AWKWARD

This is BRILLIANT. It was in my comic pull today and I devoured it. I might even reread it again later today. The art is adorable, the characters are great, and it's a ton of fun.

I don't want to give too much away, because I really encourage everyone to read this and I want you all to discover the story as it unfolds, but there's a lot of school fun here, learning about friendships, finding your own voice, combating bullies, and ART CLUB VS. SCIENCE CLUB IT IS ON.

Just go buy it. You won't be disappointed.

ROYAL DIARIES: ANACAONA (1490)

Anacaona is another of those royal figures where we know next to nothing about her. Reading about her in this series was the first I'd ever heard of her. I enjoy learning new things, but I felt there wasn't much that I learned from this book.

The style is very slice of life. She's rather philosophical and a poet. You get some idea of daily life, but honestly, this book reads far more like a real diary than a diary that's meant to be educational historical fiction. There was really only one character that impacted me at all, aside from Anacaona, and that was the girl that killed herself after appearing in one single diary entry. It's also a bit hard to reread, knowing what happened to her after the events of the diary.

This book was the second last Royal Diary published back in April 2005. It sat unread in my book pile for months, because I would pick it up, read a couple entries and put it down. Catherine's diary, published in December 2005, was the last of the series, and I believe that's when I finally made myself finish Anacaona's. Is it important to the series in that it gives even a hint of educational info on a lesser-known historical figure? Sure. But as far as the series goes, it's one of the weakest.

HER STORY SERIES

The Her Story historical fiction series was written by Dorothy Hoobler in two parts. Aloha Means Come Back (Pearl Harbor), Treasure in the Stream (Gold Rush), Next Stop: Freedom (Underground Railroad) and The Sign-Painter's Secret were written in 1991, followed by The Summer of Dreams (Chicago World's Fair), The Trail on Which They Wept (Trail of Tears), A Promise at the Alamo, and And Now A Word from Our Sponsor (20s) in 1992. These first eight books were all in the same style. They featured several black and white illustrations from different artists and had a few pages in the back devoted to a story-specific craft. They're quick reads at less than 60 pages each. In 1997, the series was revived for another four books. These featured the girls' names as the main part the titles: Sally Bradford (Civil War), Priscilla Foster (Salem), Florence Robinson (Jazz Age) and Julie Meyer (wagon train). All were larger at around 120 pages each and featured glossy pages, color illustrations and supposedly a free bookmark (none of my used copies has that intact). Florence's book has a different illustrator, but the other three girls all share theirs.

The simpler books were just that, very simple. But they were pretty enjoyable. My favorites were The Summer of Dreams (my fave from the whole series), And Now A Word from Our Sponsor, The Trail on Which They Wept and Aloha Means Come Back. A Promise at the Alamo was also good, but seemed a bit more farfetched what with the main character being super close pals with Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett. The longer books have an American Girl-ish feel about them, but not quite the same charm. Florence's was the only more original story. The others seem like I've read them all before. Girl plays heroine during the Civil War, girl's family goes to Oregon via wagon, and the Salem witch trials. I fucking HATE the Salem witch trials. I hate reading about them, but I do it for the sake of series completion.

I'd recommend this series to someone like me that's got a taste for children's historical fiction, but has already read the better series offerings (Dear America, AG, etc.). It's not the worst, but it's far from the best.

MORE MASTERTON

I've been getting through a lot of Masterton books recently, so I figured I'd do another group post for them.

Broken Angels is the second in the Katie Maguire series. I enjoyed this one much more than A Terrible Beauty, which certainly wasn't horrible. I liked all the characters involved and the case was set up well, with the problems of dealing with the church and all. Everything came together well in the end and I liked that the ending had a little supernatural maybe to it, just like A Terrible Beauty.

The third book in the series, Red Light, I could not finish. It's about human trafficking and I just could not get through the chapters on 13 and 15-year-old girls stolen from Africa and forced into prostitution in Ireland. I finally gave up and skipped to the end, then just couldn't justify the pain of reading those chapters to get to an ending I didn't like.

I'm not giving up on the series. I have the fourth one sitting in my pile. But I'm not going to suffer through something just to read a shitty ending. Not that it was a bad ending per se, but I didn't agree with the choice Katie made.

The Sphinx is one of Masterton's early works from 1978. His earlier books seem to be shorter and pack in a lot of action. There isn't a lot of dragging out of details and the protagonists figure out the plot pretty quickly. They feel sort of rushed, but I'm also used to his short stories, which do the same thing. So they're kinda like slightly long short stories. Heh.

The Sphinx is on the more far-fetched side of Masterton's work. It's about a tribe of lion-human hybrid people that began back in ancient Egypt. He twists mythology though and has Bast as a male lion god, which I rolled my eyes at. But it's a horror book, not historical, so what are you gonna do? Although Bast could have been left as female very easily, since it's the females that carry on the Ubasti line and are central to the tribe. It's an interesting quick read, but I wouldn't highly recommend it.

Doesn't that cover remind you of 80s/90s young adult horror novels? Like RL Stine and Christopher Pike. Ha. Djinn is another shorter older novel, this time from 1977. It features Harry Erskine from The Manitou, only now he's found himself in a much better book with a better cast and scarier big bad. The basic plot is that the jar contains The Forty Thieves. Yep, of Ali Baba fame. Only Ali Baba was a practitioner of black magic and his forty thieves are actually one very powerful djinn, who takes the form of forty different scary as fuck things with each incarnation able to kill in a different horrifying way. Ali Baba agreed to give this nasty tribe of people a young girl every year if they would summon the djinn for him and get it under his control. So there's a lot of not so nice things that happen to the female characters, both in the past and present.

After reading as many Mastertons as I have over the past couple months, I put a bunch of them up on Paperback Swap. Aside from the anthologies, Djinn is the only one I set aside to keep. So it gets my recommendation.

ROYAL DIARIES: ISABEL (1466)

My first experience with Carolyn Meyer was this book, I believe. Isabel's book is the third in the Royal Diaries series, following Elizabeth and Cleopatra. Meyer also wrote about Anastasia, who has the fifth book. I know I got into RD when a lot of these were released already. I think the first I remember waiting for was Lady of Ch'iao Kuo. So I suppose I could have read Anastasia first, but I think it was Isabel. Meyer's only other contribution to the series was Kristina of Sweden and she never wrote for Dear America, although she has several other young adult historical fiction novels that are similar to RD, but also more adult. I remember being dead bored by the ones that took the characters further into adulthood. Apparently, I am not interested in Marie Antoinette or Mary Queen of Scots enough to read about them as adults.

Anyway. Isabel is known best for two things: Columbus and the Inquisition. Yay, mass death on both parts. Sigh. While I enjoy the book, it's hard to read sometimes, because the bad she did weighs in the back of my mind while I'm reading about her worrying about her future husband. That is probably 50% of the book. She has an uncertain future and this brother is king, no, now this brother is king. Yadda yadda. Like others I've reviewed, she has a good voice, but this is another that fails to really dig into the background characters. Beatriz is the only one that's really interesting and she's actually rather problematic, because she's way more interesting than Isabel!  

ROYAL DIARIES: ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE (1136)

Kristiana Gregory is the author for Cleopatra's Royal Diary, as well as Catherine the Great's and several Dear America books.

I have the same mixed feelings about this as I did about Cleopatra's. While Gregory's voice in each diary is very relatable and she has the girls talking about things girls that age would talk about, they're almost too much slice of life and not enough action. Remember when I said Cleopatra's diary was "actually fairly boring?" This one is worse. Eleanor has far less freedom than Cleopatra and she doesn't do much of anything. Her secondary cast of characters is also far less interesting. I like her sister, but Gregory didn't dig deep with them at all. Petronilla is just kind of there. All the characters are really just kind of there.

Eleanor was a powerful historical figure, and yes, much of that came later in her life, but there still could have been more here. We could have gotten even further into her head on several topics and the diary should have continued on to describe her daily life once she marries and moves to Paris. There would have been many things jarringly different for her, because the Aquitaine society was much more fun-loving, and I would have liked to read about her thoughts on either adjusting or trying to convince Paris to learn from her. I would have enjoyed comparing her experiences to Marie Antoinette's from her Royal Diary, which does exactly what I wanted to see this one do.

DISNEY PRINCESS COMIC

If you are a Disney fan at all, you NEED to be reading Amy Mebberson's Disney Princess comic. The first issue came out today and it is AWESOME. They're kinda like newspaper comic format. Some are standalones, some are a series of strips dealing with one continuous story. Here's the breakdown of numbers of strips the girls get:

-Snow: 11
-Aurora: 7
-Ariel: 11
-Belle: 3
-Cinders: 2
-Tiana: 4
-Jasmine: 3
-Merida: 1
-Rapunzel: 2

Jasmine's were my fave and Belle's were really funny, too. They're like Pocket Princesses only the girls aren't all living together. They're before, during or after their movies kinda. If you like Little Kingdom, this is that style only it's comic strips and the expressions are soooooooooo funny.

(I totally borrowed that photo from Amy's Tumblr. I only Google found one image of the comic cover and it was the incorrect version. Rapunzel was in Tiana's place. So I wanted to post the correct cover and it's too late to scan it myself, since Mom's asleep and it's 3AM. Anyway. There you go.)