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.

Although Prudence Gumm, Franny Muggs, and Cat Lemonjello have all lived on the same street their whole lives, they don’t like each other at all. And when Ivy Diamond moves to town, it’s not long before none of them like her, either. But then they find themselves mixed up with a witch, a lot of ruby red slippers – and one silver one – a wizard in a hot air balloon, and magical and perilous secret country. To survive, they’ll have to work together, appreciate each other’s strengths, and look at almost everything from the other way around.

This is a very, very strange book. I mean, I finished it and just sat there blinking perplexedly for a while. After sleeping on it for a night, I still can’t decide whether it’s charmingly whimsical, annoyingly over-the-top, or just plain baffling.

See, the girls live in the town of Sherbet, which is Stepford-perfect; for example, it rains every day in the summer precisely at four in the afternoon for precisely 45 minutes, followed by a rainbow. Franny lives in a house shaped like a wedding cake; Cat lives in a tree. They attend a school where the classes are named after sandwiches (Tuna-on-Rye, Bacon-Lettuce-and-Tomato, Egg-Salad, and Liverwurst), and where misbehaving students were formerly punished by dropping them to the bottom of a wishing well, in which sits the cottage from “Hansel and Gretel,” and locking them in the oven. Their beloved piano teacher and mentor, Mr. Staccato, has two talking dogs named Fred and Ginger, although they can only say “Did you ever?” and “Never!”

So the world is strange before the girls get whisked off by a backwards tidal wave to the underground land of Spoz, where they’re imprisoned by witches who force them to make countless French fries out of sentient potatoes from the land of Spudz. Yeah, you read that right.

On top of that, it’s a Wizard of Oz…well, fanfiction. It’s not a pastiche; it’s about a world in which Dorothy’s story is absolutely factual, although the girls themselves never actually go to Oz. That’s all well and good, but the weird thing is that the book series and the movie version of Oz both exist in Gumm Street. The real silver shoes (Dorothy’s shoes were originally silver, but the filmmakers changed them to red for the movie to show off the new color technology) are disguised with red paint as movie props. All of the girls have seen the movie, and Pru has read the first book several times. Which is fine, but they’re not very startled at all to learn that Oz is real. Which is…strange. There’s a general acceptance by our heroines of all the bewildering stuff that happens in the book, which I guess is natural when you live in a tree and are a student in Tuna-on-Rye, but when the characters adjust quickly to living in a giant Z and peeling endless blinking potatoes, it sort of leaves the reader in the dust.

This intense weirdness is compounded by the fact that the mythology behind the whole story makes no sense. I found myself totally lost as to how Spoz and Spudz had come to be, who was related to whom, whether or not Ivy’s Aunt Viola was actually a zombie, whether or not Cat had conjured the Wizard of Oz, how they wound up getting the second silver slipper, why Hieronymous Gumm had founded Sherbert Academy, who had magical powers and who didn’t, and who the villain Cha-Cha Staccato actually was. (She’s supposed to be out for revenge for her sister, the Wicked Witch of the West, but…the Wicked Witch of the East is dead too. That’s sort of the whole point of The Wizard of Oz!) I was also bewildered by Ivy’s Jinx, the beast that’s been living in her shadow for the past seven years, ever since Cha-Cha tricked her into taking the seven years’ bad luck of a broken mirror. show

The thing about the weirdness, though…often weird books seem like they’re trying really hard to be weird. Here Be Monsters! is one of these books; Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians is another. As weird as Gumm Street is, the weirdness never seems forced; the sheer crazy spills naturally off of the pages. It was too much kooky for me, and yet I find I can’t exactly fault it for that, since it almost seemed like it couldn’t be helped.

And Gumm Street does have some strong redeeming qualities. Their names are Ivy, Cat, Franny, and Pru. The four protagonists are extremely likeable. They’re all very distinct characters, with their own strengths and weaknesses and interests and fears; in their bizarre setting their personalities and relationships remain strong and believable. The history of how Cat and Pru were best friends before they drifted apart; Franny’s loneliness and jealousy; Ivy’s desire for friends conflicting with her fear of them getting hurt by her unluckiness; their growing mutual respect: all feel real and very much like honest girlhood. No doubt about it, the Gumm Street Girls are this book’s saving grace.

It’s also worth noting that Primavera’s plentiful scribbly illustrations are quite charming, in a Quentin Blake-ish fashion that fits nicely with the smatterings of Roald Dahl in her prose.

In the end, The Secret Order of the Gumm Street Girls gets three cupcakes. It’s an enjoyable enough read, and the characters are strong enough to balance out the epic crazy. There’s a clear setup for a sequel at the end, and odds are pretty good that I’ll be picking it up.

Luke was never supposed to exist. The Population Law says that families can only have two kids—and the Population Police will murder any third children they find. But So Luke lives in hiding in his parents’ attic, never allowed outside, not even allowed to eat with the family in case someone glances in the kitchen window.

But then everything changes—from his hiding spot he sees another child like him, a girl who shouldn’t exist, another third. He risks everything to meet her…And it turns out that she has a daring plan which might not just liberate the two of them, but every hidden child in the country. If only they can find the courage to do it…

I was expecting a bit more science fiction when I picked this book up, and instead got a dystopia with a more classic feel. It reads very much as a cross between 1984 and The Giver, set in the Great Depression. Except, of course, that it isn’t the depression; it’s a generic future where population explosion combined with drought and famine to topple the government, bringing a totalitarian regime to power. The book also touches on class, quite a bit; Luke’s family are poor farmers, barely able to keep the roof over their heads, completely unable to turn a profit. But they live next to a settlement of Barons, a class so wealthy and powerful they have hidden luxuries like illegal junk food…and their third children can get fake identity cards, leave their houses, and pretend to be normal.

The book does a pretty good job of showing just how miserable Luke is. He’s lonely and isolated, and it gets worse as the book goes on; the writing is vivid and clear. The characters are pretty standard. What makes the book good, though, is Jen, the girl Luke finds hidden in a Baron household. Jen is both passionate and naïve. She desperately wants to be free of the tyrannical Population Laws, and defies both her parents and the government to try and do so. But her passion blinds her; she believes she truly can fix everything, that it’ll be easy to do. She believes anti-government propaganda uncritically, while Luke discovers for himself that the truth isn’t what the government claims, and it isn’t what Jen and her circle of pre-teen rebels believe; it’s somewhere between the two, all shades of gray. And then…spoiler. show

The dystopia itself is pretty great, but then, I love a good eerily wrong society. (Shocking for long-time readers of this blog, I’m sure.) The book definitely has that; it’s developed and fascinating. Unfortunately, part of what makes it so upsetting is that it’s got an…hm, not exactly anti-choice message, but it skirts the line pretty closely. There’s a very effective scene where Jen and Luke discuss the government’s propaganda, encouraging women to have fewer children—only one, or none at all. And Luke knows that all women are required to have a surgery after they’ve had two children, to make it impossible to have more; and that if an accident happens and she gets pregnant again, she’s supposed to “take care of it.” Luke doesn’t know what that means, only that his mother knew she could never have “taken care of” him because she loves him so much and wanted a large family so badly. The juxtaposition of the evil government forcing sterilization on women and the loving mother defying them is pretty striking. It isn’t a pro-choice, pro-life question, because pro-choice is very definitely not pro-forced-sterilization (since that, you know, takes away your choice), but it comes close enough to make me uncomfortable. It didn’t strike me as intentional, or that it was a message the author was hoping readers would take away, but it was subtext nonetheless.

Otherwise, the book is a dandy little dystopia. A little off the beaten path for this blog, but solidly-written and definitely something that could be read, enjoyed, and discussed in a young-ish classroom. I would read the sequels (the further adventures of Luke, presumably still seeking a way to free the shadow children) if they were available free, but am not interested enough to pay for them, and I was mildly disturbed. But then again, isn’t that why you read dystopias? Anyway, I’m split; I’m giving this three cupcakes because my enjoyment of it was stronger than my discomfort, but it’s slightly generous on my part.