Review: Bone Magician

The Bone Magician - F.E. Higgins

An orphaned boy, Pin Carpue, is adrift in a Dickensian not-London after his beautiful and saintly mother dies and his father has disappeared following his uncle’s suspicious death.  He scrapes by working for an undertaker, staying up at night with the bodies making sure they’re truly dead.  Drugged one night at his post, he wakes to find a man and a young girl raising his charge from the dead so that she can tell her fiancee she forgives their last fight.  He later falls back in with the conjurers, barely escapes from a serial killer, and builds a new family of sorts.

There are a lot of characters and a lot of build up, making the first half of the book a bit of a slow boil.  Once threads start to get untangled, it becomes a lot more engaging.  This is a fun type of scary, more about the mystery and atmosphe than anything truly frightening, it’s perfect for middle schoolers.

Review: What I Saw and How I Lied

What I Saw and How I Lied – Judy Blundell

I don’t generally pick up historical fiction for children or young adults because I don’t read books to be taught something and it’s harder to write for a younger audience without trying to explain things and put them in context.  Having won the National Book Award wouldn’t except this book from that danger, but the idea behind it made it seem like I wouldn’t be reading an edifying story of America after the war.

The book starts out in New York in the heady, go-go period immediately following the end of World War II.  Evie lives in Queens with her beautiful mother (a femme-fatale blond), her loving step-father (a neighborhood bigwig) and his prying mother.  At 15, after years of hardship and barely scraping by, her biggest problem is her inability to “fill out a sweater.”  When her stepfather, Joe, dashes them off to Florida for an impromptu vacation she doesn’t even stop to consider how strangely he’s behaving.  Palm Springs is a ghost town at the tail end of summer.  As they become friendly with a few other vacationers who bring with them an air of glamorous malice that Evie senses, it isn’t enough to stop her from getting carried away by it all.  She also doesn’t see how her mother has been holding her back and how scared she is to see her daughter on the brink of womanhood.  As Evie begins to blossom under the attentions of a former soldier she meets who has shady ties to her step-father, she also slowly pieces together what everyone has been hiding from her.

I really enjoyed this book but I think if it had been written as an adult book, I would have loved it.  It was written as a flashback, but from not very far into the future.  Evie has perspective about what happened, but she’s still a girl and not very far past the action.  As things unfold, the reader senses where it’s going before Evie does and can see her naivete and enthusiasm interfering with her understanding.  It’s very skillfully done and didn’t make me want to shout at her “the killer’s behind the door you silly girl!” especially since in effect, she was the one telling me the story.  But I still would have liked the story better with the consideration and lack of immediacy that stories about teenagers written for an adult audience have.  As a bildungsroman, if it had been written with more than just a few months of hard-fought perspective, it would have had more impact.

I read this in an evening, which isn’t always the best way to give a book deep consideration, but I think there are a lot of things about it that will stick with me.  There is a palpable sense of malice and foreboding that doesn’t take away an understanding of Evie’s enjoyment of her adventure, but does cause you to wince at how slowly she’s realizing her part in a noir murder-mystery.

Review: Dream Girl

Dream Girl by Lauren Mechling

Tonight should be the first night of my honeymoon, but instead I’m at home reading and blogging about books.  This time tomorrow I should be much more happily installed in our pretty little beach house.  While not enough to ruin my trip, it’s enough to ruin the fun buzz of anticipation I’ve been building up ever since we started planning it.  I just have to remember that by this time tomorrow, Hurricane Hanna will be a distant memory.

And on to the book!

Claire has a French father who teaches French at NYU and a mother who is a ghostwriter and gossip magazine astrologist.  She lives in the faculty housing where I went to Marie’s party the other night and “accidentally” gets accepted into Stuyvesant, though the name of the super-competitive public school has been changed.  Her parents take her out of her alternative, expensive school and plop her into unfriendly and alien territory.  The only person she meets who isn’t too obsessed with extra-curriculars to hang out after school is another new girl, Becca, who is preternaturally poised and self-assured.  She’s also secretly the heiress to the Heinz fortune, though again the name has been changed.  Most of the plot and set-up is standard bubble-gum realistic fiction fare.  There are even trips to Bendels and Aspen, though the rich kids in the book aren’t jaded or bratty.  There’s a romantic interest (I think we’re supposed to like him, but he does come off as a bit scummy) who’s got a gorgeous and bitchy girlfriend, and there’s an evil ex-best friend who’s turned into the school mean girl.

But the twist is that Claire, Claire Voyant, has been having these crazy dreams about things that start popping up in her real life.  She learns that the women in her family tend to be “gifted” and that she can use this power to help the people around her and influence the course of her own life.

What any of this has to do with the cover art, I’m not sure.  Other than the model looking kind of ducky, as Claire is described as being.  I don’t know that I enjoyed the book that much, but would definitely recommend it to younger teen girls without reservation.  It’s take on New York is very good.  And some of the characters were interesting.  But all the pieces and characters and plots didn’t fit together smoothly enough.  It seems like the first in a series, and maybe I did enjoy it enough to read the next.  Though I’d probably be happier rereading Kiki Strike, I can absolutely imagine a 13-year-old girl loving this book and wanting to be Claire.