Active Voice

By Elise Primavera [LibraryThing — Amazon]

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.

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By Lynne Ewing [LibraryThing - Amazon]

Vanessa wishes she could be a normal highschooler, with normal concerns like zits and clothes and passing her classes…But she’s not. Instead, she’s got problems like the fact that whenever she gets excited or scared, she turns invisible. And her best friend can travel through time. And now someone has found out her secret, and all she knows is she’s in terrible danger…

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By Carolyn Hennesy [LibraryThing - Amazon]

Pandora, only daughter of Prometheus, is not exactly the most popular maiden in school. So when she finds a box containing all the evils of the world, she figures there’d be no harm in taking it to school to show off…right? Of course, the box gets opened. Now Pandora has six months to travel the known world with her two best friends and her dog, collecting the plagues. That’d be bad enough if the gods weren’t using her for their own purposes…

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By Michael Buckley [LibraryThing - Amazon]

Since returning to Ferryport Landing, now under the control of Mayor (Queen of) Heart(s) and Sheriff Nottingham, Sabrina has thrown herself into the business of being a Grimm with a will. But when their latest case causes rips in time to start opening up over town, that business seems even more dangerous than usual. Sabrina and Daphne find themselves on the other side of one of those rips, in a dystopian future where their very survival is in question. Can they get back to their own time and solve the case before they’re left with no future at all?

I found that I couldn’t really discuss my reactions to this book without talking about the various twists and turns the plot makes in some depth, so beware: there are major spoilers behind the cut, and they are not hidden behind a spoiler tag. You have been warned.

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Sorry about the lack of posts, guys; Rebecca and I were both doing NaNoWriMo and all other writing sort of fell by the wayside. But we’re back!

By Diane Stanley [Librarything - Amazon]

Despite the periodic wars that ravage her country, Bella’s childhood has been an idyllic one – raised by a loving, comfortable peasant family and bosom friends with Prince Julian. That is, until she discovers that she is actually the daughter of a knight, who sent her away when her mother died in childbirth, but who now wants her back. Bella is miserable with her cruel father and distant stepmother, and her misery increases when she hears of a threat to both Prince Julian’s life and the country’s tenuous peace with the neighboring kingdom. Now, armed only with a prophetic ring and her own courage, she must travel to a foreign land to save her friend, and hopefully bring peace to both realms.

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By Michael Buckley [The Sisters Grimm at Librarything - The Sisters Grimm at Amazon]

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

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

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By Nancy Farmer [Librarything - Amazon]

The Sea of Trolls is the story of a boy named Jack, who is nothing but a poor farmer’s son until the village’s mysterious bard offers to take him as an apprentice and teach him magic. But they’ve barely started when Northmen raiders attack, strike the bard down, and take Jack and his sister Lucy as slaves. From there, it’s all Jack can do to keep them alive—and try to use what he’s learned to someday get home.

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By E.D. Baker [LibraryThing - Amazon]

Princess Emeralda is clumsy and awkward. She doesn’t fit her mother’s idea of a princess (and she hates her mother’s idea of a proper prince for her to marry), and she’s also no good at the magic her aunt Grasssina, a powerful witch, has been trying to teach her. When it gets to be too much, Emeralda takes off and does something impulsive—she kisses the talking frog who says he’s really a prince. And he isn’t lying…but instead of freeing him from his enchantment, she’s turned into a frog, too. Now Emeralda and Eadric have to try and track down the witch who cast the spell in the first place if they ever want to be human again.

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By Tobias Druitt [Librarything - Amazon]

Corydon the shepherd boy is a monster, a mormoluke, with one normal human leg and one goat leg. That’s why he was thrown out of his village, and that’s why he is picked up as a freak in a pirates’ sideshow. There he meets other monsters like him: the Minotaur, the Sphinx, the beautiful, tragic Medusa, and more. With the help of a magic staff, Corydon and the monsters escape from the pirates, but the gods of Olympus are united against Corydon and his friends, and it isn’t long before the greedy and cowardly Perseus is uniting the “heroes” of Greece into an army to wipe out the monsters. Corydon must journey into the Underworld to learn how to use the staff to save his new family, but what exactly does such salvation mean?

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By Wendy Mass [Book One: Librarything - Amazon / Book Two: Libarything - Amazon]

Rapunzel’s twelfth birthday is just ruined when a witch shows up and announces that Rapunzel’s parents traded their firstborn for a handful of lettuce leaves from the witch’s garden twelve years ago, and the witch has come to collect. Now Rapunzel is trapped in a tower with no doors, hair that’s growing freakishly fast, and a strange little green creature watching her every move. Meanwhile, Prince Benjamin is having a hard enough time getting through his awkward stage without the interference of his annoying cousin Elkin. He wants to distinguish himself, but how? He’s no hero. At least, not until he hears a girl singing in a tower…

Princess Rose’s parents didn’t really mean to not invite the oldest, meanest fairy in the realm to their daughter’s christening – they thought she was dead! Offended, the fairy places a curse on Rose: at age sixteen, she will prick her finger on a spindle and die. Although the youngest fairy in the realm is able to change “die” to “sleep for a hundred years,” Rose’s parents are understandably overprotective…at least until that fated encounter with a spindle. One hundred years later, the Prince (he’s still working on a name) is trying to solve the mystery of the nearby forest, and the castle hidden within it. Things are complicated by his mother the Queen, who is part ogre and still gets a taste for human flesh every so often…

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