DEAR CANADA: Red River

This is going to be a short one, because honestly, I found this book really dull. It's one of the first four DC books and it's just a snoozer. The cast is either not fleshed-out well or genuinely unlikeable. I hate that the bratty obnoxious girl that plagues the diary-writer for most of the book ends up with her pretty cool older brother. Like...why? You see explanations for a change in her character, but no actual proof of them. Huge chunks of time pass because the writer is either too busy or too cold to write. Events happen out of the blue with no previous development.

I think this is realistic in that it's probably what most actual diaries read like. Not many people have the free time to write detailed entries almost daily. But realism doesn't equal a good read.

STAR DARLINGS 11

Oh, man, I got behind on Star Darlings because I just could not enjoy this book.

There's still an energy crisis in Starland.

Lady Stella has left, with the cover being that she had a family emergency, although the SDs know the truth. She left after the girls confronted her.

Lady Cordial seems more incompetent than ever.

There's one amusing scene where Tessa's trying to taste everyone else's soup instead of ordering her own, which is pretty ridiculous, and the bot-bot delivering someone else's powers down just in time to dump it on her head.

Days go by and nothing happens. Finally, at an assembly new professor Honoria McHue brings up the energy crisis and asks what's being done. Lady Cordial begins to discuss it, only to have a convenient accident and need to be taken to the infirmary. That doesn't stop Professor McHue from sending out a mass email to encourage discussion and suggestions for what to do about the energy crisis.

The girls visit Lady Cordial in the infirmary and she sends them to another school the next day to look into how they're making an alternate fuel source. She does instruct them to bring their SD backpacks, which I find suspicious. The girls go all the way to the school only to find out that school doesn't have any alternate fuel source. Lady Cordial just got them out of the way for a day. Though no one's suspicious, because they're kind of a bunch of morons at this point.

That's three chapters in and it's just SO BORING.

They come back and Lady Cordial is no longer in the infirmary. Clover goes to look for her at her house and she's not there...or rather pretends not to be there. Honoria McHue is also conveniently gone, supposedly having taken a job in Gloom Flats. All too convenient. But again, no one suspects anything.

Clover has this ridiculous idea to have a circus to cheer everyone up, but it all falls apart. The SDs have a bit of fun anyway, but seriously, this whole book is boring time-killing blah so far.

There's a night star ball game and a power outage occurs. Starzaps won't work and a storm comes out of nowhere. Cassie and her glowfur, Itty, save the day by having her sing the "Song of Calmness," which brings wild glowfurs in to help sing and the panicking star ball audience calms down.

Clover wakes from a dream to be found by a sleepwalking Piper. Clover follows Piper to the Wish Cavern where a Wish Orb is waiting for her. The still-sleeping Piper says time is running out for Clover's Wish Mission. Clover is startled doesn't know what to do and thankfully a flutterfocus wakes Piper up. Clover has some rather snide thoughts about her, which were totally uncalled for, and Piper reiterates that Clover should go NOW. Piper gets Clover to haul her ass in gear FINALLY and together with Mojo the bot-bot's help, they wrangle her a star and get her down to Wishworld.

Clover's mission isn't especially interesting either, but at least it felt more focused and put together than the rest of the book. She's there on her own with no place to sleep, because she didn't get her backpack. Piper brought her Vega's (she couldn't find her own, because Piper's not very organized), but the tent wasn't in it. I loved her spelling the furniture store clerk to let her "test out" the bed in the store window of the mall overnight. That was my favorite part of this entire sad book. Clover's special power is stopping time briefly, except for her and possibly her Wisher, too, because that's how it worked this time, and she completes her mission in time and gets back safely.

Lady Cordial is far too concerned about the possibility that Clover didn't take her backpack, but calms when she learns Clover has Vega's. Might be because those star keychains are loaded with negative energy, which Cordial just happens to discover and then blame on Lady Stella. Clover's Wish Blossom opened early and Cordial misplaced her power crystal...or did she? They see it glowing in Cordial's pocket so Clover gets it, but who knows if it's been sabotaged or not?

The girls have a celebration picnic, but then there's another outage, so they go to Sage's room. There, Astra sees a photo of the woman who she saw plotting with Lady Stella.

Sage says they've made a big mistake and that Lady Stella can't possibly be evil. The woman...is Sage's mom.

Oh, that was painful. Even typing this brief summary was painful. This might be the worst book in the entire series. There were far worse incidents, like all my most hated Leona moments, but this felt like a rambling story told by your drunk friend. It meandered all over the place, several parts early on were just plain dull, and there were only a couple highlights.

I was going to try to read Gemma's tonight and get that review up, but I just can't. It can't be worse than this, because things finally get at least semi-resolved in the end, but I'm so drained from Clover's that I just cannot read more SD right now.

AMERICAN GIRL: Rebecca

You know, Rebecca was the reason I started this whole project. I got it into my head that I wanted her doll and wanted to reread her books, but then I realized I never did the old reread/review project I planned for AG back before we moved. And so this began and now we finally come to Rebecca!

Rebecca's books are really well-written in that they both create loveable characters and cover a lot of topics. You've got the immigrant experience from several angles. Rebecca's cousins and their family come over from Russia, but there are also many encounters with other immigrants, as well as her own family having been in America for different lengths of time. Then there's tenement life. We learn about Ana's experiences in the worse tenement, but Rebecca's building isn't the best either. She longs for a tub in its own room, as Ana's family gets when they move to Brooklyn, and her brothers sleep on the couch and some chairs pushed together in the living room. And of course, there's life as a Jewish family in 1914 New York City. We needed a Jewish American Girl and Rebecca was really well-handled that way. The religious aspects of her life blend seamlessly with the day to day life and pop culture moments.

Rebecca's four mysteries are all pretty good. A Bundle of Trouble has Rebecca babysitting for new neighbors during a rash of kidnappings in NYC. Secrets at Camp Nokomis handles polio far better than Maryellen's books, which is sad for Maryellen, since that's one of her things. The Crystal Ball involves Harry Houdini, fortune tellers and a string of thefts, and A Growing Suspicion takes place mostly at the Japanese Garden in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. I never went there and I always meant to! Argh. I'm not sure which of the four books is my favorite. The Crystal Ball is my least favorite, but it's still good.

Rebecca made it into the BeForever lineup, as she should, since she only just came out in 2009. I was living in NYC on her release and I went to see her in person at American Girl Place New York (AGPNY). I really loved her books, but I couldn't bring myself to buy the doll, since I wasn't in love with her meet outfit and I have a spotty history with the Josefina mold. I didn't bond with it until I got Julie.

When BeForever debuted though, I wanted Rebecca! Rebecca and Kit got the best makeovers by far. So Rebecca is actually my most recent AG purchase from the 18" line. I got her last October. Like a lot of the girls, Rebecca's art now makes her look quite a bit older than 9-11.

AG Best to Least Best (they're too good to be called "Worst") Historical Ranking:
-Josefina/Addy
-Felicity
-Samantha
-Rebecca
-Kaya
-Kirsten
-Marie-Grace and Cécile
-Caroline
-Maryellen

Rebecca falls where she does for one single reason: she doesn't have as many books as Sam. Otherwise, she may have topped her.

DEAR CANADA & I AM CANADA: War of 1812

You know, I complained about more books about war war war, but honestly, these two are quite good.

Sadly, neither author was a strong contributor to the two series. Kit Pearson, author of Whispers of War, didn't write anything else, while Gillian Chan wrote one Dear Canada as well as A Call to Battle.

I enjoyed both of these stories, because neither one is truly focused on the war.

Whispers of War is more about daily life and the tension leading up to the war. Will there be war? Will Americans who moved to Canada have to fight their former countrymen? The lines were far more blurred back then and even those who left America as Loyalists didn't fully identify as Canadians. Susanna and her family are interesting characters, although I kept waiting for an apology from Caroline that never came. I have trouble getting behind a character that's presented as acting so poorly her entire family disagreed with her actions just getting away with it with no mention of it afterwards. "My sister struggled with childbirth" doesn't erase "my sister was a judgmental douche that tried to teach her parents how to parent which is totally not cool." Caroline seems a little more chill after the baby's born, but there's no real resolution to that. I was also a little annoyed that Susanna ended up with the boy she didn't care for at the beginning. I mean, you could see it coming, but I wanted someone else for her. I loved the bits about the Falls and Fort George and Fort Niagara. My neck of the woods and I've been to all of them.

A Call to Battle is really good. I won't be surprised if at the end of these reviews this is one of my favorites from I Am Canada. Sandy is a very realistic character and his story is most entertaining. I didn't want to put the book down. The majority of it wasn't the war. He was only in one battle for the last chapter or so and that's it. But the book covers a lot of different ground, which I liked a lot. The only thing I didn't like was the time jump at the end. I would have liked to see the developing relationship between Angus and Mathilda instead of they just suddenly have kids years later. I would have liked some more development for Polly, too. The book does a really good job of being in Sandy's head, but the family characters aren't as developed as they could have been.

Anyway, still both are good and I'm glad to be doing this reread, because I've forgotten these books so much. I didn't remember Sandy's story at all! Or Susanna's either really.

MY NAME IS AMERICA: Lewis & Clark Expedition

Frequent DA contributor Kathryn Lasky did this one My Name Is America title and it's quite good. It was great to get a break from war war war with a book on exploration and discovery.

Augustus is a believable character and Lasky provided a fun voice for him. I enjoyed it, so not really much to say otherwise! It's interesting. Read it.

Unfortunately, it's right back into war after this. I've already started the Dear Canada about the War of 1812, which will be followed by the I Am Canada on the same topic, so I'll put them together in one entry. But after those, we get a pretty long break from war. Yay.

GODDESS GIRLS 20

It's hard to believe Goddess Girls is on its 20th book! But here it is. It just came out today and I read through it pretty quickly.

This one introduces Calliope, the youngest Muse. She's one of the newer students at MOA and she struggles with being treated like a baby by her older sisters. (That's her fave sister, Terpsichore, on the cover with her.)

Unfortunately, I was frustrated through most of the book. Calliope has no trouble inspiring others, but she comes up with so many ideas, that she procrastinates constantly on her big architecture project. She's also singing in a music festival with her sisters and bombs it. And why? Because she's so distracted trying to figure out which goddessgirl to ask to be her roommate! I could see if she had a legitimate issue, but her constantly being distracted by this petty thing annoyed the crap out of me.

The good thing about her "trying out" different girls is that we get some screentime for a lot of the older characters, like Athena, Aphrodite, Artemis and Medusa. With all these new girls constantly being added, we haven't spent as much time with the original cast.

Also annoying is her crush on Homer, who's just an obnoxious overly ambitious idiot most of the time. Thankfully, she gets over that, comes up with a brilliant architecture project that wins the class contest and ends up being actually created, and she finds a perfect roommate in Amphitrite, as both girls come from big families.

She did end up winning me over at the end. Why? Because her architecture project...is a MUSEUM.

DEAR CANADA: With Nothing But Our Courage

It's the Revolutionary War again. Sigh. Maybe I've read too much Ann Rinaldi over the past couple years, but this and the Civil War just bore the crap out of me now.

Anyway, this is another Loyalist book, but this one takes place after the Patriots win. So of course they act like assholes and throw the Loyalists out of their home in Albany.

I'd like to see one of these stories where the PoV wasn't the only one that was right and their enemies weren't automatically terrible. Like...you know...Felicity's books. Elizabeth was a Loyalist and she still got along fine with Felicity. She didn't turn up her nose and hiss "rebel" at her. It's a tentative balance on both sides in those books, but it's better than these DA ones where if the book is about Patriots, then they're good and the Loyalists are jerks, and vice versa.

So Mary and her family travel to Canada, where they will be rewarded with free land and food because they were loyal. But of course there's a bunch of hardship and it feels a little Little House-like at the end.

It was decent. Well-written mostly, but not the best topic for me.

Karleen Bradford wrote two other Dear Canadas, so we'll see her again. I have another book by her, the first in her Crusades series, that I'll get to at some point.

Next up: Lewis and Clark! Yay, no more war for...well, probably 8 years, as this next one is set in 1804.

MY AMERICA & DEAR AMERICA: Revolutionary War

The Winter of Red Snow is one of the big name Dear America books. It was the second in the series, following Mem's book. It is also the only book in the series to receive a sequel, which was part of the second run of the series in 2011.

I commend Kristiana Gregory for tying a bunch of stuff together, because I'm not sure I realized it at the time, but characters from this book appear in her My America trilogy set during the same war.

Hope's trilogy (Five Smooth Stones, We Are Patriots and When Freedom Comes) are actually set earlier, so I began my reread with them. I had to wait a bit to start, because somehow, I hadn't realized there was a third book and I was missing it! Hope's books are pretty good, but not as strong as Elizabeth's, the first My America series I reread. It was fun to see Abigail and Lucy there for a brief moment though. I never caught that before, or if I did, I'd long since forgotten.

As for Abigail's book, it's all right. It's not one of my favorites. It's one of those ones where it seems a little too convenient for the family to be that close to all the action. Abby's mother is acting as laundress for the Washingtons while the winter in Valley Forge.

Abby, where's your cap?

The reissue cover I don't care for. My problem with a lot of these, despite being lovely art, is that the girls look a trifle too modern and far too old. That's not the face of an eleven-year-old. Abby also always wears her cap, so seeing her without it is weird. I think the picture chosen for the original book is a better Abby.

Then there's movie Abby.

And she also looks too old.

I don't remember the movie, but I probably watched it. Iceman from the X-Men films played the older sister's would-eventually-be husband. Ha.

Abby was one of the lucky foursome to become a doll. I had her for a brief time, before she left to live with a friend.

Abby and Caty

Now we can move on to the sequel. This was just weird. It's hard to read a sequel when the epilogue at the end of the first book told you what happened to some of the characters, though I was always annoyed it didn't tell you all of them, so at least the epilogue filled that out a smidge more. But only a smidge. I honestly have to say that I was bored. Abby's house burns down so she and her family become camp followers...for YEARS. So it's boring daily life and sad deaths and kids getting married at 15 and *shudder* It's hard to read about the girl who you think of as a little girl in her first book being not just married but hugely pregnant at the end of the second. At fifteen years old. It happened, especially during wartime, but the disjoint is still pretty massive.

Although now her cover art makes me feel better, because at least she looks fifteen!

I think you could easily skip the sequel. Abby's growing relationship is kinda cute, but it's no Snowbird captures Snow Hunter.

RUMP, JACK & RED

I came across the Liesl Shurtliff fairy tale retellings on Amazon one day. I bought Rump and Jack, and put Red on my wishlist, so this was early this year, as Red released in April.

I read Rump pretty quickly and enjoyed it. I love clever takes on fairy tales and I really liked Rump and Red. I honestly read it so long ago now that I only have vague memories, but the most important thing is that I did enjoy it.

Jack, on the other hand, took me longer. I believe I started it right after finishing Rump, but I only got a chapter in before I set it down. I guess I wasn't ready for the fairy tale 'verse again that soon.

When I got Red in April, I hadn't gotten any farther in Jack, so I picked it up again and this time I made it several chapters in. I got to the part where Jack first makes it into Above, and then I got sidetracked again.

It was actually only a few days ago that I picked Jack back up and this time I made myself finish it! It was quite good, although I think it's the weakest of the three. Annabelle, Jack's little sister, is my favorite character. Shurtliff did an interesting job of blending Jack's tale into the world of Rump. I never expected Jack and his world to be the little people! The "giants" are in the world that Rump takes place in, which is set in the sky above Jack's world, which is much smaller. The king and queen from Rump are major characters in Jack, as well as the queen's brothers. Rump is not seen again, only briefly mentioned by the queen. The story is solid, just not as good as Rump.

Then there's Red. I got a couple chapters into this yesterday, then got distracted by the newest Monster High book. I picked Red back up tonight and couldn't put it down. This is hands down the strongest, most meaningful of the trilogy, and it's actually one of my favorite fairy tale-related books ever. Shurtliff seamlessly blends all sorts of tales into one big adventure: Red Riding Hood, of course, but also Snow White and Rose Red, the other Snow White, Goldilocks, and Beauty and the Beast. There are also other magical creatures like pixies, tree nymphs, water sprites and dwarves. It's just so good!

If you like creative fairy tale-inspired stories, definitely read this series. I would recommend doing them all in order. You don't have to read Rump and Jack to appreciate Red, but you will get the little nuances better if you read them in order. And I give Red one of my highest possible recommendations!

SPACEPOP 1

Spacepop is trying to be the next big thing for girls and they're a bit hit or miss for me. The webisodes (there are 12 out right now) are animated rather poorly with a style that looks like a badly-drawn blend of Winx Club and Monster High. The songs are okay. Not the worst girly property music out there, but I hate how they constantly interrupt the webisodes. It gets old.

The book, however, is surprisingly decent. I honestly thought it was going to be a graphic novel-type thing, but it's a novel with 2 comic sections. The comics are drawn by Jen Bartel, who I know of from Jem comics, and she makes the girls look really great.

The story starts out a bit weak, but as the girls develop the band and join...the Resistance, it improves a lot.  

Each girl is pretty likeable. There is no main character, even though the website makes Athena seem like the leader. She's really not. Athena (pale gray skin with pink hair) is the slightly stuffy, more mature, intellectual one. Rhea is my favorite so far. She's the blue girl. She's sassy, into fashion design, and seems more independent than the others. Juno, the purple girl, is the rough and tumble, athletic, ready to fight one, although she also has an artsy side. Hera is the pink girl. She's kinda like Flora from Winx Club amped up. Very into nature, meditation, serenity, all that jazz. She's the most naive of the group. Luna the blonde is the most spoiled, most stubborn, very into fashion and her image, and very egotistical. You know the type. A bit like Stella from Winx, but without Stella's more humanizing aspects. She's improving though. By the end of the book, she was quite a bit better.

Luna is the singer, Rhea plays electric guitar, Hera's on bass, Juno on drums, and Athena on her keytar.

I'm actually looking forward to the second book now, which surprises me. I didn't expect this to be as good as it managed to be, because the webisodes just...aren't. I can say I'm looking forward to the inevitable dolls though! (Madame Alexander has the license, which ought to be interesting. They're not exactly known for the type of doll I'd imagine this line would need.)

THE GOLDEN BULL

I think The Golden Bull is the only book I've ever read that was set in Mesopotamia, which is the entire reason I picked it up. Sadly, my copy does not have this awesome cover. it's just got the bull head image from it.

The story is about a boy from a farming family who is apprenticed to a goldsmith from Ur, because there's a drought going on and the family can't afford to feed everyone anymore. His younger sister is also sent along to fend for herself, because she has no apprenticeship, though she is a naturally gifted musician. They run into trouble on the road and the girl is declared a slave. They escape, but trouble follows them to Ur.

The story is fairly simple and unfortunately only 200 larger print pages long. I would have been happy if it had gone on for much longer! I'm going to have to see what other kinds of Mesopotamian historical fiction are out there now.