Middle grade books I have recently read
Jan. 2nd, 2022 08:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulyI seem to have gotten into a bit of a situation on the NYPL app, because every book recommends me to two or three others, and if you add that to the ones I already was interested in reading it's a veritable flood of middle grade and YA fantasy. (And sometimes not fantasy.)
It's really amazing how little crossover there is between the "also recommended" and the books I see people talking about in my own corner of kidlit readers.
It's also amazing how incredibly different this is from my childhood. The endlessly huge library in Robin McKinley's Beauty was my dream world. I read fast, we never could keep a library card (or rather, we could never remember to return the books, so same diff), I had no friends, and so I always needed more books to read. Sure, I could happily read the same book a dozen times in a row, but sooner or later you want something new.
A world in which I could find as many books as I like literally at the touch of my fingertips - unbelievable. (And yet, weirdly, there are still bizarre gaps. But that's another complaint for another day.)
Ember is a dragon. She is, as far as anybody knows, the very last fire dragon - and luckily, what most people know is that fire dragons are extinct entirely. She would be too, but her adoptive father is incredibly softhearted, and when he saw a baby dragon with its slaughtered mother he didn't think "Good thing, this vicious monster would kill me in a heartbeat!" like any normal person but "Oh, no, poor baby!" and cast a spell to hide this baby dragon as a baby human and raise her as his adoptive daughter.
Due to her inconveniently impossible to hide wings (they can be made invisible, but they're still there) and her bad habit of bursting into flames at random moments, she's never been to school. Eventually she ships herself off to her distant aunt's research station in Antarctica in order to keep from catching fire, and the plot kicks off.
There is a lot of plot. Shockingly, she's not the very last fire dragon entirely. Also shockingly, ice dragons have cities and speak Middle English. (The Middle English was actually shocking.) They are not the monsters in this book. Most of the plot involves stopping an ice dragon hunt, and hopefully ALL such hunts in the future.
Very readable. There's an asshole prince with a heart of gold and a hidden pain, and who doesn't love that? But then, weirdly, the afterword is all "Unfortunately, the hunting of endangered species is a problem today" and, while that's not false it's a bit of a weird note when the whole point of the book is that dragons are not wild unreasoning beasts but people. Like, that's a weird way to frame this, isn't it? It's weird. Made me a little iffy on the whole book that isn't afterword.
There's a lot of room for a sequel, wherein presumably we'll find more fire dragons. Nobody is ever really the last of their kind, after all, not in fictionland.
****
This one reminded me so much of Wait Till Helen Comes. If that's what you're looking for in a book, that's what you'll get.
It is more than a little irksome that the ending pretends things are resolved when they're not. Both pairs of sisters, ghostly and alive, reconcile... but the living sisters reconcile by the younger one taking a minute to see her older sister's point of view, and there's no real hint that the older one will or should do the same for her. Moreover, their interpersonal problems can be laid soundly at their parents' feet, who blatantly favor the older girl (or rather, her skating) over the younger. It certainly is convenient that their other child doesn't have any interests that aren't portable or scheduled! This is not going to be fixed through ghostly intervention, and both sisters suffer from it. But maybe that's the point. The ghost sisters don't seem interested in reconciling with their parents either. They've got each other and their ghost dog, that's enough.
****
This is a Little Women retelling - contemporary setting, Muslim characters.
I actually never have made it through Little Women! But from what I've read of the book, this seems to very neatly and clearly stop before the often-bundled-in sequels start - nobody's old enough to get married but clearly the (equivalent of) Jo/Laurie shipping is strong, and while the Beth analog did have a serious illness she's in recovery and we're explicitly told she has a great prognosis.
It seemed... honestly, it seemed a little incomplete. Not short in a sense that "okay, maybe it's not that long" but... kinda like space in between the chapters wasn't filled out as much as I would expect? IDK. It's entirely possible that this would be better appreciated by a Little Women fan.
****
Pretty standard middle grade magic school. Did some interesting things with characterization, though... but honestly, it just raises more questions and I'm not sure we'll get answers. Some people wiggled out of responsibility entirely for their role in the events preceding the plot. Room for a sequel, but it can stand without one. (Kinda wanna see a sequel.)
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It's really amazing how little crossover there is between the "also recommended" and the books I see people talking about in my own corner of kidlit readers.
It's also amazing how incredibly different this is from my childhood. The endlessly huge library in Robin McKinley's Beauty was my dream world. I read fast, we never could keep a library card (or rather, we could never remember to return the books, so same diff), I had no friends, and so I always needed more books to read. Sure, I could happily read the same book a dozen times in a row, but sooner or later you want something new.
A world in which I could find as many books as I like literally at the touch of my fingertips - unbelievable. (And yet, weirdly, there are still bizarre gaps. But that's another complaint for another day.)
Ember is a dragon. She is, as far as anybody knows, the very last fire dragon - and luckily, what most people know is that fire dragons are extinct entirely. She would be too, but her adoptive father is incredibly softhearted, and when he saw a baby dragon with its slaughtered mother he didn't think "Good thing, this vicious monster would kill me in a heartbeat!" like any normal person but "Oh, no, poor baby!" and cast a spell to hide this baby dragon as a baby human and raise her as his adoptive daughter.
Due to her inconveniently impossible to hide wings (they can be made invisible, but they're still there) and her bad habit of bursting into flames at random moments, she's never been to school. Eventually she ships herself off to her distant aunt's research station in Antarctica in order to keep from catching fire, and the plot kicks off.
There is a lot of plot. Shockingly, she's not the very last fire dragon entirely. Also shockingly, ice dragons have cities and speak Middle English. (The Middle English was actually shocking.) They are not the monsters in this book. Most of the plot involves stopping an ice dragon hunt, and hopefully ALL such hunts in the future.
Very readable. There's an asshole prince with a heart of gold and a hidden pain, and who doesn't love that? But then, weirdly, the afterword is all "Unfortunately, the hunting of endangered species is a problem today" and, while that's not false it's a bit of a weird note when the whole point of the book is that dragons are not wild unreasoning beasts but people. Like, that's a weird way to frame this, isn't it? It's weird. Made me a little iffy on the whole book that isn't afterword.
There's a lot of room for a sequel, wherein presumably we'll find more fire dragons. Nobody is ever really the last of their kind, after all, not in fictionland.
This one reminded me so much of Wait Till Helen Comes. If that's what you're looking for in a book, that's what you'll get.
It is more than a little irksome that the ending pretends things are resolved when they're not. Both pairs of sisters, ghostly and alive, reconcile... but the living sisters reconcile by the younger one taking a minute to see her older sister's point of view, and there's no real hint that the older one will or should do the same for her. Moreover, their interpersonal problems can be laid soundly at their parents' feet, who blatantly favor the older girl (or rather, her skating) over the younger. It certainly is convenient that their other child doesn't have any interests that aren't portable or scheduled! This is not going to be fixed through ghostly intervention, and both sisters suffer from it. But maybe that's the point. The ghost sisters don't seem interested in reconciling with their parents either. They've got each other and their ghost dog, that's enough.
This is a Little Women retelling - contemporary setting, Muslim characters.
I actually never have made it through Little Women! But from what I've read of the book, this seems to very neatly and clearly stop before the often-bundled-in sequels start - nobody's old enough to get married but clearly the (equivalent of) Jo/Laurie shipping is strong, and while the Beth analog did have a serious illness she's in recovery and we're explicitly told she has a great prognosis.
It seemed... honestly, it seemed a little incomplete. Not short in a sense that "okay, maybe it's not that long" but... kinda like space in between the chapters wasn't filled out as much as I would expect? IDK. It's entirely possible that this would be better appreciated by a Little Women fan.
Pretty standard middle grade magic school. Did some interesting things with characterization, though... but honestly, it just raises more questions and I'm not sure we'll get answers. Some people wiggled out of responsibility entirely for their role in the events preceding the plot. Room for a sequel, but it can stand without one. (Kinda wanna see a sequel.)
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