Nothing’s Ever the Same by Cyn Vargas

Posted on April 26, 2024 by pagesofjulia

With a remarkably true-to-life adolescent narrator, this novella charts the large and small traumas that accompany a girl’s coming of age.

Cyn Vargas’s Nothing’s Ever the Same is a starkly honest coming-of-age story told in the disarming voice of its 13-year-old protagonist. Simple but moving, this novella documents events that are traumatic but not unusual, thus marking the kinds of pain that are heartrending, as well as common, for a child approaching young adulthood.

“The first time I saw my mom cry was after my dad’s heart attack,” Itzel begins in the opening chapter, “Angioplasty and Piñatas.” The heart attack comes during preparation for her 13th birthday party. After a brief hospital stay, he comes home and improves quickly. But this event, coming at an important symbolic point in Itzel’s adolescence, is the first of a number of upheavals, as Vargas’s title suggests.

Itzel’s beloved father recovers from his heart attack, but something feels off. “Dad was different, like moving the lamp… the light and shadows hit in a different way that made all that I was used to seem a little strange.” The family suffers one loss and then another. Itzel explores new feelings for her best friend. And then she sees something that will change the course of life for her entire family. “I shut my eyes tight to make it go away like erasing the wrong answer on a test, but I still saw… the wrong answer etched into the paper though the lead was brushed away.” What to do with her new knowledge? Who to blame? As the known routine is uprooted for Itzel and her parents, she has to navigate redefining relationships. While the circumstances of these changes for Itzel are specific and acute, her experience reflects universal elements of being a teenager: disappointment, betrayal, discovery, acceptance, and always, unavoidably, change.

Vargas (On the Way) gives Itzel a straightforward storytelling voice, often naïve but also sharp-eyed. She is clever, thoughtful, and quick to question what she or others have done wrong to bring pain and difficulty to her family. Her father, mother, Tia Amelia, and best friend Fred are characters sketched only briefly in Itzel’s telling, but each has personality and redeeming qualities even when making mistakes. The author behind the narrator commands this story with a quiet compassion. Nothing’s Ever the Same is a work of restraint and understatement, its young narrator capable of stoic relating of events as well as emotional reaction. The effect is deeply moving.

This review originally ran in the March 14, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 cups of orange soda.

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Junia, The Book Mule of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson, illus. by David C. Gardner

Posted on April 22, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Well, I was sure I’d been sold on this book by one of my talented colleagues at Shelf Awareness, but I cannot find that review. Somebody sold me on it, and I’d credit them if I could, because it was a solid recommendation.

Junia is an absolute delight. Aimed at readers aged 4-8, it’s a sweet picture book in simple but fun prose, starring the mule Junia that some readers will know from 2019’s successful novel The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek. Junia and her Book Woman travel the hills and hollers of eastern Kentucky during the Great Depression as part of that state’s Pack Horse Librarian project, under the WPA. (The books are fiction but strongly rooted in fact; Richardson is a recognized researcher of this unusual bit of history.) The book follows them for a single day of environmental and climactic hardships, including encounters with wildlife and a narrow miss when a bridge washes away. They visit diverse households and communities, delivering reading material and having amiable interactions with readers. The relationship between Junia and her Book Woman is loving; it’s an all-around wholesome story.

There is alliteration, fun onomatopoeia, and perfectly wonderful illustrations that reward a close look: note the identifiable rhododendron, the child with the paper airplane and a book called Flight, and a faraway fire tower that we’ll approach on later pages. The visual style is sort of soft-edged but quite detailed, with a bit of whimsy, and lots of personality for the starring mule. I love the regional, historical focus, and I feel it strikes a lovely balance between entertaining and readable, and educational. The book’s text is followed by an Author’s Note with “real” facts and historical photographs, so the young reader (perhaps with extra help in this section) can get a bit more enrichment out of it, and quite painlessly, I think.

I did buy this book with a particular reader in mind, who is eight years old, and I thought of her several times as I read: I know her dad will tickle her with his own “soft whiskered muzzle” as Junia does to her favorite little readers, and I know they’ll enjoy the farts. This quick read was really fun for me – I’m glad I stepped out of my usual zone to check it out. I guess I’ll try the Book Woman novel next!

Rating: 8 shiny red apples.

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The Witches of Bellinas by J. Nicole Jones

Posted on April 19, 2024 by pagesofjulia

In this atmospheric and suspenseful novel, an exclusive coastal California community is either the best thing to ever happen to an unhappy newlywed, as her husband believes, or a frightening trap.

J. Nicole Jones’s The Witches of Bellinas sets a newlywed couple in a vibrant small community–a lovely wealthy commune, or a cult?–and watches the fallout, in an atmospheric, suspenseful experiment involving witchcraft, love, and dividing loyalties.

Tansy and Guy have been married mere months, although they’ve been together for a decade, when they move from New York City to the hamlet of Bellinas on the coast of northern California. Wealthy, health-oriented, idyllic, and highly exclusive, Bellinas is led by the charismatic Manny, or Father M to his followers, a business mogul turned self-styled guru, and his wife, Mia, a former model. Guy falls easily and head-over-heels into the lush, indulgent lifestyle: surfing, diving for abalone, carousing. Tansy, expected like all the wives to serve her husband’s whims, finds Bellinas a bit suspicious. But the town’s high shine, like its perfect weather, is hard to resist. She so wants things to work out with Guy: “I let the happiness I felt in that moment of renewed closeness grow taller than the forest of disappointments we had collected in the course of years together.” So she goes along. “Everything would be fine. How could it be otherwise? Bellinas was so perfect-looking.”

The Witches of Bellinas is narrated by Tansy in hindsight, from an apparent confinement in the town schoolhouse, after something has gone awry. With her academic background in the classics (a vocation sacrificed for Guy), she flavors her conversations and her narrative with literary references that increase her story’s sense of deep foreboding, frequently comparing herself to Cassandra. The reader must wait, however, to discover the precise nature of the trouble in paradise. Is the creeping dread about the neighboring forest fires? The ocean’s force? The local blend of calming tea? Are the powers at work in Bellinas magical or cult leadership at work?

Jones (Low Country) gives Tansy a strong sense of the wrongs done women at the hands of men, from both her scholarly work and her experience. “The plans of women have been called plots, schemes, murder, but if we do not claim the future as our bodies are claimed by men, then both are gobbled up by husbands and historians.” She writes, it seems, for her life. “Do not discount the truth of the old wives’ tales…. What is this history if not a wife’s tale? A truth revealed by unlikelihoods does not make it less true.”

At the intersection of the supernatural and simple human ugliness, The Witches of Bellinas gives its readers chills and thrills along with a profound sense of wrongs done, but no heroes or villains. This is a novel for anyone who’s wondered if the picturesque might be too good to be true.

This review originally ran in the March 8, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 6 crackers.

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Soulstar by C. L. Polk

Posted on April 15, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Book three of the Kingston Cycle does not disappoint. It did feel somewhat like a shift in tone for me, and changed up my pacing. But I am a big fan of Polk and hope they’re at work on more like this.

In this installment we see a new protagonist again: Robin Thorpe, who we knew in the first two books as a nurse, Miles’s dear friend, and a witch of the less-privileged, illegal sort. She is also an activist and an important member of the movement to free the witches from asylums and gain some basic human rights for all citizens. She was suspicious of Grace at first (for which I don’t blame her), but also a big enough person to remain open-hearted and learn to trust. (This process we also saw with Grace learning to accept Tristan over her original prejudices.) We’re building communities and coalitions: Robin working with her people, including the Solidarity movement, and their elected official; Robin, Miles, Tristan, and Grace working together and with the Amaranthines for the good of Aeland and its people. Trust has to develop slowly and naturally in several of these relationships; the process is slow and messy, but it’s working.

Early in the book, we have a bit of a revelation. One of the freed witches is Robin’s spouse, Zelind. Mere kids when they married in secret, they are now reunited, but only after decades of separation and trauma. Robin will now navigate the political activist roller coaster she’s entered into, while also trying to reintegrate a longed-for relationship with some profound challenges. Zelind of course turns out to have some talents to offer as well, aside from being Robin’s love.

It was my feeling that Soulstar takes a darker turn than the previous two books. The stakes are getting higher, or the problems the reader is aware of are getting bigger – they’re not new, but we’re getting deeper into this world and learning more. As I’ve said before, this world’s problems are easily seen as analogous to our own.

Grace led us through the gilded reception hall, looking neither left nor right at the people lifting priceless works of art from the walls. It pricked my conscience until I turned my face up to behold our reflections in the mirrored tiles in the ceiling fixed together by gold moldings. Solid gold, I remembered from the time we trooped into the palace as schoolchildren to stare at all the finery I now understood to be hoarded wealth. The taxes of five hundred clan houses held those mirrors together. The wealth in that ceiling could fed the entire country for a year. This ostentation and greed had to end.

The dream team our leaders are putting together is up for this dismantling if anyone is, but the bad guys’ power is considerable and they’re not giving up easily. There was one special challenge mounted late in the book that about broke my will, although luckily these characters are tougher than I am.

Race has been a sort of understated issue throughout the trilogy. Class and privilege make up an obvious one, and climate change, and politically, we’re moving towards self-determination and communal systems of support. The issue of race is less clear: characters are sometimes noted as being Black or white, or described in terms that imply race (blonde, dreadlocked, dark skin), and privilege sometimes lines up with race, but I think not always. I’m not certain how this is meant to be read, whether we’re looking at a mostly-race-stratified society or simply a diverse one. Queer relationships have also been centered throughout. Book one saw a romance between two men, book two featured one between two women, and in book three, Robin is rejoined to her nonbinary spouse. (We also see a triangle marriage buck against Aeland’s societal norms, although it’s not unusual in Samindan culture.) Queerness seems to encounter some raised eyebrows, but not enormous resistance (the triangle marriage is much less accepted).

As another note, now that I’ve got all three books in me, I want to appreciate the covers, which are visually pleasing and offer some clue as to setting, and feature modes of transportation associated with the protagonist of each: a man on a bicycle for Miles on the cover of Witchmark; two figures in a coach for Grace (Stormsong); and now a couple skating for Robin in Soulstar. It’s a neat nod to the world Polk has built here.

As a trilogy: fantasy, world-building, romance, allegory, lovely writing and beautiful details, easy immersion. This writer is a great talent. I hope there is so much more to come, whether in Aeland or anywhere else Polk chooses to take me.

Rating: 8 sweaters.

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Sipsworth by Simon Van Booy

Posted on April 12, 2024 by pagesofjulia

A friendship between a widow and a mouse brings outward ripples of positivity in this surprising, compassionate comfort read.

Simon Van Booy’s Sipsworth is a delightfully funny, poignant, surprising novel about an octogenarian widow who has all but given up when she finds an unusual reason to reinvest in life. The story takes place over two weeks, in private spaces, and features events that on the surface appear small in scale, but have far-ranging consequences and meaning for its human and nonhuman protagonists, with whom readers cannot help but fall in love.

Helen Cartwright had lived abroad for six decades when she returned to the English village in which she was born and raised. Her beloved husband and cherished son have both died, and she now lives alone, sad, reclusive, in a pensioner’s cottage. “Life for her was finished. She knew that and had accepted it. Each day was an impersonation of the one before with only a slight shuffle–as though even for death there is a queue.”

“Then early one morning, something happens.” Helen brings in a neighbor’s rubbish, to go through it on her own time; something reminded her of her son. She has inadvertently also brought in a tenant: a mouse, which initially repulses her. On an inexplicable impulse, she begins to feed it, to keep it safe, and her choice to care for something beyond herself will lead her to leave the house, to interact with people (librarian, hardware storekeeper), and to the terrible realization that if she dies now, the mouse will starve in the enclosure she has designed. “For the first time in many years, against her better judgment,” Helen is “not dying.” Unexpectedly, the accidental company of the mouse she calls Sipsworth forces Helen to rediscover the world and a reason to live.

Helen begins by caring for Sipsworth in material ways (food, water, shelter) but winds up caring in broader ways. She talks to him, in remarkably confessional terms. They learn to trust one another. But it is not until a true emergency that the lessons of “a lost wish… granted” become clear. And it is only late in the book that a vital truth of Helen’s own life is revealed.

Van Booy (Father’s Day; The Presence of Absence; The Sadness of Beautiful Things) tells Helen’s story in unadorned prose that however frequently offers lovely images and metaphor. Sipsworth features unassuming, deeply likable characters in an essentially quiet, simple tale. Sweet but not saccharine, tender, loving, and funny, this story of unlikely friendship and late-life new beginnings will charm any reader who has ever loved or lost.

This review originally ran in the February 29, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 unsalted cashews.

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Stormsong by C. L. Polk

Posted on April 8, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Book two in the Kingston Cycle is every bit as riveting and delicious as the first, and I immediately opened book three upon its conclusion, so fair warning there. As is my practice, this review will contain mild spoilers for book one but not this book.

Witchmark‘s narrator and protagonist was Miles, but having seen him through danger and triumph and into the beginning of a delightful new romance, we are moving on to a new central character: Miles’s sister the indomitable Dame Grace Hensley narrates and stars in Stormsong. I was only sad for a moment; Grace is an exciting woman to follow, and anyway Miles is still on the scene, and his partner Tristan plays at least as big a role. (Miles is recuperating from injuries sustained in the big crescendo finish to Witchmark.) Many common threads continue: political intrigue as well as familial, as Grace and Miles’ family is one of the most powerful in the land. Romance, as Grace finds her own love, although she must navigate it amid all that intrigue. Self-actualization. “You make me want to be better… you know exactly who you are, even if it’s not what you’re supposed to be.” There are some neat instances of thinly veiled reference to our real world, as with worsening weather patterns (and the people demanding the government control the weather – which in this case is possible, because witches), and labor and civic unrest. Crime and punishment, just government and revolution, compromise and how to best run a country: it’s huge stuff, but it’s also still a sweet story of relationships, romantic love and siblinghood and respectful alliances. Oh, and I think I failed to say with book one, Polk writes really tantalizing food and the details of things like fashion which don’t usually interest me but do here. But especially food.

These books have momentum and atmosphere. The world-building is well thought out, which I think is evident for any series that shifts its focus between protagonists with each novel. They are sumptuous stories to get lost in, while dealing with serious themes. I’m impressed. And I’m already well into book three, so stay tuned.

Rating: 8 outfits on the bed.

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A Revolver to Carry at Night by Monika Zgustova, trans. by Julie Jones

Posted on April 5, 2024 by pagesofjulia

This slim, immersive novel cleverly examines the interior experiences of Véra Nabokov as she supports her famous husband’s literary career.

With A Revolver to Carry at Night, Monika Zgustova (Dressed for a Dance in the Snow) examines the life of a fictionalized Véra Nabokov, necessarily in relation to the famous husband whose career she helped shape. Zgustova offers snippets of the lives of Véra and Vladimir, including both mundane and life-changing moments, alongside their son, Dmitri; Vladimir’s one-time lover Irina Guadanini; and the Nabokovs’ friend Filippa Rolf. Translated from the Spanish by Julie Jones, this brief but absorbing novel is both terse and expressive.

The novel contains four parts, set in 1977 Montreux; 1937 Cannes; 1964 Boston and New York; and finally Montreux in 1990, following Vladimir Nabokov’s death. These nonchronological sections allow for various perspectives on the same events, like the couple’s first meeting. In Zgustova’s telling, Véra orchestrated the relationship and the marriage from the start. Planning to meet the author at a dance, “[s]he thought that she could only attract a special man like him by doing something original. That’s why she had chosen to wear not a delicate, feminine mask but the head of a wolf.” The image of the wolf that would indeed intrigue him that night will be evoked again later to describe Véra. A Revolver to Carry at Night is told in a close third-person narrative, shifting perspective among Véra, Vladimir, and others, allowing readers to become engrossed in the various characters’ thoughts and feelings.

“She knew that in Russian circles, people said that Véra had coerced Vladimir into marrying her. They may have been right, but… so what? We all create our own lives. If she hadn’t organized it, he wouldn’t have married her, and with a different wife, he would never have become a famous writer.” Véra is “that crazy, marvelous sleepwalker,” “a fragile and vulnerable woman,” ambitious, complex, controlling, and not necessarily likable. “She knew she didn’t have any artistic talent and lacked creative genius… so she decided to realize the work of her life by creating someone whom she could help by fusing with him and becoming part of his creation….” In the absence of her own creative career, she privately takes credit for her contributions to Vladimir’s. “She was proud to leave her own mark, although it was small and anonymous, on world literature.” The titular revolver is a literal object Véra carries as well as a symbol of her insecurity and tough exterior; it is observed that “Véra would always make sure it was loaded.”

Based on events from the Nabokovs’ real lives, A Revolver to Carry at Night offers insight as well as imagination into the life of a strong woman who fought for what she wanted. It is not always flattering, but its subject would appreciate the hard-nosed lack of sentimentality.

This review originally ran in the February 12, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 6 black cats.

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repost: No Son of Mine by Jonathan Corcoran

Posted on April 1, 2024 by pagesofjulia

This is a repost of an earlier review, because this moving book has just become available today.

Disclosure: Jon has taught as guest faculty in my MFA program. I admire his work and he is a dear friend.

I found this memoir remarkable. It encompasses much in terms of its time span and the bigger events in the world, and Jon accomplishes something special by being raw and vulnerable, and never self-indulgent. I think the struggles he portrays here will offer something to any reader, because we are all struggling to navigate even the closest of relationships. I am impressed by the writing in terms of that larger storytelling and meaning-making, as well as line by line.

Corcoran grew up in a small town in West Virginia that is just a few minutes’ drive from where I live now. (It’s always a little exciting to read a place written well that you personally know, and I did enjoy that part here. Elkins is not perfect, but I think this author has handled it with respect for both positive and negative qualities.) As a gay kid, he suffered in the town, in the evangelical church his family attended, and in his family itself. He did some secretive explorations of sexuality in West Virginia (not too dissimilar, I think, from those in The Rope Swing, which is however fiction), but did not live as an openly gay man until he left for college at Brown University. Coming from poverty, Brown was both a great accomplishment and a shock: a wider world, but rarified, and Jon was a foreigner to many of his peers and professors there. It’s at Brown that he met Sam.

In his second year at Brown, Jon is in Portland, Maine, with his boyfriend, Sam, meeting Sam’s family for the first time. It’s his twentieth birthday when his mother calls, seething with what she’s discovered. Jon confirms that he is gay. “You are no longer my son,” she says, and she hangs up. This leaves him traumatized, trying to finish college with no financial or emotional or any other kind of support, with no family, and no options, surrounded by Ivy League administrators whose understanding of what all this means is so poor that he is advised to take a year off and travel. His mother spends the next six months calling in the early morning and waking him up to tell him he will die of AIDS or go to hell, or both.

Jon and his mother spend years–fifteen years, the rest of her life–being estranged and trying again, having massive, blow-up fights and years of silence, and abuse and toxicity and cautious attempts at peace and acceptance. Her bad behavior is horribly, shockingly bad. But tangled up with the bad is the fact that this is his mother, his caretaker, whom he has loved, and who still (somewhere, twistedly) loves him, and misses him when they are on the outs. It’s a level of trauma that’s hard to fathom if you haven’t lived it. But as a narrator, he does a good job of describing its effects, including a mistrust of memory and various physical ailments. It also poses some challenges for his relationship with Sam, which will continue until they eventually marry, and into the present.

This is a memoir of trying to reconcile a parent that the narrator loves, his memories of her and of his hometown, with the pain inflicted at the hands of that same person (and place). It’s all a puzzle, to question the causes, to wonder how much forgiveness is due to such a figure. It’s a memoir that is also an assay, both a personal narrative and an exploration of ideas. “…some part of my brain is perpetually trying to explain her actions, to find the root cause for them, and what this really comes dangerously close to is the notion that her actions have an excuse, that if I searched hard and long enough the hurt and pain she caused me can be written away. But she hurt more, a voice says, and I don’t doubt that. So here I am, operating the world’s worst justice system from the recesses of my brain.” “I do not know how to balance all the pain she caused with all the pain she felt.”

There’s a lot to appreciate here, and a lot of wisdom that I think will help just about anybody. Not to say answers, but wise observations about one man’s experience. Most of us are wrestling with difficult, tangled-up relationships where abuse and love meet; many of us are struggling with what to take and what to leave about a family or a place. “I hear her laugh, hear the crinkle of her dyed-blonde hair. I rub her cracked feet, feel her hand on my back. I smell her nicotine fingers. There is her cup of Lipton tea in the little ceramic mug that is white with flowers around the brim. I taste the milky black tea. And I say, I don’t want to lose this all. I don’t want to lose what made me.” There is also some lovely writing here. If the story itself is often difficult, there’s a remarkable amount of grace, beauty, and hope. I think it’s a book for anybody and everybody. Thank you, Jon, for sharing so much in a way that feels both raw and wide-open, and careful and thoughtful. I’m awed.

Rating: 9 paper bags.

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Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands by Heather Fawcett

Posted on March 29, 2024 by pagesofjulia

This is book 2 in a series, following Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries.

This review contains spoilers for book 1.

Having wrapped up adventures in Hrafnsvik, Emily has returned to Cambridge and a more comfortable *tenured* position there. Her nineteen-year-old niece, Ariadne, has arrived on the scene as a student, as Emily’s self-appointed assistant, and as a fan and annoyance. Wendell remains nearby, also a fan: his proposal (from near the end of book 1) remains an open question. Now we know his own courtly-faerie identity, it also transpires that would-be assassins have begun to hound him, to reduce his threat to a distant and fearsome fae crown. Meanwhile, an antagonistic department head (ha) is also hounding Wendell and Emily both, seemingly out of some combination of suspicion about their academic integrity and a sense of late-career threat. Obviously, then (that is sarcasm), the whole troop winds up traveling together – Emily, Wendell, Ariadne, and the grumpy Dr. Farris Rose – to a tiny village in the Alps where a controversial dryadologist named Danielle de Grey disappeared some 50 years ago.

This returns readers to a little-populated setting Fawcett clearly favors. Not quite a closed room, the village and surrounding natural world still offer a useful limitation on outside distractions. Compared to Hrafnsvik from the last book, the residents of St. Liesl play a smaller role in this novel’s cast. It keeps that character list neat: Emily (still curmudgeonly, genius, deeply socially awkward, and more caring than she’d like us to know), Wendell (hedonistic, lazy, compulsively neat, and in love), Ariadne (enthusiastic and committed, but oh, young), and Rose (who may have something to offer, if he could get past his own unpleasantness), as well as the famed de Grey and the lovelorn scholar who has chased her, in turn, into misty faerie worlds. With this limited cast, Fawcett does well with humor and the tension Emily feels about her good friend and would-be lover. The fae creatures she studies continue to be a diverse and diverting bit of world-building. Action and development occasionally felt a bit rushed to me, more than I remember from book 1, but it was still a good time, and this is a book with momentum, that motivates the reader to stay up for just one or two more chapters. Also, I’m still pleased by the mild snark about academia, and the quirk of Emily’s character that she’s always thinking about what a good paper or conference presentation her current adventure will make, no matter how dire as it happens. I’m in for book 3.

Rating: 7 carrots.

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A Spark of White Fire by Sangu Mandanna

Posted on March 25, 2024 by pagesofjulia

A very fun sci fi novel and first in a trilogy. Aimed at younger readers, it still has plenty of plot and character to engage us kids-at-heart.

I’d call this ‘light’ sci fi in that the science isn’t ‘hard’ and doesn’t contribute crucially to any plot points. You might call it speculative fiction instead: political and familiar intrigues, with coming-of-age issues and romance, set in a world that is not quite like our own. Esmae has grown up in the spaceship kingdom of Wychstar, but she belongs on Kali. By winning an archery contest, and therefore winning a gods-blessed undefeatable warship, she is able to return to the home she’s never known; but reuniting her fractured family and putting the rightful heir back on the throne may be a bigger job than she’s realized.

Esmae is a teenager who’s lived most of her life appearing as an unremarkable orphan, although she also enjoys the close friendship of Wychstar’s youngest prince Rama. He’s a true and lovely friend. Secretly, she has also enjoyed training under a famous warrior named Rickard, who is bound to teach no one but the offspring of Kali’s late king. Rickard and the gods are the only ones who know Esmae’s true identity at the novel’s start.

So, like I said: speculative fiction, at the juncture of fantasy and sci fi, with political intrigue and the challenges of coming of age. Esmae’s troubles winning a kingdom may be outside the experiences of most young readers, but exploring the larger world and finding one’s place in it, struggling to find one’s truest identity, making friends and feeling attraction and navigating conflicting loyalties – all these are absolutely universal. I think it’s a very accessible story for young readers.

I read this book for my own pleasure, absolutely, but also because I was hoping to pass it on to my favorite almost-12-year-old, and for that reason I paid more attention than usual to anything that might cause concern for the younger set. There’s some very mild bloodshed, and some intro-to-sexual content: basically a quick but passionate kiss, and some reference to wanting hands on one’s body and feelings of warmth. By my standards, this is plenty appropriate for a middle schooler. I pointed these passages out to my friend’s parent, and we agreed that she’d be fine. (You know I’m not inclined to censorship, and I was reading far spicier stuff at a younger age. And sometimes confused by it! I also appreciate that this kid is doing other reading about bodies, and doing a fair amount of reading with her parents. All solid.)

Fully invested in books two and three. I’ll read more by this author, too.

Rating: 7 birds of feathers and buttons.

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