Scottish Play Doe (please just call him Scott) has always been a little weird, what with his migraines that make him see really strange things, but everything in his life gets a lot weirder when his family moves to Goodborough (home of the GoodCo Cereal Company) and one of his hallucinations steals his backpack. And then it turns out he hasn’t been hallucinating at all: he can see things no one else can, and oh yeah, that includes cereal mascots that might actually be faeries… and they’re all on the run from GoodCo itself.

With the help of his new friends Erno and Emily (who have their own weird connection to GoodCo), plus Mick the leprechaun, Harvey the rabbit man, and a suspiciously hairy housekeeper named Biggs, Scott has to figure out what’s really going on at GoodCo… and how to save the world from one seriously sinister cereal company.

(Mild spoilers within.)
Although I never got around to Rex’s second book, Fat Vampire, Rex was on my list of authors to watch after I finished The True Meaning of Smekday a few years ago. And considering the two books, I feel safe in saying this: Adam Rex is a very entertaining writer and illustrator, but his Achilles heel is definitely pacing.

Something was distinctly off about the way the tension in Cold Cereal built, and I think it comes down to the fact that there were about three different books in this book. Basically, in this one (very long for middle grade) novel, you’ve got way too many elements at play: a creepy cereal company, some Irish/Celtic mythology, time traveling King Arthur, freemasons, and more. And that is just… a lot. Too much. They are all cool ideas, and they tie together eventually, but it also becomes kind of a jumbled, confusing mess. And, because there are just so many elements that need to be pulled together, getting all the pieces in play, moved to where they need to be, and set up for the climax, takes a lonnnnng time, and makes things feel kind of bumpy and uneven.

But on the plus side, a lot of the ideas are really enjoyable and entertaining. Sinister cereal company that uses faerie creatures as mascots? HECK YES. And the time traveling King Arthur idea was really cool. Also, while Scott and Ernesto were both basically everykids, Emily was wonderful — she’s a supergenius, smart enough that she’s figured out a lot of what’s going on before everyone else, but no one believes her, but also smart enough to understand that and deal with it. And smart enough that when her brother tries to make her feel better for being a social outcast, she doesn’t really want to hear about it. She knows people don’t like her and she doesn’t want to be condescended to about it, frankly. That was a small piece of the story, but a great touch.

Overall, the book was enjoyable. There are a lot of good gags and Rex’s tone is funny and entertaining. But when I got to the end and realized that it’s the first of a trilogy, instead of jazzed for more, my reaction was, “How is it POSSIBLE that there’s more???” So, while it has the same pacing issues as Smekday, it doesn’t deal with anything deeper than the surface story the way Smekday did. thus Cold Cereal gets three cupcakes.

(Note: I was given an advance copy of this book by my personal ARC fairy. It actually goes on sale next week, 2/7/12.)

All Hanna wants is for her mom to love her. Never mind that she’s never met her mom, never mind that she’s got a slew of mental health problems and even more pills, never mind that she still hears her dead father’s voice. She forces herself into her mom’s small-town life — only to find that Portero, the town, is even crazier than she is. But somehow, a town full of missing persons signs, hidden doors, and killer monsters is exactly what Hanna needs to fit in, because Portero might be crazy, but Hanna is crazier.

(FYI: “crazy” is the book’s word, not mine. A lot of this review is about ableism and mental health, so I wanted to make that clear up front.)

Mild spoilers uncovered beneath the cut.
I gobbled this book up, reading it in a day. It’s weird and dark and gory, but compelling as heck. But it’s also got some serious problems.

For me, the biggest issue in the book is mental health. Hanna, we’re told, has a slew of mental health problems; the most recently diagnosed is manic depression (she prefers that term to bipolar), but she’s also dealt with anxiety, ADD, and many many others in her life. That’s all fine, as far as I’m concerned. My issue is that we meet Hanna shortly after she’s blithely murdered her aunt. Okay — so it turns out her aunt survived, but regardless, Hanna smashed her over the head and left, not caring at all, but she promises her mother she’d never do that to her. So I’d just like to say upfront that the linking of mental health problems with violence really bothers me. It’s been in the media a lot recently, as Jared Lee Loughner (alleged Arizona shooter) has been presumed to be skizophrenic, leading to a lot of ableist assumptions that mental illness was the cause of his violence. The linking of mental illness to violence is unfair and inaccurate, so starting off the book with a character basically saying, “Hi, I suffer from manic depression, and also I kill people, and I have no remorse about it!” really, really bothers me.

Aside from what I felt was an ableist issue with the set up, I also didn’t buy into Hanna’s mental illnesses because several people in my life have dealt with severe depression, anxiety, and yup, manic depression. Warm, wonderful, creative people who I adore. Mental health, for some of them (from what I’ve seen as a friend), has often been a struggle — not just in the “how do I cope and get better,” sense, though that’s a huge part of it, but also in the, “I hate the person this makes me, and I hate the way this affects people who care about me,” sense. It’s not something they shrug off or embrace or just don’t care about; coping with mental illness is a huge part of their lives. Hanna… not so much. I know that people experience things differently and react differently; some people will want to go on medications, some won’t, some will have a harder time coming to terms with their mental health, some will resist the idea of having a mental health issue at all. But Hanna wasn’t resisting her diagnosis, or coming to terms, or struggling in any way. She was fully aware of it, and just didn’t care. Not about how it affected her, or the people around her. Basically, what struck me was this: Hanna didn’t seem like someone dealing with manic depression, she seemed like a sociopath. No empathy or regard for people around her (or ability to connect to them, at least in the first half of the book); poor behavior control, disregard for safety, and on and on.

I feel like a lot of the decisions in the book about Hanna’s mental health were made to give it a “hook” — a “crazy” protag, and the eventual reveal that things Hanna has hallucinated in the past are real once she gets to Portero. It also seemed like some set up that was never carried through — at first, Hanna questions whether some of the things she sees are real, with hints that her mental health issues are causing her to hallucinate a lot of Portero’s oddities. It seemed like a setup for an unreliable narrator, akin to Justine Larbalestier’s Liar, but that all sort of fizzled out. It was actually pretty straight forward: whatever problems Hanna may have, it’s actually just that Portero is full of monsters and strange happenings, and everything is real.

Which brings me to what I really liked about the book: Portero. This weird little town reminds me of a darker, more adult Eerie, Indiana. We never find out why it’s so full of monsters and doors and keys (or why they seem confined to Portero), but I’m actually okay with that. Not knowing didn’t bother me, and though I hope there’s a rich backstory that will be explained in Reeves’ next book, I don’t feel like Bleeding Violet was lacking because of it. Similarly, though I’d liked to have learned more about the Mortmaine, the town’s protectors and monster fighters, I don’t think that was necessary, either. I really enjoyed the book’s setting, and found it deliciously creepy and incredibly intriguing. I’m not particularly into urban fantasy, but I really enjoyed this.

In terms of characters, there were only a few who were really developed — Hanna, obviously; Rosalee, her extremely cold mother; and Wyatt. I really loved Wyatt: he’s a Mortmaine initiate who’s driven by an urge to help people. The Mortmaine help in a grander sense but are very rigid about when and how they step in. Wyatt just wants to help, period. He experiments with new styles of fighting that the Mortmaine frown on, he helps people the Mortmaine turn their backs on. Out of everyone in the book, Wyatt is the only one I’d like to be friends with in real life, and I think he was very well done (especially his big turning point moment, which I won’t spoil for you).

Some other, smaller points: the book had a minor pacing issue. It didn’t exactly drag, but the actual plot doesn’t come into play until page 274 (of 454, hardcover edition). That’s… a lot of set up. I was disappointed when the Mayor finally appeared, since she was set up to be Serious Chief Badass, but was actually pretty easily overcome by our protagonists. It also felt a little edgy-for-the-sake-of-edgy. I wasn’t bothered by the sex or the gore, but it was very in your face, screaming, “Look! Sex! Gore! For teenagers!!!”

Overall… I’m not quite sure how I feel about this book. I loved it the moment I finished it, but have found it a lot more flawed since stepping back and thinking about it. (Not that I can’t love a flawed book, of course.) It’s got compelling prose and a bunch of great concepts, but also enough serous flaws that jump out with less than 24 hours of distance. However, I do plan to pick up Slice of Cherry (a non-sequel, but also set in Portero) when it comes out, so I think I’ll give this one three cupcakes and call it a day.

Even though Hiccup is the son of the Viking chief, he’s scrawny and not much good at Viking-type things. All the youths in the village have to catch dragons to train, but Hiccup only manages to get a tiny one, which he accurately names Toothless. Though Hiccup has taught himself to speak Dragonese, Toothless refuses to obey him, and eventually gets Hiccup and all the other boys banished from the village. That’s when they realize a monstrous Sea Dragon has washed up on their shore. It’s up to Hiccup and Toothless to defeat the Sea Dragon, save the village, and get themselves reinstated in the village, if they can only get along long enough to do it.

Despite my love of dragons, the Cowell books didn’t look terribly interesting to me in the store. But the How to Train Your Dragon movie blew me away. I loved everything about it – the story, the animation, the characters, the complete awesomeness of having a fantastic female lead and another girl who was treated as just another kid instead of the “bad” girl to Astrid’s “good”…fabulous. Utterly fabulous. I adored it.

So I picked up the book. Unfortunately, it’s pretty much the only time that I’ve liked the movie version better than the book.

To a certain extent, this isn’t the book’s fault at all, because it’s a very different beast. And certain decisions that were made were the correct ones for the format the story was in. For example, in the book, Toothless and Hiccup talk in Dragonese, which wouldn’t work in a kids’ movie – you’re not going to have long conversations between the two main characters in subtitles when half the audience can’t read well enough to follow them. Conversely, in the movie Toothless is basically a big kitten, and his body language is utterly lovable to anyone who’s ever had a cat – but that’s not something that translates to prose.

Then, too, in the book Hiccup has a friend who’s even more pathetic than he is: Fishlegs. In the movie, Hiccup’s isolation works well. In a book series with an indefinite amount of books, it would be way too depressing. He needs at least one friend. Again, it makes total sense that the book was written that way, and the changes that were made for the movie were made to tell a different kind of story – but it was a story that I preferred.

The one thing that the movie changed that I do in fact fault the book for is the amount of (human) female characters. There’s one in the book – Hiccup’s mom – and I’m not sure she even has a line. Meanwhile, the movie has the fantastic Astrid and Ruffnut, and women seem to be just as capable warriors as men in general. Advantage: movie version, by far.

Also, a small quibble: emphasis in the book is done with all caps instead of italics. This makes it read like everyone’s screaming at you all the time, including the narration. It’s kind of stressful.

The book was decent, with cute illustrations, and I’m glad it’s a successful series. But I have no interest in picking up any more of them – just in getting the movie when it comes out on DVD. Three cupcakes. (But the movie would’ve gotten five.)

Arthur has battled and defeated the first six trustees, but now he must face the most powerful of them all: Lord Sunday. To make matters worse, the House has almost completely collapsed into nothing, his best friends Suzy and Leaf have been pressed into dangerous military service against the Piper’s army, his mother is missing, and he is now completely, irrevocably a Denizen. As he struggles to overcome Lord Sunday and free the final part of the Architect’s Will, the Will’s true meaning is about to become clear, shaking the very foundations of the House and all of existence.

Since I can’t discuss my reaction to this book without talking about the end, major spoilers are unhidden behind the cut.

I’ve already spoken at length about this series in general, so I won’t rehash all that again. Suffice to say that I love the characters and the world-building, and have been waiting extremely impatiently for this, the last installment in the series.

And, well, I was disappointed.

It’s still very well-written. Arthur is still a fine protagonist, and his sidekicks Suzy and Leaf are still wonderful. There’s nothing really wrong with the book; I have no objective, critical comments to make.

(Well, no, I actually have one. Arthur’s mother – his smart, awesomely competent mother – is killed off off-page in order to give Arthur a momentary pang, then basically forgotten. The killing of female characters in order to bring pain to or forward the narrative of male protagonists (an infamous phenomenon in comic books) is one of my least favorite things to encounter in fiction and I was angry and disappointed that Nix used it.)

But the big twist is that the Will, when completed, is the Architect, and that Her reappearance triggers the complete dissolution of the House into Nothing, thus freeing the Architect from the self-imposed trap of her own existence. Rather than let her creation be completely destroyed, though, she offers Arthur the opportunity to become the new Architect. He accepts, with a caveat: he splits himself into two beings, the Architect, and a mortal Arthur who doesn’t remember any of his adventures.

And so the entire series is a pyrrhic victory. Arthur does not manage to save the House, but he is left with the painstaking work of rebuilding it from scratch. He does not manage to remain human, but he creates a human copy of himself, though neither New Mortal Arthur nor Architect Arthur come across as the Arthur we’ve come to know throughout the series. And hanging over all of these events is the depressing knowledge that everything Arthur did throughout the series was a roundabout way of accomplishing exactly what he was trying to prevent. In trying to save the House, he destroyed the house. It could be argued that the House needed to be started afresh and this is all a good thing, but it’s extremely frustrating to spend an entire series rooting for a character to succeed, only to have that success snatched away at the last second.

I do still think that The Keys to the Kingdom is an excellent series, and I do still love the characters and the world-building. But I really, really didn’t like the ending. Since I know my reaction is very subjective, and since I’m loath to give the book a really bad grade thanks to my former love of the series, I’m settling on a middle-of-the-road three cupcakes.

Because Theodosia’s parents work at the London Museum of Legends and Antiquities, Theodosia spends a lot of time around quite a lot of very cool ancient artifacts. The only problem is that most of these items come into the museum with curses on them, and Theodosia appears to be the only one who can see the curses. When one particularly curse-heavy artifact is stolen from the museum, Theodosia must recover it, along with her brother Henry and her new pickpocket friend Will, before the whole country is flung into war.

I picked this up in Target because it was cheap, and because spunky Victorian girls and Egyptology are things that intrigue me. I then proceeded to not review it for, like, eight million years at least. So that’ll give you an idea of how much of an impact it made on me. A lot of the details have been lost in the canyons of my mind since I read the book, but let’s see what I can remember:

Theodosia is a pretty decent heroine, and her two sidekicks perfectly respectable sidekicks. The villains were sort of random and disconnected, and the red herring villain’s red herring-ness was never adequately explained.

The prose was quite charming Victorian pastiche, but the chapter endings were dreadful. Almost all of them felt more like LaFever had paused for a bathroom break than because there was a real break in the narrative; the first sentence of the subsequent chapter almost always seemed like it could just have followed the last sentence of the previous chapter without interruption.

One of the motifs of the book is that adults, particularly Theodosia’s parents, don’t listen to her. I know that often adults don’t listen to children, and have certainly been there myself, back in my graham cracker days. And there are narrative where it works well (Count Olaf’s triumphant “Adults never listen to children!” in the Series of Unfortunate Events film is marvelously chilling). But here I just found it unbelievably frustrating and, quite frankly, it made me hate Theodosia’s parents, who never hear a word she says, whether it’s plot-related or not.

The end was a little bit of a letdown, because the war the heroes are trying so hard to prevent is…World War I. So, um, sorry, guys. Your triumph will be short-lived. It’s just hard to celebrate with them through the lens of history.

All in all, Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos was a perfectly serviceable but un-noteworthy book, and so gets the middle-of-the-road grade of three cupcakes.

Thomas wakes up in the maze, the newest kid there. Before he has a chance to figure out why he can’t remember anything, or acclimate to life in the Glade and the Maze and its horrible Grievers beyond, bad things start happening. First, another newbie shows up — the first and only girl. Then supplies stop coming. And then the Ending: if the Gladers don’t solve the Maze soon, they’re definitely going to die there.

There are spoilers uncovered under the cut.

My main thought after reading this book was that it called on a lot of the same tropes as the Maximum Ride series — but its strengths and weaknesses are exactly opposite. Consider: both books involve kids who are part of some enormous experiment (not one they entered by choice), who don’t really know what its endgame in. They both are told that everything happens for a reason, but never really get more than a hint of what that reason is, and yet have reason to suspect the evil scientists are perhaps not so evil after all. And both feature a lot of running and being chased by strange creatures.

But in terms of strengths and weaknesses, where the problem with Maximum Ride was the pacing and total lack of plot, but its strength was the characters, Maze Runner is in the extreme other corner. The book is face-paced and exciting; the plot is fine, though nothing extraordinary, and carries the book from setpiece to setpiece with no problem. But the characters had zero personality (and there was only one girl, who spent much of the book unconscious, which… yeah). We’re told that Thomas is very smart, and in great shape, super duper special and extraordinary… and being told that substitutes for development. Similarly, the ease with which Thomas defeats the Grievers and saves people makes it look like everyone else was just incredibly incompetent for two years,and makes it all feel a bit too easy for him.

Aside from that, the slang made me really irritated. I think adding in some slang can make for really great world building, when done well; it can make the strange setting feel real. It basically failed to do so in Maze Runner. It didn’t feel like there was a need for a lot of the words that were used, and whether there was a need or not, they were all vastly over used, to the point where it felt more like a nervous tick than an insult when a character was called a shuck-face or a pile of klonk or whatever.

Ultimately, because I’m such a nut for worldbuilding and structure, I liked the book fine. I might even pick up the second one, to see if there really is a plan behind everything, something I’m generally pretty skeptical of (especially after the Maximum Ride series…). But the book itself didn’t do much for me; the good parts were fine, but not outstanding, and the bad parts were pretty annoying. So it edges by with a respectable but not outstanding three cupcakes.

Creel thought that with the Dragon War over, life would return to normal, but all that changes when the kingdom of Citatie declares war on her homeland – led by an army riding on dragons. As the leading expert on dragons, Creel heads off to Citatie to find out how to save her home, but that may be easier said than done, especially when her friend Shardas the Dragon King turns out to be intimately involved in this new war.

My biggest problem with this book was probably the pacing. Shardas defeats the villain! Yay! But then they still have to stop the actual war. So Marta stops the war! Yay! But then the king of Feravel, where Creel lives, banishes the dragons. So Shardas finds the dragons another place to live, and now we’ve finally reached the end. I know it’s a trilogy, but you’re supposed to spread the three endings out over all three books, not put them all in a row. Astute readers may also notice that Creel, the protagonist, doesn’t actually cause any of these triumphs to come about, which was really disappointing. I don’t expect her to fight a dragon (although she wouldn’t be the first human protagonist to do so), but I wanted her to do something.

I was also really annoyed by the structure of the dragons’ society. The queen is the hereditary ruler and the center of their culture, while the king is pretty much just the consort. Logically, then, the queen should be the more powerful and important of the two, and take point on governing. And yet, as one of the dragons describes it:

Our queens are, you might say, the spiritual rulers among us. When the queen is strong, dragons prosper. We go to her when there is illness or injury, she blesses us when we mate, and sings the mourning song when we die. The king takes command when there is danger: wars, rogues like Krashath, mountains erupting, earthshakes, and the like.

So the queen has an almost entirely passive role as a symbol, save for the typically female-coded activities of healing, mating, and death rituals, while the king does all of the active stuff. All of this, of course, matches human behavior, but there’s no reason a bunch of magical lizards should follow it, especially since that’s not how the animal kingdom works. And quite frankly, Velika does almost nothing for her people in this book; it’s Shardas who defends them, and Shardas who gives them hope. If the king was supposed to be the center of draconic society, it would be merely disappointing; as it is, it’s contradictory and annoying. Plus, the fact that all of this death and destruction turns out to be because Krashath is trying to steal Shardas’s woman is infuriating.

Otherwise, it’s a decent story, and I still like Creel well enough as a narrator. The real strength of the book, though, is the dragons. Dragons are pretty much my kryptonite, and George’s are wonderfully varied, eccentric, and simultaneously majestic and grumpy. Despite the book’s flaws, I can’t ignore the part of my brain that spent the entire time going “Dragons dragons dragons!” They are a delight.

Thus Dragon Flight skates by on a middle-of-the-road three cupcakes. I’ll still be picking up Dragon Spear to see how the trilogy ends, but George is otherwise not on my “must buy” writer list.

Minli’s family is very poor, so Minli sets off to ask the Man in the Moon how her family can change their fortune. With her new friend, a dragon who cannot fly, Minli finds herself navigating the world of folklore. But will she know what to ask the Man in the Moon when she finally meets him?

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon basically works by taking various bits of Chinese folklore and stringing them into one coherent narrative. That is, various traditional stories are told throughout the book that all turn out to have connections to one another and to Minli and the people she encounters. I only recognized a couple of the stories, so I’m not sure if, to someone well-versed in Chinese folklore, this might not seem as bizarre and silly as if Cinderella’s glass slippers were actually crafted by Baba Yaga. But to admittedly relatively ignorant me, the twining together of the various stories was pretty neat.

That’s a good thing, because the actual introduction of those stories into the narrative was kind of jarring. It was always announced with a change of fonts, a headline, and a switch in the narrative voice, even when the so-called story was only a character describing what he or she did last night. Often, especially towards the end, the sudden interruption of loudly-proclaimed stories badly disrupted the flow of the main book. It doesn’t help that the prose of the whole book is slightly awkward and particularly weak on transitions.

I’d also like to say here that I am so very sick of the all-too-common trope where the main character’s father is cool and relaxed and fair-minded and imaginative and she has oh-so-much in common with him, and the mother is a nagging shrew. It crops up in fiction all the time, especially when the protagonist is a girl. I don’t know if it’s entirely Electra Complex-ish in nature or simply a watered-down version of the Wicked Stepmother trope, but either way I’m totally over it. This book has it in spades: the father tells the stories that are the heart of the book, while the mother is essentially blamed for creating the dissatisfaction that sent Minli on this quest by whining about wanting more money, and is only redeemed at the end of the book by realizing her own culpability and begging the father for forgiveness. I know it’s a standard trope in fairy tales, but enough already!

Speaking of fairy tales, Minli is a very good fairy tale heroine. That is not the same thing as being a fantasy novel heroine. Fantasy novel heroines have, or at least should have, distinctive personalities and voices. Fairy tale protagonists, on the other hand, are only required to do three things: 1. Decide to wander from home. 2. Show compassion to old people or animals who turn out to be powerful beings in disguise. 3. Be clever enough to trick greedy adversaries. Minli’s got all that covered, but she pretty much lacks in the personality department. However, since this book reads much more like a fairy tale than a modern fantasy novel with a conflict and a climax, she actually serves the story very well, since the main object here is not to showcase Minli, but the dozens of bits of folklore that crowd the pages.

In the end, it’s a wash: a decent fairy tale with somewhat clunky writing and couple of annoying tropes. Where the Mountain Meets the Moon is perfectly middle-of-the-road, and gets the perfectly middle-of-the-road grade of three cupcakes.

When Rue’s mother disappears, Rue starts seeing…things. Faeries, to be precise. And as if that weren’t enough for any high school girl to have to deal with, her father gets arrested. Did Rue’s father really kill her mother? What was her mother, exactly? And can Rue stop the war between humans and faeries that is brewing in the wings?

As I mentioned the last time I reviewed a Holly Black book, I’m not a big faerie person. I am, however, a big comic book person, and so I picked up this graphic novel.

The story is strong. The mythology is solid and creepy, and though the gradual reveals about Rue’s family aren’t by any means shockingly original or surprising, they’re still told in a way that engages the reader’s attention. This continues all the way through to the big reveal on the final page, which, while expected, is done pretty spectacularly and made me wish I had the second book in my hands. Rue’s a solid enough protagonist, smart and plucky but with believable emotional reactions to the supernatural (and traumatizing) events around her.

However, it’s pretty clear that this is Black’s first graphic novel; the pacing is awkward in spots, and the book itself seems somehow scanty, like there’s not as much story as there could be. Characters that I expect would have been more fully fleshed out in prose are only vague shapes in this. I know what Headbanded Boyfriend and Goofy-Haired Father look like, but I don’t know anything about them.

This is, however, possibly more a problem with the art than with the writing. I was not a fan of the art in this book. Part of that is subjective – I’m very aware that I prefer a cartoonier, less moody style. But some of the issues with the art were more general problems. Sometimes the facial expressions didn’t match what the characters were saying; they were drawn with gritted teeth or screaming faces when the text bubble above them contained a relatively calm statement. It was also hard to tell a lot of the characters apart; there was kind of a surplus of slender, androgynous young people with dark hair and fishnets on. The fact that everyone was dressed in over-the-top goth couture didn’t help.

I do want to find out what happens to Rue in the next book, but I have to say I was somewhat disappointed by the rather blah quality of this one. It’s a totally middle-of-the-road book, and so it gets a totally middle-of-the-road grade: three cupcakes.

Rory’s always been able to see past tricks and deceptions, but even he’s surprised when he finds himself able to see even farther, deep into the secret history of New York. There notable figures of the city’s past walk as gods: Peter Stuyvesant, Babe Ruth, Alexander Hamilton, and countless others. Cockroaches ride rats into battles, albino alligators swim the sewers, and statues whisper secrets for a handful of coins. Rory quickly finds himself and his little sister Bridget immersed in this world, working to correct a great injustice committed a hundred and fifty years ago, but a great enemy is doing his best to stop them – an enemy with the power to murder the gods themselves.

Now, the thing you have to understand is that I am a New Yorker born and bred. I spent the first 14 years of my life in Brooklyn, just across the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan. I went to college in Morningside Heights, just below Harlem, and though I live in New Jersey now, I commute into Midtown every day, and am hoping to move into the city as soon as possible. To my mind, there is no better place in the world than New York City (although London comes close), and I plan on living there my whole life.

Gods of Manhattan is a love letter to New York, and to people of my mindset. It’s steeped in the history of the city – the gangs, the rabble politics, the crusading journalism, the minor heroes and the urban legends. The rich descriptions of the island, from the cliffs of Inwood Hill Park (where my co-blogger Rebecca and I walk while we plot our novels), to the labyrinthine and antiquated streets of Greenwich Village, are a delight to read if you live in and love New York like I do.

But if you don’t…well, there’s the rub, right? Singing panhandlers on the subway and the otherworldliness of Central Park probably don’t mean much to a reader outside of the city. And the history…I mean, out of the Council of Twelve, the ruling gods of Manhattan, I’d guess the average kid would recognize two: Alexander Hamilton and Babe Ruth. Older readers would probably be able to identify Walt Whitman, Zelda Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, and possibly Horace Greeley and John Jacob Astor. As a New York kid I would have known the name Peter Stuyvesant was important, since the most prestigious public high school in the city is named after him, but I wouldn’t have known who he was; I could only identify Boss Tweed since I recently read a book on New York history. T.R. Tobias? Hamilton Fish? I had to look them up. So the concept, while brilliant, raises some very real questions of accessibility.

Then there was the treatment of Native Americans in the book, which was sort of all over the place. See, the spirits of the Munsees who used to live on the island remain there, but a hundred and fifty years ago they were trapped in Central Park, and can no longer leave. This is, of course, a horrendous injustice, and Rory’s central quest in the book is to obtain the items needed to break the spell and free them. However, he’s then told by the sole Munsee to escape the Trap that he should not free the Munsees, since the Munsees are so angry about the Trap they’ll attack the gods of Manhattan as soon as they’re free, leading to immense bloodshed on both sides and the inevitable complete destruction of the Munsees. To his credit, Mebus never says the Munsees are irrational for being angry; of course they’re angry! They’ve been trapped in Central Park for 150 years! But the idea that the Munsees are being kept in the Trap for their own good is very “white man’s burden” and phenomenally offensive.

There are a couple of other patchy areas related to the Munsees. For example, when Rory refers to the first Munsee he sees as an Indian, Bridget punches him and tells him the correct term is “Native American,” which is great – but then both children continue to refer to the Munsees as Indians both in dialogue and narration, which is almost worse, like they know the politically correct term and just don’t care. On the other hand, Bridget does refer to one Native girl as a squaw and is promptly told not to be so insulting, so there’s that. Rory also receives a wampum belt and is told that it is his “birthright,” which is a little appropriate-y, even if they explain it away by saying he must have some Munsee blood from way back when. There are good moments with the Munsees, and Mebus appears to have done his research, but there are also some really, really bad moments.

Speaking of the Trap, when Rory is told why he has to open it, it’s not just to correct an injustice. No, apparently the Trap is responsible for global warming, war, and everything else bad in the world. This crops up pretty frequently in fantasy – blaming the real world’s troubles on a mystical issue – and I hate it. It absolves us from blame or responsibility – like, hey, why not stomp around with my giant carbon footprint if global warming is all because of an evil spell? Obviously I don’t think any readers will go “Well, I guess global warming is really because Native American spirits have been betrayed,” but it supports a mentality of a quick-fix solution instead of the constant vigilance and hard work necessary to fix all the things we’ve done wrong as a society. And I don’t like that one bit.

The other major problem was the climax, in that there wasn’t one. Seriously. Everything seems to be building up to something…and then Rory gets knocked unconscious, and when he wakes up things all sort of resolve themselves without answering any questions or fixing any problems raised at the beginning of the book. Um, whoops? I get that there’s another book coming out and we have to leave some things open, but the book should have at least achieved some sort of exciting turning point. But nope. Boy, I bet Mebus is embarrassed about that.

For my final quibble, I’d just like to point out that even when you yell a question, it still needs to end in a question mark, not an exclamation point. “What is going on!” is wrong, and that, or similar shouted queries, happens all the time in the book. If Mebus really wanted his characters to yell questions all the time, he could have just used the interrobang: “?!” It’s grammatically correct as well as having the bonus benefit of a super awesome name. Interrobang!

But now for the positive things! And there are positive things about this book. Aside from the wonderful concept, I absolutely adored Bridget. Rory was a decent enough Everykid, but Bridget was fantastic. All she wants in life is to be a warrior, and her head is filled with fantasy epics and kung fu movies and all the rituals one has to go through to become a fighter. She has just one doll – named Malibu Death Barbie. There’s a wonderful scene where she goes shoe shopping with her mother, and though there are tons of shoes she’d like, she settles on steel-toed boots, so that she’ll be able to put the hurt on the very real bad guys who are suddenly popping up in her life.

There’s another great aspect about Bridget, but it’s spoilery, so I’ll put it behind a cut: show

I also really enjoyed a bunch of the supporting characters. Toy the paper maché boy is rather charming, and, once his backstory is revealed, tragic and creepy in a really effective way. I especially liked Fritz the Battle Roach; this book plus the Gregor books just might make me not hate cockroaches (although I kind of doubt it). And some of the gods worked really well; Whitman as the exclamation-point-abusing God of Optimism cracked me up, and Stuyvesant was great as God of Things Were Better in the Old Days.

Gods of Manhattan hit some places that I really, really like, and I’m in love with the concept, but it fell down quite a bit in execution. A book that started off as a strong five wound up only earning three cucpcakes, and then only because I’m pretty sure I will be picking up the sequel when it comes out. Maybe Mebus can pull this thing up from the ashes. I’ll let you know.