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.)

ROYAL DIARIES: LADY OF PALENQUE (749 AD)

Lady of Palenque is an excellent Royal Diary. I really love learning about cultures I know very little about and she gives great details mostly.

The book chronicles the Lady's travels from her home in Palenque (modern name) to Copan (modern name to make looking them up on maps easier). Its only real fault, once you get used to her repeating everyone's long names/titles a bit too often, is that the journey takes up 90% of the book. I wanted to see more of her married life and learn about daily life details, but basically, they finally arrive in Copan and the book's done. So the constantly journeying gets a bit tedious and you really just want to meet her betrothed and you do for five seconds and then it's over. Also, because she's so separated from her family, you don't really get close to any characters but her. Still very worth the read and automatically a good addition to the series, because anything not European is nice.

Anna Kirwan has only written two Royal Diaries, this one and Victoria's. She did no Dear America books. Fans of historical fiction series may have read one of her other series though. She wrote the Juliet books for Girlhood Journeys and she did the second Portraits book, Of Flowers and Shadows, which I can't remember at all, even though I know I have both of the books in that series.

ROYAL DIARIES: SONDOK (595 AD)

The Royal Diaries/Dear America series have a lot of authors that have written several books. Sondok's author is one of the few that has not. (Possibly the only. We'll see as we go forward.)

This is the only historical fiction book about Korea that I have ever read and I have pretty much zero knowledge base for Korea. (Some art history knowledge, but that's it and it's very minor.)

Sondok is a neat character, because...at least from the point of view of someone with only basic knowledge about the histories of Asian cultures...you don't think of women in roles of power in these civilizations. Granted, there were not many, but it did happen. A bit of Google research and I've learned she was the first queen of Korean, which I knew from the book, and the second female sovereign in East Asian history. And now I'm annoyed because I can't possibly continue until I look up the first. Sigh. Oh, it's Himiko from ancient Japan. I read about her in Esther Friesner's books. Cool. Anyway...

The main plot of the book is Sondok trying to find herself. She likes astronomy, but she's a girl, so she's not supposed to study it. But she's also her father's heir, so she feels she needs to develop a connection with the stars. She also struggles with identifying both with Buddhism, a more recent religion in her region, and the Shamanism from the older days of her civilization. She slowly comes to realize she loves her childhood friend, only to have him devote himself to a monastery. She loses her mother, who is set aside and forced to join a monastery herself, because it's apparently her fault she didn't produce a male heir. (*grumble grumble*) And throughout the book, she faces off with her father's new Chinese advisor, who basically hates her because he thinks she has too much power for a woman. But of course, she wins the day.

I like this book, because Sondok is definitely a character most of us can relate to, what with her struggling to figure out what she really wants out of life and how to get it. She doesn't ring too modern, even though you don't think of women in ancient East Asia doing what she does. But she did. And her observatory still stands, the oldest existing one left in the world:

ROYAL DIARIES: THE LADY OF CH'IAO KUO (531 AD)

This is the next book chronologically and already we've jumped into AD. I wish there were more ancient history books in this series. Rome should have gotten one for sure.

Anyway, this one was written by Laurence Yep, who also writes for American Girl. He did Mia and Isabelle's GotY series, plus Spring Pearl's book for the Girls of Many Lands collection. I mention this because this book reminds me a bit of Spring Pearl's. Both feature fish out of water main characters who are placed in the homes of wealthy Chinese families. Spring Pearl's is more novel and less historical fiction with nicely-developed characters you really care about, while Lady of Ch'iao Kuo is a bit too historical. Lots of talk of battles and war and less about the characters themselves, which is the strength of Spring Pearl's book.

That said, I do quite like Princess Redbird. She's a fascinating person that sadly, we don't know too much about. I think Yep did well in crafting a family and life for her, although I felt more removed from the majority of the characters than I like to feel.

I recommend this one, because it gives insight into some of China's very rich history, and I did feel like I learned a lot, even though it was a bit dull once it got into the war stuff. (Expect to hear this a lot when I get to the boys in war books. All the battles. Ho hum.) Definitely read Spring Pearl's book! Maybe someday I'll review the GoML series, which I give a high recommendation to.

ROYAL DIARIES: CLEOPATRA VII (57 BC)

I decided just today to tackle an epic rereadathon of the Dear America series and its spinoffs. Because I'm going in chronological order, we'll mostly be seeing The Royal Diaries for awhile. Royal Diaries is definitely my favorite. I only wish they'd done even more. I find it sad Cleopatra is the only Egyptian ruler present, when she was Macedonian Greek and not one of the older Egyptian female rulers.

I believe this was the first Royal Diary I read, which makes sense, being Egyptian and all. I still enjoy it quite a bit, even though it's actually fairly boring. There's a lot of intrigue, but Cleopatra is only 12-14 as the action takes place, so you don't get her big adult adventures. She suffers through seeing both her older sisters betray their father and get killed for it. Cleopatra went through some serious family shit. She meets some big name Romans like Julia, Pompey, Cicero and of course, Antony. No Caesar. That was later.

But my favorite part of the book was seeing just how smart she really is. The author captures her love of knowledge and her gift with languages. Her best friends are a Jewish boy who wants to be a rabbi (he taught her Hebrew and they communicate in it) and a Greek boy who wants to be a physician (and who taught her Latin, so she knows exactly what's going on in Rome).

Cleopatra is presented as a very intelligent girl stuck in a situation that makes her grow up too fast. (Although in those days, she was basically a woman at her age.) She's surrounded by mostly likeable characters, but the majority of the book once they escape to Rome is rather dull and slow-paced. I still recommend it though.

STAR DARLINGS 7

This is going to be a quick one without my usual chapter-by-chapter summarizing. This is my favorite of the series so far.

Piper is awesome. She and Scarlet are both my favorites and they're very different, yet I see myself in both (and Libby, too). Piper is slow-moving and often arrives late, which I am the opposite of, but she's dreamy, a writer, sometimes takes things to a dark place, doesn't care much what others think of her, and loves sleep. She believes in the power of dreams and were religion part of SD, I think she would be the most spiritual.

Piper's favorite holiday, Star Kindness Day, is here. It's a day when Starlings pay each other compliments and other positive messages. Piper has written individual poems for each SD and she's excited to send them. However, everyone gets insulting, mean messages. All the good messages sent have turned negative. Lady Stella tells everyone to ignore them, but the tension is high and everyone is snippy and unhappy. Libby suggests an SD sleepover in her and Gemma's room and that works for awhile, but then Piper has a nightmare and Sage comforts her. They go outside and Piper tries telling Sage her nightmare, but Sage can't stop laughing. Remember the nail polish? Yeah, it's still affecting the girls.

Piper has dreamt she's going to be the next one chosen for a mission and she is. I really like Piper's mission. I think it's the best one by far. But that might be because about half of it is set in the diner owned by her wisher's family and there's a lot of restaurant stuff going on that I totally get. Piper actually gets the wish wrong twice, although her first attempt at fixing is a spectacular success. It's just not what the wisher asked for. Astra comes down to help. The true wish is finally revealed at a sleepover that Piper helped plan, incorrectly thinking that was the wish. Piper's mission is different, because the wish itself is not something intuitive. She couldn't have figured it out on her own, because it was a secret amongst the wisher and her group of friends. However, Piper sabotages herself a few times when she's trying to get her wisher to open up and talk to her and says something her wisher finds too dark and creepy. It seems to be a combination of Piper's being spelled to constantly interrupt people and her own dark side that slips out and she can't help herself. But she finally gets her wisher to talk and everything is taken care of. Successful wish mission.

What's also successful is that the girls do mani-pedis and both Piper and Astra have to scrub extra hard to get their old polish off. Once it's off, both notice they feel different and once they're back on Starland, they vow to figure out what's going on. They haven't made the polish = problems connection, but both are fixed. I'm looking forward to this, because I'm hoping they free some of the lesser-used characters first, so it can be them, plus Adora, Tessa, Gemma, etc. solving the mystery this time, and not Cassie, Vega, etc.

I'm looking forward to getting to know Astra in the next book, because this one has me liking her a lot more.

DC SUPERHERO GIRLS 1

The first book in the DCSG series released today. There is a regular edition, which I ordered from Amazon, but Target received a special edition including a poster and an insert with character profiles. I bought it just because Lois Lane was included in the profiles. Not that I'm a huge Lois fan or anything, but we've not seen her before and I wanted the picture because I'm obsessive like that.

I just finished the book (got a little sidetracked, because my mom and I bought guinea pigs today). I have somewhat mixed feelings on it.

On the bad side, it felt rather shallow. A lot of the incidents were repeats from the webisodes, like Wondy's flying mishap and her poorly-designed costume. But they were actually covered better in the short webisodes than they were in the book, which is kind of a problem. I was hoping the book would give me a lot of insight into all the characters, but you really only get to know Wondy and a little bit more about some of the others, far from in depth. Even Wondy is a bit odd, because she's so literal and so unused to regular teen stuff that it's almost an alien perspective. I'm afraid that is going to be repeated in Supergirl's book, which is the next one, because she actually IS an alien. Wondy is a sweet girl who tries way, way, WAY too hard, wants to be a good superhero and wants to make her mom proud, and that plotline runs for the entire book, but it still rings hollow to me. The ending was nice, no spoilers, and it helped some, but I felt like I read pages and pages of...fluff. Kind of. Not even fluff, because I feel like I would have enjoyed sheer fluff more. I kept waiting for this to dig in and for me to get hooked, but it never happened.

On the plus side, the book works with characters that the webisodes don't. Star Sapphire is one of the main players here, while she's barely in the webisodes. Frost is here a lot, too, and both of them are fun because Frost is an amusing mean girl and Star Sapphire's kinda borderline. Cheetah is here for that, too, but she actually gets more focus in the webisodes, I think. Although she comes off looking better in the book. Katana also gets the spotlight a lot. I like what they did with her character, aside from the two (I think only two) mentions of honor. And that she uses both a katana and a samurai sword at one point, but samurai had several types, not just a singular "samurai sword." Hawkgirl was the other hero featured a lot, which was a pleasant surprise, because she's in the webisodes even less than Star Sapphire, I think. She's Latina in this incarnation. Bee, Harley and Ivy actually had fairly small roles compared to these others. Bee and Ivy were treated well in theirs, but Harley is pretty much reduced to only videotaping Wondy and others for her HQTV video channel. She really doesn't do anything else, which was sad. Oh, wait, there was one funny bit with her and Katana in their Debate Club. That was good. Anyway. Barbara is barely in it, though she's also barely in the webisodes. She's not a student. She goes to Gotham City High (or something like that). Likewise, Lois Lane, who has a prominent role, is a student at Metropolis High, but she's a reporter, so she ends up in contact with Wondy a lot. So the shift in character focus was nice, because I expected it to be only about the seven main girls and yet of them all, only Wondy gets developed here. The other development all goes to non-doll characters.

So yeah, mixed feelings on this one. I hope Supergirl's book will be better.