Mean Girls meets The Age of Innocence
Month: November 2007
Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale
Lady’s maid Dashti may look meek, but her inner fortitude is far more than that of her fragile Lady Saren. When Lady Saren is condemned to seven years in a locked tower by her father for not marrying evil Lord Khaser, Dashti is the one who rations the food, sings the songs of healing to ease her lady’s anxiety, and chases the rats from their precious stores of food. When Lady Saren’s true love, Lord Tegus, comes calling through the tower’s only opening (a chamber pot dump hole), it is also Dashti who must speak to him, under her shy lady’s orders. After a few such intimate, whispered visits, Dashti is horrified to discover that she is in love with her lady’s man. She writes it all down in her Book of a Thousand Days; her forbidden thoughts of Tegus, her despair that her lady will ever come out of her depression, her fear that they will not survive the tower imprisonment. But survive they do, and before Dashti knows it, they are on to another adventure where she will need to call on the strength of her ancestors to keep them both alive. Finally, they come to the point where Dashti’s precious Book will either save their skins, or condemn Dashti to death. Will Dashti, a lowly mucker girl, be able to claim both her life and the love of a lord? This rarely told Grimm fairy tale, re-imagined by Hale to have taken place on the Mongolian steppes, is a sweeping romantic epic that will steal your heart even as it makes it race with excitement. It’s one of the best fractured fairy tales I’ve ever read, and the fact that Hale sets it in a real time and place makes it even more rich. Follow this one up with Donna Jo Napoli’s historically imagined Pied Piper story, Breath.
Jen’s 2007 Top Ten Books
The 2007 Top Ten list has been posted! You can find it under “Jen’s Yearly Top Ten Lists” on the right hand sidebar, towards the bottom of the RR homepage. Please check it out and let me know what you think. Am I right on the money? Or have I missed/dissed some of your favorites? Please leave a comment and let me know what would have made YOUR top ten of 2007! (Even though I try to love all my Top Ten Books the same, if I had to pick my very favorite, it would have to be Peter Cameron’s angsty YA debut, shown at right.)
2007 Top Ten
Please note that there has been absolutely no attempt to balance this list by age, gender or genre. These are just my “from-the-gut” favorites. No annotations this year, just click on the title to go right to the review.
Brande, Robin. Evolution, Me & Other Freaks of Nature.
Cameron, Peter. Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You.
Ellis, Ann Dee. This is What I Did.
Red Moon at Sharpsburg by Rosemary Wells
Well, fiddle-dee-dee! Picture book author Rosemary Wells has penned a rousing Civil War novel whose heroine is the very antithesis of spoiled southern belle Scarlett O’Hara. India Moody is the daughter of a modest Virginia harness maker who reluctantly leaves home to become an ambulance wagon driver for the Confederates. In his absence, India (who is a daddy’s girl through and through) pines for him as she tries to help her mother keep their family together while the war goes on and resources become scarcer. She is encouraged and inspired by her teacher, Emory Trimble, a young man of science who teaches India all about the wonders that exist beneath the glass of the microscope. After a friend up North writes to tell her that there is a college in Ohio that accepts women, India becomes determined to work her way there, war or no war. Soon Emory follows her father to the battlefield and India finds herself unable to just sit and wait for bad news. She leaves home to find her father, and ends up smack dab in the middle of the bloody battle of Sharpsburg. Will India survive long enough to find her father and realize her dream of a college education? Although Wells succumbs to the occasional bit of melodramatic purple prose (in this example, literally): “Mauve is a pinkish purple of such delicacy I can only hold the silk square to the light and gaze at it. I have seen it only in petunias and stained-glass windows,” it suits India’s rebellious, yet lady-like personality. And who doesn’t enjoy a little historical melodrama, especially of the skirt-swishing, finger-wagging, swooning sort? I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough to find out what would happen to India and her dream of studying science with the big boys, and I will definitely be recommending Red Moon to my 8th grade students next year as a perfect selection for their Civil War book project.
Red Spikes by Margo Lanagan
