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.)

Summerton is the most beautiful resort town in New Zealand, but since Keri’s older brother killed himself unexpectedly, she’s been even less enchanted with the town than usual. Then she talks to Janna and Sione, whose older brothers also killed themselves – without warning and without leaving a note. Sensing a pattern, the three of them start looking for a serial killer, but Summerton’s secrets may just be darker – and more supernatural – than they think.

The Shattering is not a book about magic. Oh sure, there’s magic in it, and that’s what sets the plot in motion. But at its heart, The Shattering is about things that are much more raw and real: the grieving process. Secrets. Bullying. The complicated ways we relate to the places we’re from. Summer flings. Friendship. In fact, for a significant chunk of the book I wasn’t 100% sure there was going to be any magic, and I wouldn’t have minded in the least if there hadn’t been, since everything else was handled so deftly – except that I wouldn’t have been able to tell you guys about it here.

I honestly don’t have a lot of deep thoughts to share about this book, but here’s a few salient points:

• It’s incredibly gripping – I picked it up while sitting by the pool on vacation in Florida, and the next time I looked up the sun was setting and it was time to get ready for dinner. It’s also a little creepifying – don’t read it right before bed, maybe.
  
• The characters are wonderfully complex and feel like real teenagers; even when they’re saying horrible things or being petty or cruel, they still read as decent, complicated people.
  
• As with Karen’s previous book, Guardian of the Dead, The Shattering is consciously diverse and explicitly addresses issues of race, gender, and sexuality throughout. It also draws strongly on its New Zealand setting and references Samoan and Maori traditions and culture. All of that is basically super great.
  
• It is, unsurprisingly, pretty sad – after all, it’s about three teenagers whose brothers have just died. I was in tears by the end, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.
  
• Did I mention? It’s really freaking good.

While Guardian of the Dead was excellent, The Shattering is nearly flawless. My one teeny tiny quibble is that while the book spends a lot of time on its heterosexual love triangle, I would have liked to see Keri, who is gay, have at least a hint of a love life, even a one-sided one. Still, as she’s the primary narrator, she doesn’t exactly get short shrift, story-wise (and there is a mention of her dating at the very end).

All in all, The Shattering gets the full five cupcakes. Bring on the next book!

(Requisite disclaimer: Karen is a pal of mine. But honestly, I think I would have loved this book just as much if she were my mortal enemy. Well, maybe not just as much. But close to it!)

Nicholas Flamel and his wife Perenelle have lived nearly seven hundred years, thanks to Nicholas’s possession of the Codex, a book full of magical secrets like the elixir of life, the spell to turn base metals to gold…and the key to bringing back the old gods and destroying the human race. When Nicholas is attacked by his almost-as-ancient enemy, Dr. John Dee, and the book and Perenelle are both taken, Nicholas knows he doesn’t have long before the human race is wiped out by Dee’s masters, the Dark Elders. All Nicholas has on his side are Josh and Sophie, ordinary 15-year-old twins who didn’t mean to get mixed up in all this. But Nicholas suspects they may be the twins prophesied in the Codex, who may save the world…or destroy it.

In the past decade, there has been a slew of kids’ and YA fantasy series that became phenomena: Harry Potter. Twilight. A Series of Unfortunate Events. Percy Jackson. The Hunger Games. And, naturally, such success brings more aspiring authors to the 18-and-under market. While the majority of the successful ones do genuinely seem interested in writing stories for and about young people, every so often I find myself getting the sense that a certain author is merely jumping on the kids’/YA bandwagon. There’s the sneaking suspicion that the author isn’t the least bit interested in kids, but decided to write for that market because it’s lucrative – and after all, how hard can it be? They’re just kids.

I don’t know Michael Scott’s life. He may have always dreamed of being a YA author, in which case, congratulations! But The Alchemyst really felt like a bandwagon book.

That’s not to say there aren’t strengths to the book. Scott does some really interesting worldbuilding, populating his pages with basically every ancient pantheon in history. I found his interpretations of Hecate, Bastet, and the Morrigan to be fascinating, especially in the ways they negotiated the modern world, and I loved the throwaway mentions of figures like Odin and Persephone and the passing references to Arthurian legend and American folklore. The gods were all nicely scary, even the “good” ones, and Dee (based, like the Flamels, on a real historical figure-cum-legend) was a solid antagonist.

Perenelle, Flamel’s wife, was quite frankly great – smarter, more resourceful, and more engaging than her husband. I loved that even though she spent most of the book in Dee’s clutches, she never became a damsel in distress, but instead used her magic and cunning to send messages to Nicholas and try to escape. For that matter, I loved that there were nearly twice as many major female characters as male ones in The Alchemyst, and that they were all more powerful than the dudes.

Even Flamel was fine, if a bit of an enigma (in that annoying “I won’t answer your questions, not for any real reason, just to drag out the plot” way, to boot). If Scott had jumped on that other literary bandwagon of the Oughties and written a magical Da Vinci Code, letting his clear fascination with Dee and history and mythology take center stage, he probably would have had a stronger book, or at least one that feels less like an imposter.

But he didn’t, and we’re left not with Flamel or Dee as the protagonist, as Scott admits in the Afterword he originally intended, but Josh and Sophie. And Josh and Sophie do not resemble teenagers in any way, shape, or form. In fact, it took me several pages to realize they were supposed to be teenagers at all (like, I didn’t pick up on it until the narration said “Josh and Sophie were fifteen”). Before that, I was genuinely perplexed as to why this YA book starred a couple of 30-year-olds.

The real problem, though, is not that Josh and Sophie don’t feel authentically youthful, but that they don’t feel authentically anything. They’re total ciphers, given character traits and knowledge at random to drive the plot forward. The trivia they spout off is ludicrously specific: their expertise in archaeology is hand-waveable thanks to their absentee archaeologist parents, but archaeology is not the same thing as paleontology, so I’m not sure why Sophie knows that pteranodons are older than pterosaurs, and it certainly doesn’t explain why Josh knows how old Joan of Arc and King Tut were when they died and why he can name the craters of the moon. Conversely, they know almost nothing about mythology, mostly so Flamel can explain it to them and the reader, but you’d think they’d have picked some of it up from their parents.

Aside from their extremely specific and esoteric knowledge and Josh’s tendency to run off at the mouth, they don’t really have personalities to speak of. Every so often Scott stops the narration to inform us that, say, Sophie likes tea or Josh is afraid of snakes, and he repeatedly tells us (but never shows us) that the twins love and rely on each other, but there are no consistent patterns of behavior to shape their characters. At one point, the twins are watching Flamel and another ally fight off the bad guys.

“We should help,” Josh said.

“And do what?” Sophie asked, without a trace of sarcasm.

[Two paragraphs later.]

“We’ve got to help!” Sophie said.

“How?” Josh shouted, but his twin had run into the kitchen, desperately looking for a weapon…

There’s never any acknowledgment that the twins have switched sides of the argument. It’s shoddy editing, but it’s also symptomatic of the twins being such blank slates that either one of them could easily take one side of the argument or the other. It’s not that Sophie is helpful and Josh is reluctant, or vice versa. They’re both just empty.

Finally, Scott uses my least favorite narrative trick in order to give Sophie magical abilities: one god touches her, and she gets them. Another god touches her and she understands them. There’s no earning of her skills and no effort to bring them under control; she just meets two gods and suddenly she’s a powerful magician. (It also enhances her senses, but because she already had a preternaturally good sense of smell when it was convenient for the plot, it lacks impact.) By watching Sophie learn how to use her powers, we could have gotten into her headspace a bit, but Scott doesn’t bother, thus exacerbating the feeling that Sophie is a plot device and not a character.

There are some great concepts underpinning The Alchemyst, but they’re undermined by lazy writing and nonexistent characterization. To make a book for young people work, you need to put engaging young people in it. As I said above, I don’t know Scott’s life; he could very well have spent ages crafting Josh and Sophie’s personalities. But unlike the clearly lovingly-researched rest of the book, they read as if he doesn’t care about them. And if he doesn’t care, why should I? The Alchemyst gets one cupcake, and I won’t be picking up the rest of the series.

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.

It’s shaping up to be a perfectly boring summer for Jane, Mark, Katharine, and Martha, until they find a strange coin on the sidewalk that grants wishes…sort of. The coin grants half wishes, so you must wish for twice as much as you want, lest you end up with half a talking cat or half a safe journey home. Figuring out how to double most wishes is simple, but when it comes to finding a happy ending for themselves and their mother, the siblings need something more than just a little arithmetic.

I’ve been meaning to read this book for…oh, probably about two decades now. Seriously, I’ve noticed it in libraries and bookstores all my life and just never got around to picking it up until recently. And it is just as charming as it always looked! I tend to really enjoy mid-century children’s fantasy, with its warm, conversational tone and interesting glimpse into a different era of childhood. This book, published in 1954 but set in the 20s, made me long for streetcars and silent movies and, I don’t know, pinafores and stuff. The prose and the mood were just absolutely lovely.

I really liked the hook of the story – the half-wishes – and I also enjoyed all of the children, who are all very quickly captured in a few words. For example, “Martha was the youngest, and very difficult.” It has the charm of a child repeating what he or she has heard adults say about a sibling, and yet tells you exactly what age Martha is and what her disposition is like. Perfect! I was a bit annoyed that Mark, the only boy, seems to be a lot more together than any of his sisters, but I tried to let it slide as a product of its time.

There are a couple of other elements that I had to let slide as products of their time as well. At one point the children are lost in the desert and encounter “Achmed the Arab,” who promptly kidnaps them. Achmed is a broad and unflattering stereotype, but at least Mark points out (albeit in a clumsy, white-man’s-burden-y fashion) that Achmed’s claim that the coin belongs to his people might be true, and “You know how people used to be unjust to natives in the olden days.” The book is trying, at least. I had a similar reaction to their mother, who we’re told is a stubborn and capable single mother and career woman, but who is completely unable to cope with the idea of magic, to the point of it affecting her mental health, while her love interest takes it all in stride. And while the children think she really wants to be editor-in-chief of the paper where she works, what she really wants, it turns out, is to get married and stay home with the kids. The example with Achmed is certainly more potentially damaging today, but both aspects of the book rubbed me the wrong way. But again, their products of the time, and there’s not much to be done about them besides pointing out that they exist and avoiding them in modern books.

My major quibble with the book that was not an element of the 1950s was the resolution. The kids’ mother’s boyfriend, Mr. Smith, who knows all about the magic, proposes, but she turns him down because, having seen glimpses of the various wishes, she thinks she’s going crazy. Since the children want them to get married, they make a series of increasingly dumber wishes to make their mother believe in the magic, but it’s Mr. Smith who finally makes the wish that works and leads to their happy ending. Which annoys me because it’s the grown man in a book about three little girls and a boy saving the day, but also because he’s not the protagonist. The kids are the protagonists, and I wanted them to figure it out, not some random dude!

Aside from this rather annoying conclusion, though, Half Magic is, as I’ve said, an extremely charming book, and makes me want to read the rest of Eager’s work (aside from The Well-Wishers, which I’ve read many times). Four cupcakes.

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.

[Sometimes we come across books that even we can’t finish. But how can we give them a rating if we haven’t finished them? Thus we have the Unfinished/Unrated category, for those times when we want to talk about a book we didn’t finish – and why.]

From the back cover copy: “In order to fit in at her new school, Jessie accepts a dare to spend one night in a local cemetery. Once inside the heavy iron entrance gate, she encounters a handsome young boy named Paul. He tells her that she is just in time to watch the rehearsal of Tombstone Tea, a memorial for those buried in the cemetery in which actors impersonate the deceased. But Jessie notices that there is something strange about these actors – something deadly.”

I struggled about a third of the way through this book before eventually giving up, but I was skeptical of my ability to finish it by the second page. I didn’t run across anything that offended me or anything – it’s just really poorly written. Like, the worst prose I have encountered since this blog started, or at least the worst prose that wasn’t a translation from another language. In fact, I checked the author bio very early on to make sure it wasn’t originally written in German or something. Since Dahme is a lifelong Philadelphian, I’m guessing not.

The book is written in first person, which makes the awkward, stilted prose seem even more unnatural. It doesn’t help that Dahme seems to have a hate on for contractions, and doesn’t always make her sentences cohesive. Here’s an example from the second page, where Jessie describes her ability to sense the presence of the dead:

“A face would flash before my eyes, or I’d hear a voice I did not recognize whisper or laugh in my ear. It was a bit distracting and, of course, I never shared this with anyone. People would think that I was crazy, although it had happened in small ways for as long as I could remember, particularly if I was in a place that had some history.”

The “did not” in the first sentence so jarringly formal that it took me out of the narrative. In the second and third sentences, the first clauses have nothing to do with the second. What does the distracting aspect of seeing ghosts have to do with telling other people? What does the length of time Jessie’s been seeing them for have to do with people thinking she’s crazy? I’ll admit my current love affair with Reasoning with Vampires has made me more conscious of grammar as I read, but seriously, this is not good writing.

The blurb I quoted at the beginning of this review shows the other major problem with Dahme’s writing – it’s more concerned with description than action or character. Is it really necessary for us to know that the entrance gate to the cemetery is heavy iron (as opposed to what, light iron?)? No. But you’d best believe that I learned all about the heaviness of that gate – as well as every other aspect of the cemetery, because the entire first third of the book consists of one scene with one setting. I’d really have been more interested in seeing Jessie do something.

I could have forced my way through Tombstone Tea, but I wouldn’t have enjoyed it, and the book wouldn’t have rated more than a cupcake, probably less. For a bestseller, I’d make the effort to at least keep abreast of market trends. Since this book seems to be almost completely unheard of, I’ll pass.

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.

Miri is stuck in the middle between twin brothers and twin sisters, and feels totally alone, especially when they move to a big old house in the middle of the country. But when she finds a mysterious piece of glass in her room, she looks through it and finds herself transported to 1935, where she meets a girl just her age named Molly, who begs Miri to save her. Now Miri’s got to figure out how to get both of them back to the present – and it might just be a matter of life and death.

This is so cute! Right from the cover on down, everything about it is adorable. Miri is a likable protagonist in the Imaginative Loner mode, and Molly is a little spitfire (and feisty orphans or semi-orphans from the 30s are just about my favorite thing ever). I also love a good time travel plot handled well, and The Magic Half is definitely that; watching the girls set up the necessary components to make sure that in 75 years Miri is able to set the plot in motion was a delight. Plus I can’t really fault a book that’s all about two little girls figuring out magic, defeating a bad guy, and becoming friends.

I also thought a side aspect of the book was done really well: the sibling rivalry. Since we started this blog I’ve run across quite a few books where the siblings are viciously nasty to each other, actively wishing for the other to experience physical agony and so on. Like, ten-year-old kids, wishing for this. I find that more than a little disturbing. This book has siblings who tease, annoy, exclude, and fight with each other – boy do they ever – but they still come off as a believable family of non-sociopaths who love each other. Even when Miri whacks her brother over the head with a shovel, it’s clearly in the heat of the moment, and she’s terrified that she’s hurt him. Take note, children’s authors: this is how you write believably antagonistic siblings who don’t come off like future serial killers!

Anyway, the book was basically a big pile of charm and delighted me all the way through, so: four and a half cupcakes.

Mae’s life has changed forever now that she knows about magic — about demons and magicians — but now that her magic-wielding brother Jamie is safe, she thought they were done with that world forever. Then she sees Jamie cavorting with Gerald, the magician who took over the Circle trying to kill them, and she has to call the brothers Alan and Nick again. Except they’ve changed: Nick’s new powers are limitless, and there’s some kind of wedge between him and Alan now. Now, Mae has to figure out what the magicians are up to, how to get Jamie away from them, and how to save Nick from the magicians too — and save Nick from himself.

Wow, that was a crap summary. Sorry!

When I reviewed The Demon’s Lexicon earlier this year, I wrote about my biggest issue with the book being the narrator, Nick:

I think Brennan walks a very fine line with Nick. He’s not a character people should be able to identify with, but having a completely non-empathetic protagonist could also make it hard to enjoy the story, since it’s entirely told through Nick’s POV. ….

Nick’s POV is uncaring, so it isn’t like he asks other characters what they’re feeling or why, how they’re doing, how they got to be the way they are. Because he never gets into anyone else’s head — he just doesn’t care — the reader doesn’t get to, either. I felt somewhat cut off from the supporting cast throughout, which included characters I probably would have otherwise been able to empathize with.

So hey, it turns out I was dead right! I mean, about my preferences as a reader, if nothing else. This book is from Mae’s POV, rather than Nick’s, and I liked reading about her much better. Mae is an interesting character; she’s the only one of the four protagonists (or the villains, for that matter) who doesn’t have any useful training: she’s not magic like Nick and Jamie, and she’s not a trained fighter like Alan. But she’s bold and determined to get all of them (especially Jamie) through things alive. She plans, she finds allies, she risks herself to save other people. All that is pretty great, and she makes for a dynamic protagonist. Which is great! Which is why part of the climax really bugged me.

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There was one other plot point near the end I took some issue with: show

There was one serious positive, though. I’m always pleased when I run across a book with a GLBT character who’s a) well written, and b) whose sexuality is a facet of the character, and not his or her entirety. I felt that Jamie was well done in that regard — him being gay was certainly A Big Deal, in that it came up repeatedly, but I thought it was interesting that the big coming out scene was about magic, not sexuality. And I liked that hey, Mae wasn’t the only one who made stupid choices because of her crush on a not-so-great guy.

Speaking of romances, I was pretty… meh about Mae and Nick, overall. I’m not a shippy reader, and broody bad boys don’t do it for me overall. I wasn’t made uncomfortable by their dynamic, but I can certainly see a case for Nick leaning towards Cullen-esque behavior. It didn’t ping my radar as I read, but in retrospect I’m not thrilled by it.

As a whole, this book was a reasonably fun read, but it also read very much as a second book to me — its primary purpose was to put things in play, move characters from Point A at the end of the first book to Point B for the series climax. (I read it a month or so ago and could barely remember what the actual plot was when I started this review.) Brennan’s writing and world building remain great, and Mae was a fine character. I’ll definitely pick up the series conclusion when it comes out, so the book earns three and a half cupcakes.