I haven't been able to write a good introduction to this week's question, so I will skip straight to the question itself:

How much can we know about the author herself based on the content of the book?

People often make assumptions based on a book’s content about what the book’s author is like.  I once read a magazine article where a journalist was devastated when she went to interview an author and found out his book was not at all what she’d thought it was about when she read it.  She had thought it was an argument against child abuse; he hadn’t intended there to be any message about child abuse in it at all.  Other times, people think that if an artist or writer creates disturbing work, she must be disturbed herself.  What is it safe to assume about an author based on her work?  Does the book tell us nothing about the author?  Does an author’s personality shine through in the book?

Last Week’s Question What is the recipe for good historical fiction?

You can read answers at Tea Cozy, Becky’s Book Reviews, Bri Meets Books, and Charlotte’s Library.  Thanks as always to those of you who linked the question.  If I’ve missed your answer, please let me know!

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Special thanks this week to Elaine Magliaro of Wild Rose Reader for dedicating her lovely poem GIRAFFE to me!

The readergirlz pick this month, On Pointe, is a verse novel, so today I’ll be sharing a few excerpts, as well as my review of the book, in honor of both Poetry Friday and Poetry Month.

It shouldn’t matter what you look like if you really want to dance. I want to.

Clare is a dancer.  She wants to join the City Ballet, but she’s taller than most professional dancers.  Can she make it?  If she can’t, what will she do?  On Pointe examines what happens when our dreams change.  Clare begins the summer auditioning for the City Ballet, living with her grandfather, and chatting with her friend Rosella, who says negative things about their peers that make Clare uncomfortable.  By the end of summer, Clare’s perspective and priorities have undergone a dramatic shift.

Lorie Ann Grover’s verse beautifully conveys the work, pain, and pride that come with being a dancer, as well as the self-consciousness and alienation we feel as our bodies change us from children to adults.  Clare learns that our passions don’t have to be our professions.  This is a valuable lesson for anyone, but it is especially valuable for readers who are passionate about one art or another.

I would recommend On Pointe to fans of dance, poetry, or readers struggling to define themselves.

He’s changed. Different and the same. I’m changed. Different and the same. We can sit and remember how good it was, hiking, skiing, getting ready to audition, and be sad. Or we can be who we are now and try to enjoy the new parts.

Book: On Pointe (Affiliate Link) Author: Lorie Ann Grover Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Original Publication Date: 2004 Pages: 320 Age Range: Middle Grades/Young Adult Source of Book: Purchased from Amazon Other Blog Reviews: Big A, little a, Pie Not Included Links: Interview at Bildungsroman

More Catullus.  Latin text from The Latin Library; translation/adaptation mine.

II. The Tears of Lesbia’s Sparrow Sparrow, my girlfriend’s pet, with whom she is accustomed to play, whom she is accustomed to hold on her lap, to whom, attacking, she is accustomed to give her fingertip and to provoke a sharp bite, with my desire shining she is accustomed to make a dear joke and a little solace of her own sadness, I believe that then her heavy passion subsides: I wish I could play with you just as she does and lighten the sad cares of my heart!

IIb.

It is so pleasing to me as they say the golden apple was to the leggy girl, the apple which loosened her too long bound girdle.

II. fletus passeris Lesbiae

PASSER, deliciae meae puellae, quicum ludere, quem in sinu tenere, cui primum digitum dare appetenti et acris solet incitare morsus, cum desiderio meo nitenti carum nescio quid lubet iocari et solaciolum sui doloris, credo ut tum grauis acquiescat ardor: tecum ludere sicut ipsa possem et tristis animi leuare curas!

IIb.

TAM gratum est mihi quam ferunt puellae pernici aureolum fuisse malum, quod zonam soluit diu ligatam.

I’ve been to the library three times this week.  The first time was for the Friends of the Library book sale.  That was insane.  I did come out of it with some books, but they are in the car so I can’t tell you what they were.  Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted was among them, as was The Chocolate War.  Also a book called Pirate Island.  I had to get it because it had the word “Pirate” in the title.

Here’s what I checked out this week: American Born Chinese, Gene Luen Yang Aria of the Sea, Dia Calhoun The Midnighters Trilogy, Scott Westerfeld A Drowned Maiden’s Hair, Laura Amy Schlitz The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big, Round Things, Carolyn Mackler Flight Volumes 1 - 3, Kazu Kibuishi The Last Days, Scott Westerfeld Make Lemonade, Virginia Euwer Wolff Peeps, Scott Westerfeld So Yesterday, Scott Westerfeld Weedflower (CD), Cynthia Kadohata

At Borders this week I bought all of Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies trilogy, as well as Dana Reinhardt’s Harmless.

Because I haven’t turned in any of the not-yet-reviewed books from my last trip, or Pucker, I have a total of 21 books out now.  It feels like summertime when I was little.

Let me say this right up front: this is not a story about kissing, or wrinkles, or things that are sour.  It’s a story about redemption.

Thomas Quicksilver was born in Isaura, a world that exists parallel to our modern Earth.  In Isaura, everything is pre-ordained.  Family dinners are dictated weeks in advance, not because anyone wants it to be so, but because a group of fortune tellers called The Seers have predicted what they will be.  Each day, the citizens of Isaura visit the Seers to learn what their fate is for that day, and how it can be changed for the better.  In Isaura, most of the hard labor is performed by a group of people called the Changed: individuals who were deformed or handicapped in some way on Earth but are made whole when they come to Isaura.  Both of Thomas’s parents were Seers, but he and his mother were exiled to Earth after the death of his father.  Thomas was the one who found his father, lying on the kitchen floor dead and stripped of his Seerskin, a glittering golden membrane that makes it possible for Seers to do their work.  His mother had been skinned as well.  Thomas, afraid and alone, hid under the sink until he thought he could sense Cook, a woman who had cared for him his whole life, coming.  He reached up to grab her, but instead, pulled the curtains out of the kitchen window down upon himself; she wasn’t there yet, and the candles that were burning in the kitchen when he found his parents had set the curtains aflame.  Thomas was burned to the point of deformity.

On Earth, Thomas’s mother can use her precognition even without her Seerskin, and makes a living by telling fortunes.  Eventually, she starts to sense everything that is about to happen to everyone near her, to the point where she can’t be around people anymore because her head has become so crowded with images of their futures.  She tells Thomas she needs him to return to Isaura, disguising himself as a candidate to be Changed, and recover her skin.  He reluctantly agrees to do so, but once he is in Isaura he finds himself distracted.  It turns out if he hadn’t been so severely burned, he would have been stunningly handsome.  The Changed girls all want to spend time with him, and he enjoys the attention he’s never had.  He falls in love with another of the Changed, begins to feel himself at home again in Isaura, and is tempted to forget about saving his mother and just stay there.  Thomas is torn between his desire to live a life he’s never known and his obligation to help his mother.

This is a book about redemption, though it comes to it in a roundabout way.  Melanie Gideon has created a fascinating world, and paints a picture of a society that is apparently serene, but exists only because of a disturbing social structure.  The world-building Gideon has done here is Pucker’s greatest strength.  Even when I was tired of Thomas Quicksilver, I still wanted to see how things would turn out for his world.

Thomas Quicksilver is not a flawless hero, and the flaws he has aren’t charming.  He is, however, an accurate portrait of a teenage boy.  If you put down Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix because you found Harry’s behavior obnoxious, you shouldn’t read Pucker.  If, however, you kept reading either because Harry’s teenage antics amused you or because you wanted to see how he would grow through it all, then Pucker will provide you with a similar vision of a young man’s growth.  Thomas Quicksilver does some things that make him near despicable, not the least of which is dating a set of girls all at the same time, disparaging them while doing it, and pursuing another girl who is the one he actually loves.  Still, these conflicting actions made him all the more believable to me.  Teenage boys chafe against authority, love being an object of desire, and - especially when denied a “normal” experience, as Thomas has been - might drink too deep once offered life’s pleasures.  While some of Thomas’s actions hurt his likability, they absolutely cemented his plausibility.  In a book set in a world so different from our own, we need a foothold to understanding the world.  Characters who feel the same things we feel and do things we or people we know might do can be that foothold, and that’s how Pucker succeeds.

I would recommend this book to fans of the more recent Harry Potter books and anyone who likes stories where utopias are maintained through dystopian circumstances.

Book: Pucker (Affiliate Link) Author: Melanie Gideon Publisher: Razorbill Original Publication Date: 2006 Pages: 288 Age Range: Young Adult Source of Book: Library Other Blog Reviews: Wands and Worlds, Scholar’s Blog, Si, se puede

When you have too much sadness, the magic drowns in it, like people in water.  If you think things hard enough, they become true.  But if you have sadness inside, all that comes out of your head is sadness.  (p. 35)

Sometimes a book finds you at the right time.  That’s what happened to me with Silvana de Mari’s The Last Dragon.  I was in the middle of reading this book when I lost a friend of mine to her own mental illness.  It was exactly the book I needed at that time.

Yorshkrunsquarkljolnerstri, “Yorsh” for short, is the last elf.  He lost his mother at a young age, and his grandmother sent him away while she remained in their house and drowned.  Though he is one born lately, as he so often reminds his companions, he has already experienced much misery.  As Yorsh and the two humans he meets travel through the city of Daligar, he reads a prophecy concerning the last dragon and the last elf breaking the circle.  He immediately recognizes himself as the last elf, and knows he must find the last dragon.  Armed with his father’s traveling map and the support of two humans shunned for helping him, Yorsh sets out to find this last dragon and break the circle.

This book strikes a delicate balance between pathos and humor.  Yorsh’s disdain for what he perceives as human lack of intelligence is juxtaposed with his own naivete, leading to misunderstandings that while intended to be funny, could become grating if the book relied on them exclusively for its humor.  Fortunately, this sort of comedy is just embellishment on a book that is of great substance.  As Yorsh grows, he learns about the world around him, and his eyes are opened.

At the heart of the book is the idea that you cannot trust your own preconceived notions about people you’ve never met.  Yorsh’s ideas about humans, humans’ ideas about elves, and everyone’s ideas about dragons turn out to be extremely off-base.  Around this theme, Silvana de Mari builds a world populated with characters both endearing and terrifying.  This is a dystopian society, but its children live lives filled with hope, despite their desperate conditions.  Yorsh, the last dragon, and these children unite to change their world for the better.

While The Last Dragon gets off to a slow start, its characters are so touching that it’s worth it to read all the way to the end.  Yorsh and his companions are darlings, and you want to see how they fare in their quest to improve their world.  I would recommend this book to lovers of fantasy, as well as readers who may need some hope in a dark time of life.

Book: The Last Dragon (Affiliate Link) Author: Silvana De Mari Publisher: Miramax Original Publication Date: 2006 Pages: 368 Age Range: Middle Grades Source of Book: Library Other Blog Reviews: Original Content, Si, se puede, Wands and Worlds, The Brookeshelf,