this point in the series I’ve gotten used to it, but I still don’t really feel that it works. With a story like Little Red Riding Hood, which comes from an oral tradition, you can say “This is how it really happened,” because, after all, there’s no ultimate authority. I’m extremely uncomfortable, however, with Buckley telling us how, say, Hans Christian Anderson’s stories “really happened,” especially since he gets so many of Anderson’s stories so very wrong. “The Little Match Girl” is not about a girl with magical matches, Buckley, it’s about a girl who dies of exposure. The Little Mermaid should not be a bitter, shrewish, grossly overweight (mer)woman who’s been eating compulsively ever since she was scorned by the prince, not when her story is about how sacrifice is inherent in love and that true salvation comes from loving, not by having that love returned. (I have issues with Buckley’s use of all characters with known creators, but he happens to really butcher Anderson’s, which is why I’m picking on those.)

Rebecca:On the upside, at least the grossly overweight Little Mermaid is still represented as being beautiful and graceful? But yeah.

But I have no real problem with the inclusion of non-Grimm-story Everafters–and I think it’s neat that there’s a brief reference to “the Anderson triplets,” who are apparently off doing about the same thing as the Grimm family, but the Everafters they’re chasing down aren’t confined to one little town. Which does make sense to me; we don’t know where the Everafters came from or why, so unless every single one of them happened to have been reported on by the Grimms, and then brought to Ferryport Landing together, it seems to make sense to me that there are more around…so why shouldn’t they also have been written about? This also works well with the series’s motif of fantasy being present in every day life, but hidden; there are still Everafters around, but only a few people, like Anderson, Shakespeare, and Baum, have noticed. So running into the Wizard of Oz didn’t phase me in the least.

Jessica: One last complaint, I promise. Does anyone remember the game Mousetrap? You know, you turned a crank that bumped a boot that kicked a bucket that knocked a ball down a ramp and it all ended with your mouse getting caught in a net? Elaborate Rube Goldberging is great for games, great for cartoons, and great for lighthearted Dick Van Dyke musicals. It’s not so great in prose. Puck gets at least one of the sisters with a prank like this in almost every book, and every time the humor falls flat. It’s like slapstick – it doesn’t work if you can’t see it.

Rebecca: Okay, and now the good stuff! The characters! Or at least, the characters who aren’t Sabrina. Daphne is delightfully adorable; she had won me over by the third page. Elvis, the family’s dog, is excellent–a character in and of himself without speaking, smarter than the average human, and very loyal. Mr. Canis is fantastic, and probably my favorite. He is, of course, the Big Bad Wolf, and as the series goes on the reader learns he’s one of the most infamous, powerful Everafters to ever exist. He has done very bad things (like, you know, murder) but has obviously, for some reason–and I’m hoping we learn why–reformed. His struggle to suppress his Big Badness is great; when he loses himself he’s terrifying. And the way the Red Riding Hood backstory is represented…wow! Seriously. Red is an excellent villain, because Buckley doesn’t forget that, while Canis is a protagonist, he murdered a little girl’s family; the background is used and not swept under the rug. And the supporting cast members–Hamstead, Snow, Charming, and a few others–are also all intriguing and well-written.

Jessica: Man, such word on that. Especially Red. She and her pet monster, the Jabberwocky, make for completely terrifying villains, as do most of the other baddies (most of which are twist endings, so I won’t spoil them here).

And it’s not just the villains. When I was little, I had a few beautiful clothbound fairy tale anthologies, including the hardcore Brothers Grimm versions, with the mutilation and the satanic pacts and the cannibalism and everything else horrendous those fellows pulled from the collective unconscious of folklore. I’d read the stories when I felt particularly brave, but those books did not stay in my room – they were too scary to be near with the lights out. They stayed way out in the living room, safely away from me.

I’m much bigger now, and even somewhat less scared of the dark than I used to be, but reading The Sisters Grimm evokes the same thrill of fairy tale terror in me that those old Grimm collections used to. They’re downright scary, as scary as real fairy tales can be, and that is the highest praise I can give to the tone of these books. Obviously we love them, considering how fast we plowed through them; they’re funny and exciting and interesting. But the scariness might be the hardest part to get right, and Buckley does it perfectly.

Rebecca: I think the thing about the books is that they’re so fun, and so readable, and so overall good that the problems stand out in stark relief against everything else. It’s easier to pick apart than praise, and there are many things to pick at. The flaws warrant discussion, but shouldn’t put people off from reading them: this is a series that will keep you gleefully entertained, and you’d better believe we will be buying the next book the day it comes out. But with good parts so good and bad parts so mediocre, we found ourselves unable to settle on a single grade. So these books get, simultaneously, two cupcakes for the gender issues and other not-so-stellar bits, and four cupcakes because what Buckley got right, he got really right.

When Nearra awoke in the woods, she couldn’t remember who she was. After an attack by goblins, nearly being eaten by a dragon, and almost getting run down by a minotaur, she collects a group of friends (a ranger, a warrior, a kinder adventurer, an elfin guide, and the minotaur) who help her on her quest to discover who she is. Her only hope is to find a mystical temple and ask the priests and priestesses there to heal her. But it’s a dangerous trip, and there are all kinds of evil folks chasing them, and one in their own group may be a traitor…

This book, as it turns out, is part of the giant mass of Dragonlance gaming franchise, though It’s a new series, written at a juvenile level (labeled ages 10 and up). I didn’t realize this going in, and so a lot of my moments of confusion may well be due to not knowing the greater world. There was, obviously, a lot of world building behind it, that I was clear on; all sorts of backstory and histories, lots of fantasy species, and lots of…well, stuff. But the problem with all of this is that very little of it was explained, and when it was (such as the colors of the dragons corresponding with their alignment of good or evil) it was dropped in large exposition chunks, so basically everything was either over- or under-explained. So overall, the fantasy aspect of it read a little awkwardly.

The much bigger problem was the pacing/POV strangeness. (Warning: this whole section includes spoilers. Most of them are given away early in the book, though, so it isn’t a huge deal.) Though the book largely uses Nearra as the POV character, it does move to other people’s when important things that Nearra doesn’t witness happen. What makes this odd isn’t the switches themselves, which are smooth enough, but what they reveal. Within the first third of the book, the villain essentially spells out what he wants with Nearra, which would have been a more dramatic reveal later. Second, the POV switch points out that Davyn, the ranger who initially found and befriended Nearra, is the traitor and is being paid off by the villain. But the thing is, none of this seems to be done to much of a purpose. The reveals would be more dramatic later, but instead we know what’s going on with Nearra fairly early, and Davyn…well, he would be more interesting if we didn’t know. Instead, he clues the reader in, then proceeds to be wishy-washy but kind of bad-ish until he is, in turn, betrayed by the villains.

Then there’s the end. It was…not good. Not the climax or itself, which was fine, but the actual end: show

Other than that, the book was…fine. The characters were all pretty typical fantasy archetypes; the quest was a fairly typical fantasy quest; the whole thing was really…generic. It isn’t bad, it just isn’t…anything. I think it would be a fine introduction to fantasy for a kid, but after having read any fantasy at all, I think it would fall a bit short. Two cupcates.

Arthur has lived underground with his grandfather his whole life, until one night, while foraging for food, he witnesses a sinister group of men on a cheese hunt – even though hunting wild cheeses has been outlawed for years. Soon Arthur finds himself wrapped up with the cheese hunters and their mysterious plan to destroy the city of Ratbridge. With the help of his fellow underground denizens, the clever boxtrolls and the shy cabbageheads, plus a ragtag crew of piratical humans, rats, and crows, Arthur must stop Snatcher and his fellow Cheese Guild members before they eliminate Ratbridge – and the peaceful creatures living beneath it – forever.

Here Be Monsters! is a weird book. Unfortunately, it’s weird because it’s trying really, really hard to be weird, and so just winds up being annoying. Fantasy books are all about taking the hero from his or her ordinary world and plunking him or her down into extraordinary situations. This doesn’t mean the world has to resemble ours from the start – Frodo Baggins leaving the Shire comes to mind. But it has to start with something resembling normality before it gets into serious abnormality. When you’ve got a kid living in a drainpipe with his adoptive grandfather, wearing a gunnysack and stealing bananas out of people’s gardens (bananas? in England?), and seeing nothing strange about live cheeses running about or mechanically-minded trolls wearing boxes stealing everyone’s spare lug nuts, you’re not starting from any kind of normality, and we’re not given any time to get used to or understand this strange world before Arthur is thrust into the Cheese Hunt.

Arthur was also a disappointingly passive protagonist. At one point in the book he displays remarkable intelligence, competence, and courage, when he sneaks into the Cheese Hall to rescue his kidnapped friends. Unfortunately, this is only a third of the way through the book, and for the remaining two thirds Arthur does approximately nothing. In fact, all of the characters are remarkably passive. The kindly old Willbury Nibble, who takes Arthur in when Arthur is trapped aboveground, simply allows Arthur to be arrested by corrupt police officers and handed over to the villainous Snatcher. Kooky inventor Marjorie sits mindlessly in the Patent Office while her invention is stolen by the bad guys and used to horrendous purposes. This does not make for exciting decisions on the part of the good guys; the plot mainly consists of them sneaking or breaking into the Cheese Hall and then running away from the Cheese Hall. You get the feeling Snow could have cut a lot of unnecessary pages if the characters would just stay in the damn Cheese Hall for two seconds.

I also would have liked to see more female characters. There were two, unless you count the cameos by the queen of the cabbageheads (they live underground and worship vegetables) and the rabbit women (they live underground and worship rabbits. Sensing a theme?), and the idiot society women who gave Snow a chance to exercise his satirical muscles. Marjorie, as mentioned before, created the invention that is behind Snatcher’s evil plan, and is the classic absentminded professor type. That’s a role that women rarely get to play, and so it’s nice to see, but as she doesn’t get much of a chance to exercise her technical acumen, and is, like all the other characters, frustratingly passive, so that she comes off not as charmingly eccentric, but rather bland and dopey. The only other named female character, Mildred, is a crow who does very little.

Finally we have the society women, who totter around town on ridiculously high heels with insanely large, bizarrely shaped buttocks, which I at first thought were bustles, but which, it appears, are their actual buttocks. I’m not sure how you get your rear to grow into a hexagonal shape, but maybe it’s different in Ratbridge. Now, I certainly don’t deny that fashion is frequently taken to a dangerous or ludicrous extreme, but I always get a little wary when a male writer chooses it as an easy target. When it’s done well, it’s a way of mocking people who let themselves get overly concerned with what’s fashionable. When it’s done poorly, it’s a way of mocking women. If at any point Snow had shown us either that there are women who are not obsessed with hexagonal buttocks (aside from fringe dwellers like Marjorie) or that men can be equally as foolish over trends, it wouldn’t have bothered me; as it was, however, my feathers were distinctly ruffled.

I do have to give props to Snatcher, who was an excellent villain. He managed to be both goofy and threatening, a balance that works beautifully for children’s books but is very difficult to achieve. I also really enjoyed Arthur’s pirate allies, a motley crew of humans, rats, and crows who ran aground sometime before the events of the book begin, couldn’t get themselves out to sea again, and so decided to set up a laundry service on the ship. The boxtrolls were rather endearing, and I’m a sucker for steampunk, so things like Arthur’s mechanical wings charmed me to no end.

Finally, a word should be said about the illustrations. There are several hundred of these tiny, painstakingly cross-hatched black and white doodles throughout the books, and they show an incredibly amount of hard work and talent. However, they’re small and extremely detailed, and a lot of them are hard to make out. I chalked this up to the fact that the copy I was reading was an advance copy and maybe the printing of the illustrations wasn’t up to snuff yet, but a glance at the art on the website makes me think that maybe they are just that cluttered. Snow’s a great artist – he’s the pen behind the brilliant How Dogs Really Work!, which I’ve always loved – but his style doesn’t translate well to non-picture books. Fewer-but-larger illustrations, maybe with some color or at least some grayscaling, might have worked better.

Here Be Monsters! gets two cupcakes. There was potential there, and a couple of good moments and characters, but it was too long, too dense, and too boring. There are two more Ratbridge Chronicles planned, but I won’t be picking them up.