PANDORA 5

 
Like the second book, this one is almost non-stop action. This might be my favorite one, though I do love the Egyptian setting for #2. 

Iole, Homer and Pandy are struggling through the Arabian Desert trying to get to Baghdad. They meet up with a caravan, which contains Mahfouza, one of the dancing girls from Wang Chun Lo's carnival. The point of the caravan is to take a famous physician and his son to Baghdad, where the physician's execution will take place. This is a story from the Arabian Nights, where the physician is executed, but he gives the prince a book with poisoned pages, so he dies as well. Pandy and Iole trap some lesser evils that were stuck inside the prince. 

Meanwhile in the underworld, Alcie is being shown around by Persephone, who is decidedly goofy but also loveable. I like their version of Hades, who isn't really scary at all. At least they did well by him, despite falling into the trope of making Hera the big bad. Hades goes to Lachesis, one of the fates, and she brings Alcie her life thread. Because Hera's actions went against what the fates had planned, they did cut the thread but had not yet cast it into the final flames, so they were able to attach a new thread to it. Alcie is now the only person in Greece who has control over her own life. (There was a heavy belief that everything was fated.) Thanks to one of Hades' devices, Alcie is able to talk to Pandy not once but twice. Hades sends her to Earth, but she's stuck in a tree in the hidden garden of the djinn, so it's up to the others to go find her. 

The garden adventure is really good. I feel like this was also in Arabian Nights. I need to read that. They go one by one through a pitch black room surrounded by snakes, then into three successive rooms, each filled with either copper, silver or gold. Voices tempt them to pick up the coins or try to frighten them. As soon as a coin is touched, the person becomes a black rock on the floor. Pandy, Iole and Douban (the decapitated physician's son and Pandy's love interest) each try and fail. It's Homer with his love for Alcie who's able to resist and get through the rooms to her in the garden. He gets her down from the tree, though she does have a small branch growing through her shoulder. Then the two of them discover that the black stones are transformed people and using oil from the djinn of the garden's lamp, they restore them all. All the djinn who created the garden are grateful and give them jeweled fruit from the trees, then move the garden so no human can find it again. 

Next, they're off to Mahfouza's house. The point of the Baghdad adventure is to capture wrath/rage and they discover it's in the djinn who was trapped in the garden but learned how to escape. Mahfouza's youngest sister was poisoned by three lesser evils and her actions led to the family peri being killed. The garden djinn loved that peri, so he's filled with rage and cursing the family members. Mahfouza's parents were killed, but her brothers and sisters all have had horrible, body-mangling punishments. When she returns home, while the others are in the garden, Mahfouza gets taken apart and put back together incorrectly, so she's a mess of mixed up body parts.

The others realize that the fix is in the jeweled fruit, so they slowly figure out which fruit is which person, feed it to them and they return to normal. Each is a small riddle. Mahfouza had her pieces mixed and the only fruit that can be in segments is the orange. Another person is being pitted like a peach, another was split into halves (a pair/a pear), another is being cored like an apple. This is definitely the most gruesome part in the series so far. I love that it doesn't shy away from being more realistic in that way. It's not light and fluffy, no way. 

Pandy is able to defeat the garden djinn using the old "I don't believe you fit in that tiny lamp" trick. Ah, they always fall for that. Then they save everyone in the house, box up the lesser evils that had possessed the youngest sister, and...then Hera shows up. The sidestory with Hera in this book was so annoying. I hated it. Like every bit of it. Enough crazy crap happened that they could have skipped her part entirely and it still would have been well dramatic enough. Hera's taken care of with some help from the tiny rocs (which control djinn and magical powers in the land), then they're off to Rome to capture greed. 

Despite the boring, annoying Hera bit, I think this is my favorite so far. Lots of good characterization, characters and details. 

PANDORA 4

Pandora #4 is pretty much nonstop craziness. 

First, the gang knows they have to go to Mount Pelion to find Lust. The problem is...Lust is 1300 years back in time. 

The gods help out more in this book than any of the 3 previous. Hermes takes them to the mountain and then sends them back in time, where they find themselves working as temp serving help for the wedding. 

What wedding? 

I'd say the most famous wedding in Greek myth: Thetis and Peleus. 

AKA: The one with the For the Fairest golden apple that sparks the Trojan War. 

I loved the time at the wedding itself. It was handled really well, including a conversation between Pandy and her father, who at that point is of course not married and not a father. 

Eris shows up, the apple is delivered and chaos ensues. The challenge is issued and Hermes will take Aphrodite, Athena and Hera to Mount Ida the next day where Paris will make his judgment. 

Pandy received a coin from Zeus and she and Alcie both got them from Hermes. They can be exchanged for godly assistance in travel, but it costs them two weeks of their allotted time. 

They give one to Hermes and he gets them to Mount Ida, then turns the girls into dogs so Homer can pretend he's got 3 dogs with him, instead of 4 kids randomly appearing on Paris's mountain. 

Then just as at the wedding, everyone kinda stands around and watches the myth play out. Dog Pandy finally goes after the apple when Paris tosses it to Aphrodite, but Aphrodite systematically injures Pandy, Alcie and Iole as she stops their dog forms from taking her precious apple. 

Hermes helps them get back to the present, where Pandora's broken arm is now badly healed and whatever happened to Iole is also badly healed, but Alcie remains blinded. Hermes can't fix curses done by other gods, so they're stuck that way. 

The gang plans to use another coin to get to Aphrodisias, where a temple to Aphrodite is being built. They're going to ask present day Aphrodite for the apple. 

However, Hera's been working behind the scenes to get back at Pandy for a ridiculous slight from years ago. She tortures Hermes to get information, then traps both him and Aphrodite while Hera herself impersonates Aphrodite. Hera/Aphrodite agrees to give Pandy the apple in exchange for one thing: one of their lives. 

There's a horrible scene where they fight over who gets killed and Alcie finally insists it has to be her. She's bitten by a snake and dies. Then Hermes and the real Aphrodite arrive as Hera reveals her ruse. Pandy (with Aphrodite's permission) slaps Hera and then sets her on fire. Zeus arrives as this is dying down and the others lie to cover up Hera's deceit and all the assistance they've given Pandy. Zeus gets Hera out of there and returns Dido to Pandy. Aphrodite heals Iole and Pandy's injuries, but she cannot bring Alcie back. She does give them the apple though, so that's four down, three to go. 

Next up, it's off to Baghdad for Wrath (Rage in the book). 

And down in the underworld, Alcie is causing a ruckus. Go, Alcie!

PANDORA 3

For Pandora's third adventure, they find themselves headed to Jbel Toubkal, which is the highest mountain in the Atlas range. 

Pandy is separated from everyone else, gets some help from Dionysus and his team of crazy squirrels, and meets two young boys who accompany her for most of the rest of the book. 

Alcie, Iole and Homer end up being taken captive and find themselves on a ship newly-captained by the same guy that was the captain of the ship to Egypt. He recognizes them and puts them in his care. While onboard, Homer works for the captain while the girls mostly cry about Pandy, thinking she's dead. They then have a run-in with one of the lesser evils: Misery. 

Nearer the end, once everyone is reunited on Jbel Toubkal, Pandora has to get Laziness, which exists in the form of an ugly nose hair on her uncle Atlas. Homer is one of the men baked waist-down into a column so he can help support the heavens because Atlas is now too lazy to do so. Pandora's father Prometheus is there in disguise along with Hermes, who's helping him out as much as he can. Prometheus sees Pandora in action and realizes what his daughter is capable of. 

The book ends with our foursome getting on a ship again, bound for Thessaly where they're after Lust next. 

I found this one not quite as strong as the second. The first is slow going because it has to set the story, but the second was non-stop new characters and action and of course I also favor Egypt. This third book is good, but it dragged on in a few places. I still love all the characters and the storylines though. 

I AM AMERICA Part 2

 

I Am America is back with two new books. 

The first is about the earthquake and fire in 1906 San Francisco. Like Lily's book from the Girls Survive series, this is told from the Chinese-American perspective. It digs a little deeper than Lily's though as Han struggles with his identity as both Chinese and American. And the action and drama are far more than in Lily's book. I definitely liked this a lot better. 

The book is written in a regular format. No letters or diaries or anything like that. 

Now this is something new. We've read plenty about prejudice and racism in the US during periods of war, but never has the perspective come from an Indian immigrant. I was really excited about this one, but it didn't turn out quite as I'd hoped. 

Margaret has an Indian (Sikh) father and a white mother. She struggles with being mixed race and with the fallout of her father having some involvement with a party trying to fight for India's independence from Britain. I wish the author had gone all out and just made her Indian. I'm guessing she wanted the mixed race aspect to stick her in a white school so she could have a white German friend who also struggled with prejudice? I'm not sure. 

The book covers a long time span and suffers for it. It's actually unfortunately boring. I hate to say that, but it needed to be at least twice as long and get into Margaret's head a lot better than it did. There are good bones here, but it needed a lot of fleshing out that never happened.

GIRLS SURVIVE Series: Part 4

My post for part 3 of this series got stuck back in January, even though I didn't finish it until much later:
http://redblackandwhitebookreviews.blogspot.com/2020/01/girls-survive-series-part-3.html

I also started writing this in July and got sidetracked. Again. I need to stop doing this.

These newest four Girls Survive just released. I think they were supposed to be August 1st, so once again, they came out early.

Amazon's shipping has been terrible. They've switched to UPS Mail Innovations for certain packages and they take eons to arrive. I get it, pandemic, yeah, but I'm a Prime member and that's not cheap, so I miss the method of shipment I'm used to my money paying for.

Long story short, I only have two of the four books so far. The other two are poking along verrrrrrrry slowly. So for the first time, my review is going out of chronological order.

We begin with Rebecca, whose story was based on the women who helped the Revolutionary War by being heroic messengers. This one was simple, but it was also enjoyable. I liked it a lot.

Maribel's book takes place during the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. Maribel is a Hispanic girl with ADD. Back in those days, things like that weren't diagnosed, so it's not discussed in the book in plain language, but the signs are there, and the author addresses it at the end.

Maribel and her family are evacuated from their home and live with friends for three weeks, mostly not believing there's any danger from the volcano. Tired of her family being upset, Maribel decides to sneak back to her home and retrieve some possessions she thinks will help. Naturally, the volcano erupts while she's there and she has to fight her way to safety.

I really liked this one, because this is something I didn't know much about. It went by quickly, as this series tends to do, but it was well-written.

If you've never heard of the Great Molasses Flood, it's about exactly what it sounds like. In Boston in 1919, a giant tank of molasses exploded and the ensuing wave killed 21 people and injured many others. It sounds silly, but it was real and would have been pretty terrifying. 

The events of the book happen very fast. Leah is an orphan who lives with her uncle, who works for the company that owns the tank. Her dream is to go west. She goes to school, having a couple run-ins with a female classmate named Francesca, who's sort of a rival. Throughout the day, the girls become slightly friendlier, but they're outside when the tank explodes and that throws them into a life and death situation together. First they're in the wave itself, then they're trapped in a crawlspace with the level of molasses slowly rising. Both sustain injuries and struggle to find a way out. They end up being rescued and taken for medical assistance. The girls end up fine, but Leah learns later that her uncle was killed in the flood. When she goes home, she discovers that the can she thought held their vacation fund was money he had been saving for her future, so she can actually go west and live her dream. Francesca comes to find her and offers her a place to stay with her family until school ends and Leah can buy a train ticket west. 

This book originally had a different cover. This one here on the right. Leah had longer hair and the title was different. I guess they must have decided "Braves the Wave" sounded a little stupid. 

I liked this one, but the super fast pace made it less interesting than others. It was okay, but I felt like I didn't have time to get invested in the characters much, though I did like both girls. 

Oh, man. This one hit me hard. 

Tara and her mother are vacationing in Thailand, because her mother's parents were Thai immigrants. They're there on their third day when the tsunami hits. 

I'm not sure if the story was hard because Tara and her mother are close, just like I am with my mom, and they're separated. You spend a lot of the story wondering if her mom's okay. (She is. Whew.) It also might have been hard because we survived a hurricane together. Nothing as powerfully devastating as this tsunami, but it was terrifying regardless. Some of the incidents in the book brought things back. It ends on a bittersweet note, because Tara and her mom are safe and return home, but you never learn the fates of other characters in the book. Still, I think it's one of the strongest of this entire series. Very powerful. 

DRESS CODED

 
Man, I honestly can't believe I pulled this off, but I completed all 3 YA books in one day. It's been nice just reading and not worrying about anything else. 

I have liked all three of the ones I read today, but I've got to say Dress Coded was my favorite. It's got a more unusual format, which includes texting, podcast transcripts, lists and letters mixed between the chapters. It feels more realistic in its chaos. 

It's got an obvious theme: girls are being unfairly dress-coded at their middle school and one of them starts a podcast to tell their stories. 

There are a lot of disturbing elements here, but each one feels like it could be absolutely true. There's a girl who hides her period-stained pants with her sweatshirt around her waist and is in the hallway in a tank top to get her phone from her locker to call someone to bring her fresh pants. She gets in trouble with the principal and a completely sexist male teacher and even gets the class trip cancelled. This is utterly unreasonable, but definitely sounds like it could be real. There's a black girl with natural hair who gets detention for retaliating after a boy in her class pushes her hair down to get it "out of his way." Not exactly fitting with the dress code, but also definitely believable. And there are loads of other stories. 

Also wound through the book is the main character's bad relationship with her vape-addicted older brother and the trouble he brings their family, plus other friend drama. 

It's quite well-done and I recommend it. I do recommend all three I read today.

THE PRETTIEST

Next up in our YA lineup for the day is The Prettiest. 

This one has a pretty simple premise. Someone wrote a list ranking the Top 50 prettiest girls in the 8th grade and the book follows the fallout. 

Shy, book-obsessed poet Eve is shocked to find herself at #1, while most popular girl Sophie is equally shocked to find herself at #2. 

Eve endures attention she doesn't want from being hit on and pursued to nasty comments saying she wrote the list herself. She's painfully shy and awkward, so she has no idea how to handle any of this, especially in the wake of her having had some body developments over the summer. 

Sophie is obsessed with her looks. She comes from a lower-income, single-parent family and hides where she lives from her friends. She's afraid being second will topple her place at the top of the popularity food chain. 

Nessa is Eve's best friend, a theater star. Being plus-sized, she's not surprised she's not on the list at all, but she handles everything with more realism and self-confidence than the other two main characters. 

The girls end up teaming up to try to out the list writer, who they think is popular boy Brody. They try to exploit his current interest in Eve, but that backfires spectacularly. As more and more comes out and things change, the team grows to include more girls and one of Brody's former male friends. 

There's a lot going on in this book aside from just body positivity issues. There's a bit of anti-Semitism (Eve is Jewish) and racism (Nessa has a quick couple lines about prejudice her family has faced because her mother speaks Spanish) that's brushed aside maybe a little too quickly. There's the girls dealing with being the target of a popular boy after he feels rejected by them. He tried to pressure Sophie into kissing him and she refused, which led to fallout there. There's distance between family members for different reasons. Parents and siblings reacting to the list in different ways. Definitely a hell of a lot of sexual harassment in various forms. 

One of the main themes between all the characters is how we handle the wrong things we see. Eve is actually hard to like for a while, because she's such a mouse that she never speaks up to defend a friend or herself against abuse until she's pushed to extremes. Nessa isn't accepting of Eve's behavior in various ways and their eventual making up feels too easy. There's a lot more to this, but I'm keeping quiet to avoid spoilers. 

I enjoyed the book, but I felt like it could have been expanded in many places and been better for it. 

PIPPA PARK RAISES HER GAME

This is the first of what I'm hoping will be three young adult reviews today. 

I get books suggested to me on Amazon all the time and that's how I found the three of these. 

Pippa Park Raises Her Game came out in February. It's sort of a modernization of Great Expectations, but not really. The similarities are rather shallow. To the point that I honestly didn't even realize what it was going for until the notes afterward. Then I went "Oh, yeah, okay." But the book stands alone just fine. 

Pippa is a seventh grader who struggles with math and her family's expectations for her. She loves basketball and she's really good at it, but she's not allowed on the team until her math grades improve. 

One day, she's practicing by herself and has an encounter with a teenage boy, where she generously offers him a snack cake and some brief conversation. Not long after, she begins being tutored in math by a wealthy boy who goes to a private school. And not long after that, she's shocked to see she's been offered a basketball scholarship to the same private school her tutor attends. 

Pippa soon becomes wrapped up in her own deceit. Not that she planned anything malicious, but she feels she'll be judged for her family background. Her mother couldn't renew her work visa, so she lives in Korea, while Pippa lives with her older sister, who runs a laundromat. Her sister's husband works in a factory. Mina, the sister, is a hard character to like. She's not abusive toward Pippa, but her lack of support and encouragement is pretty awful. Her husband though is honestly one of the best male adult characters I've ever encountered in a young adult book though. Jung-Hwa is kind, generous and just amazing. I love him. 

On top of having to hide her public school background from her new classmates, Pippa finds herself in several types of drama. She has a crush on her older tutor, though he's very cold and he clearly has some bizarre family drama going on. She falls in with "The Royals," the popular girl clique, and then has to try to keep up with them, though thankfully that's handled in a pretty realistic manner. Their leader also has a crush on Eliot, Pippa's tutor, so that's an issue. Pippa runs into her old best friend and kind of blows him off because she's with her new wealthy female friends. And she's also being threatened by a cyberbully, who claims to know her secrets. Then her mother is in a car accident and Mina has to go to Korea to be with her, leaving Pippa to struggle with large laundry orders over Thanksgiving break when she's also supposed to be studying for a big math test. 

It's eventually revealed that Eliot has an older brother named Matthew, who turns out to be the older boy Pippa gave a snack cake to at the beginning of the book. It's Matthew that got Pippa the scholarship, not Eliot as she has thought. Then she gets involved in their family drama, which leads to her possible expulsion after a jealous classmate writes an expose on her and publishes it online.  

It's an enjoyable, but quite predictable book. It was clear to me from the beginning that the older boy got her the scholarship. It was never Eliot. It was also clear that Olive was the cyberbully the entire time. I'm not sure if it's supposed to be obvious to the reader and not to Pippa, but I'm hoping that's the case. I did like the resolution of the problems in the end and how certain friends stood by Pippa throughout her struggles. Helen is a really likeable character and so is Winona. (I do tend to love Winonas.) I also like that the cast is diverse but it's not an in your face thing. Pippa is Korean. Helen is black. Winona's last name isn't mentioned until the end, but it's Hussein. Another girl is Divya, who's likely Indian. 

All in all, I'd definitely read another book about Pippa or by the same author.

PANDORA 2

 
The second book in the Pandora series finds our three young heroines (and Pandy's dog) on board a ship and on their way to Alexandria. They're now accompanied by Homer, a large "youth" (as the girls refer to boys around their age) who had once attended gladiator school but now worked for his father's shipping company. Against his will, because he wants to be a poet. Because of course he does. Homer's father sold the girls their passage with the condition that Homer accompany them for safety, so they've now got an oversized cute (according to Alcie) bodyguard. 

This book is almost non-stop action and excitement. 

First, a storm hits the ship. Then...a tornado. Both come from Aeolus at the bidding of Hera. They're saved from the tornado by a squadron of dolphins sent by Poseidon, but they end up far down the Nile and away from Alexandria. 

Then on land once again, Pandy falls through the ceiling of an underground burial chamber. She's forced to use her fire powers to keep the punishment system in the chamber from impaling her on stakes. When she melts a golden one, its explosion leaves her with the little golden teardrop she's drawn with on the covers from then on. With the help of an undead skeleton, they each gain power over language, which is quite convenient. 

After they emerge from the temple, they're confronted by a large group of mysterious people and eventually taken in by what's basically a travelling circus. It's run by a Chinese man and his ancient mother, and there are loads of interesting characters here from all over the world. 

During a performance given to their new guests, Wang Chun Lo, the leader, performs his trick, which involves actually travelling to different locations across the globe via large crystal panels. Pandy has the idea that they can use these to get to Alexandria faster. In a private discussion with Wang Chun Lo, he agrees to help her, but tells her about the price for travelling that way: fifteen years of your life. Pandy willingly takes on everyone's fifteen years without telling them. They use the crystals to contact the family of an acolyte in the Temple of Delphi they met in the first book, and he's able to point them to the palace, where young queen Cleopatra is unable to tear herself away from her mirror. Being that they're after Vanity, it seems logical that the mirror is it. After going through the panels, everyone else is shocked to see than Pandy is now 73. Iole gets very angry with her, but they've got bigger problems. Cleopatra is wasting away because she won't eat, but she's also developed super-strength, so she's killing and blinding servants who aren't pandering to her beauty needs enough. Through some clever trickery, they're able to get the mirror away from her and get Vanity back in the box, though not before Pandora gets bopped by one of its bubbles. 

In an interesting twist, Wang Chun Lo reappears and reveals he isn't Wang Chun Lo after all. He's...Osiris. I loved so quickly seeing a non-Greek god involved and Osiris was written pretty awesomely. Osiris cures Pandy of her vanity problem and offers to grant a wish basically for each of the others. They all say they want Pandy back to normal and that's what they get, despite Iole having a broken arm and Alcie still having two left feet. (Osiris does fix Alcie's feet though, in a surprise to her that she notices as they're leaving.) After using the map, everyone is disappointed their next location is so far away, until Apollo drops in and pretty much hands them the keys to his sun chariot. 

On the way to the chariot, Pandy notices Dido is missing and remembers seeing her dog surrounded by peacock-colored cats. Yep, Hera's got him. 

Also, Homer and Alcie like each other. Her crush on him is obvious at the beginning of the book, but his feelings about her come a little bit out of nowhere. They're cute though, so why not? 

PANDORA 1

 
 

I was instantly smitten with the Pandora series when it came out in 2008. 

Pandora, daughter of Prometheus, does what she's known for: opens the box containing all the world's evils. 

From there forth, she's on a quest to recapture them and she's only got 6 months to do it. (If you think that's a lot of time, try imagining travel in the ancient world and how time-consuming it was.)

Pandora is your standard awkward heroine. Brown hair she wishes was curly. Brown eyes she wishes were blue. An overbite she thinks makes her look like a horse. She feels like a loser and that's how she and her two best friends are treated. Beautiful redhead Alcie is descended from Medusa, so that's what makes her different. And Iole, who's a year younger than the other two, is very smart, but physically more delicate. She was sick as a child and would have died if not for Apollo's help. 

Pandora unleashes the evils after taunting by her mean girl bullies. She and her family are then whisked away to Mount Olympus where Zeus gives Pandora her task. Recapture the evils within 6 months without any help from her family. Not being family, Alcie and Iole get away with coming with her. 

The three girls do have assistance from the gods though. None of them want to see Hera use the world's evils to take control of everything. Artemis, who gave Pandy a talking wolfskin diary years ago, tells her to make sure to take the diary along. It also communicates with Pandora's dog, Dido. (My one real sticking point in the first book is this dog's name. Dido the dog is male, but Dido is a classically female name.) Athena gives her a small bust of herself which can answer questions, though the voice sticks a bit, so it's not always clear what it's saying. Hephaestus has crafted her a net to help with capturing the evils. Hermes brought Prometheus two shells that can be used as a phone so he can communicate with his daughter. There's also a magic map that tells where the next evil is, what it is and keeps track of how many days are left.

Pandora herself is a demigod with power over fire that she's just learning about. She's always used it to start up her fire in her bedroom, but she's far more powerful than that. 

Most of the book is the setup for the story and the capturing of Jealousy takes up far less time near the end. It takes place at the temple of Delphi and I liked the oracle characters. 

Almost every character in the book is likable, except those not meant to be. Even Hera is written as powerful and cunning, bent on revenge and world domination, yet also sympathetic at moments. I  honestly can't remember how this story ends, so it will be fun to read through it all again. 

LITTLE GODDESS GIRLS 1-5

I have been woefully slow with Goddess Girls and that includes the newer series for much younger readers. 

Little Goddess Girls books are very short. They've got lots of cute illustrations, too, but don't expect your favorite GGs just in younger form. These are basically totally different characters and the story is The Wizard of Oz with a bunch of tweaks. 

Athena, as seen on the cover, is now a modern Earthling. A strange wind takes her to a magical land. She's in Dorothy's role. Medusa, who's a mean girl at Athena's school is also in not-Oz, but she's not Earthling Medusa at all but a completely different girl with snake hair. She's in the Wicked Witch role and wants the magical winged sandals that attached themselves to Athena.

Athena is helped by Hestia, who is now that fairy on the cover. I hate this because Hestia was her own character in the Goddess Girls series and they completely changed her look and turned her into an adult fairy. Just give the fairy a different name. I love Hestia and think she's very underrated so to see her character kind of tossed aside and revamped annoys me. Then there are the little talking owls. And the Toto role is played by Oliver, who's Athena's dog in not-Oz. In the real world, Oliver is her pet character in a game she plays on her tablet. 

The story is incredibly basic, but it's also pretty fun once you get past your expectations. So first rule of Little Goddess Girls: Don't expect anything to be the same as in Goddess Girls. 

We met Persephone at the end of the first book. She's sort of the Scarecrow, I guess. But instead of needing a brain, she's convinced she's bad luck and wants some good luck. 

I love her design for this. The little curly pigtails and flowers and leaves sprouting everywhere are really cute. 

Fun fact: She was originally randomly blonde!

The second book takes Athena, Persephone and Oliver into the Wunderworld. Hades makes a cameo in this one and they meet Aphrodite. 

Aphrodite is sort of in the Tin Man role, but instead of lacking a heart, she's lacking a filter. She just blurts out whatever sassy thing and she's actually my favorite of the four because of that. She's hilarious. But she wants to stop and her wish is for likability.

The third book has the sleep-inducing poppy fields. 

And they meet Artemis. 

Artemis is the closest to an actual Oz character because she's very cowardly. 

The fourth book wraps up the first Oz storyline. They meet Zeus, stop Medusa by turning her to stone, Zeus gets whipped away in a balloon after giving the other girls their gifts, and Hestia the fairy reappears to help Athena get home.

Book 5 picks up with Athena at home on Earth, but asked to come to aid not-Oz. So back she goes and now we're in the Ozma of Oz storyline. 

New characters include Heracles and Circe. Circe, as you can see from the cover, has many faces. This is their version of the Mombi role, only they're trying to make her more helpful. The Nome King is being turned into King Hephaestus, so this ought to be interesting. 

These are cute little books, but a bit weird if you're like me and you've been into the GG-verse for so long. 

GODDESS GIRLS 26

Aha, I did it! I am officially fully caught up with Goddess Girls for the first time in too many years. 

I am so happy to say that Persephone's long-awaited third starring role was amazing. Persephone has been my fave since the beginning and it has been far too long for her to sit on the sidelines. Her first book, the second in the series, came out in April 2010, over TEN years ago. Then while the other 3 first four girls got their second books right away throughout 2011, she was bumped until book 11...all the way in 2013. Athena and Aphrodite both got their third books in 2014, but we all had to wait 6 more years to see Persephone again. I hope Artemis gets her third next year. I hate that they're only doing one book a year now. 

Persephone's newest book is delightful. I loved spending time with her and Hades again. Right away we're introduced to Minthe, the naiad who guards the River Cocytus. The Cocytus is the river of wailing and lamentation, so it's not exactly a happy place. Minthe in the original myth was a nymph of the Cocytus so that's straight out of the myth. In the book, she has a simple crush on Hades, but in the myth, she was his lover before Persephone. 

Persephone's on a bit of an introspective journey, as she struggles with being sassy to bullies and then feeling guilty about it and then with her jealous feelings springing from watching Minthe crush on Hades. The lesson she learns by the end is that sometimes you see only what you're looking for and not what's actually there. 

The students are put together in a class competition and Persephone is on a team with Poseidon, Hades, Antheia (the wreath goddess, Iris's BFF) and Makhai, the slightly less bullying half of Kydoimos and Makhai. She's sad when Poseidon and Hades are pulled from her team, having helped come up with two of the clues. I'm not sure what the point of this was. If you're doing such a big event, you don't plan two of the clues after you've told the class the event is the next day. You approach those students privately and plan ahead of time, then don't put them on a team at all. The boys were allowed to pick their replacements and Poseidon suggested visiting mortals Theseus and Pirithous.

I'm going to pause a minute and talk about these two. There was definitely a missed opportunity here. In the previous book, Clotho takes part in the Goddess Girls version of the Calydonian Boar Hunt. Theseus is on Atalanta's team, too. Pirithous was also there in the myth, so I wish there'd been mention of him at least in the crowd. He could have made a comment about the two centaurs Meleager chose for his team, because mythic Pirithous was the husband at the wedding gone wrong that became the Centauromachy. Then mythic Pirithous and Theseus both find themselves widowed so they decide to carry off daughters of Zeus. Theseus picks Helen, while Pirithous is after Persephone. This is worked into the GG book as him having a crush on Persephone and near the end, he tries to get her to leave the Underworld with him instead of staying with Hades. In the myth, Hades traps them on their seats and they're stuck in the Underworld until Heracles comes to the rescue, but he only saves Theseus. So this book contains both the myths of Minthe and Pirithous and Theseus in the Underworld. 

So back to the competition. Persephone realizes as the day goes by that someone having a crush on you is really annoying, so she realizes Hades may not know what to do about Minthe. She also sees a nicer side of Makhai and then later on, also Kydoimos. These two have been bullies for so long that it's nice to round out their characters a bit. That's the whole learning to not just see what you're expecting part of the book. 

Pirithous is so desperate to win that he hacks the scroll-gadgets (yep, GG has finally come up with a way to have cell phones...sort of) and cheats. Athena being Athena figures things out and her team is the only one to also get to the Underworld, which is the final location. 

Antheia and Persephone have a run in with Minthe and honestly, I don't blame her for being upset, because the two goddesses did really go on about what a horrible place her river is. But she attacked Antheia and Persephone turned her into mint to save Antheia. 

So that happened and she's wondering how to tell Hades when they learn from Makhai that Theseus and Pirithous have, against Hades warning, snuck into the Underworld. This is when they're stuck on the bench of forgetfulness or whatever it was called. Something like that because it was near the Lethe. True to myth, Heracles (from Athena's team) has to come save them, but unlike the myth, he does save both. 

After this is resolved, Hades and Persephone go restore Minthe and Persephone forgives her, now seeing how desperately unhappy the naiad is. She even figures out a new home for her: guarding the fountain at MOA so she won't be so lonely. And her crush on Hades is no longer an issue, because she and Kydoimos take a liking to each other. 

All of this is handled much better in the book. I'm just rambling. I think it's one of the stronger GG books for sure.

GODDESS GIRLS 25

Every year I swear I say the same thing and vow to read my Goddess Girls books faster, but they somehow get lost and lost and lost in my reading piles. They only come out once a year now. Shame on you, self. 

Well, not this time! Yesterday was the release of #26 and I received it in the mail today, so I sat down and read #25 cover to cover without stopping for much. 

#25 features Clotho, the youngest of the Fates. I love Goddess Girls and I do know not to expect accurate Greek myth ever, but the way they did the Fates was kind of odd. The three Fates are Clotho who spins the thread, Lachesis who measures it, and Atropos who cuts it. You'd think they'd be born in the order of their roles, but this book has Atropos as the eldest at 13, Lachesis is 12 and Clotho is 11. So what exactly did the older ones do until Clotho was born? Considering their important role to mankind, they'd have to predate the birth of man. You'd think. Man couldn't be running around without the Fates at work. Anyway. I need to not think about it too much. 

So Clotho is the Asian-looking Fate, Lachesis is black and Atropos is the redhead. The image on the book's spine is always of its main character. Yet the image on Clotho's spine...is Lachesis. Odd. 

Plot-wise, it's your typical rebellious youngest sister tired of being bossed around by the two older ones. Thankfully, most of the book is Clotho on her own. Zeus has rules for them and she's breaking #3, which says not to hang out with mortals, by going to the Immortal Marketplace for the first time. 

The book neatly reintroduces all the main characters from the series through Clotho's eyes. She meets most of them at the grand opening of Game On! a new IM store. 

The story blends the myths of the Calydonian Boar Hunt and Tantalus while also looking back at Arachne and giving her story a happy ending. Not the most deserved happy ending. She's still mostly bitchy, but she's getting better.  

I liked Clotho a lot and the book was fast-paced. Most of it takes place in a single day. There was one major plothole. Each Fate takes her turn picking where they do their nightly work of deciding the fates of men. It was about to be Clotho's turn, but Atropos ends up going twice. It's not on plot purpose, just a legit proof-reading error and minor nitpicking on my part. I like to mention these things in case anyone else goes "Huh? I thought she had her turn last night" and pages back to that part like I did. 

Naturally, there's a happy ending and I really enjoyed this one. It was a lot of fun. What's different about right now is that I'm about to crack open #26 and I will likely have it finished later tonight. Then I'm going to read the Little Goddess Girls books, too! And then finally get to Skade's Thunder Girls book because I keep forgetting I never did! And I love Skade, so it makes no sense. 

AMERICAN GIRL OF THE YEAR: Joss

Ah, I've finally caught up and gotten all the GotY books read! 

Joss is this year's and her books are in yet another new format. Illustrations are back  HOORAY. And the art in her book is cute. 

Erin Falligant has done a lot of lesser writing for AG, but Joss is her first big character work and I kinda hope that's all she gets. The books are not especially well-written. Joss is partially deaf, so there's a lot with her different methods of communication that I thought was interesting and handled nicely, but there are other bits I had issues with.

As you can tell from the cover, Joss is a surfer. The first book has her wanting to enter a contest to meet her surfing hero. She and her best friend are teaming up to make a video and one of their competitors is Joss's kinda jerky older brother. She's also got an even older brother who's super awesome. 

To win a bet and gain her jerky-yet-video-skilled brother Dylan's help, Joss has to audition for the cheer team and make it. She doesn't have to join the squad, just get in. So she accepts and does indeed make it. Then she starts to realize she likes it, which causes a lot of tension between her and her artistic surfing BFF who feels left out. My only issue with this is that it's honestly not that well explained WHY Joss is suddenly into cheer. She sticks with it because her eldest brother's girlfriend is on the senior team and she (Reina) says that the skills Joss works on in cheer can make her a better surfer. As the book goes on, we see more why Joss is interested, but that initial decision to accept her place on the squad comes kinda out of nowhere. 

Cheer, by the way, isn't like stereotypical high school cheerleading, rahrahing the boys' team on. It's a more organized, athletic sport. Although wearing giant bows on their heads still seems stupid to me. 

So the book has Joss and her BFF getting into the inevitable fight. Her BFF gets really mean about things. The fighting part of this book is pretty serious and the making up doesn't seem to equal the badness of the fighting. 

Naturally, the girls make up, Joss and Dylan make up, they all work together and win the video contest and Joss stays in cheer.

The second book finds Joss preparing for a cheer competition and the school talent show. She gets roped into having her bulldog do skateboard stunts for the talent show (the dog does enjoy skateboarding already so it's not out of nowhere) and that ends badly, leading to a rift between Joss and her cheer teammate Brooklyn. 

Then after a bad run at a more dangerous surf spot, Joss's confidence is shattered and she's afraid to do her trick as her cheer team's newest flyer. I had issues with this part of the book because I felt the other characters all forced her to finally agree to try the harder trick, but when you're doing dangerous stuff, it's important to take your time and build your confidence back up naturally. Not because your teammates are giving you shit because you're letting them down by not trying for the stunt that gets them the most points in competition. I didn't like the other characters' motivations or the way they handled this situation. It really was not a good message for the readers. There's this whole bit about how we're a team so one person doesn't get to decide what we do. Well, if that one person is the one being held above all the others doing the most dangerous stuff and she doesn't feel safe, she's got a fucking right to say so. 

So yeah, I wasn't impressed with Joss. The best characters were Liam, Joss's eldest brother, and his girlfriend Reina, who's pretty awesome. And Murph the dog. 

AMERICAN GIRL OF THE YEAR: Blaire

 
The 2019 Girl of the Year was Blaire Wilson. 

Blaire lives on a farm, which supports a bed and breakfast run by her grandfather and a restaurant run by her mother. In the first book, her father is working on renovating the barn into an event space. 

Blaire is a cute character. She feels like a modern girl with her reliance on devices more than past GotYs, but it's not really a bad thing. Just a modern thing. 

Blaire has many "idea-sparks" about cooking, designing, event-planning, you name it. 

The first book has her trying to keep her grandfather from moving. She overhears him tell a friend that he's against the barn event space idea and is considering retiring. Of course he was just talking and it wasn't meant to be taken seriously, but Blaire throws herself into helping plan her favorite farm worker's wedding. The wedding needs to be done quickly so her brother can give her away at the altar before he goes on military leave. 

Blaire naturally gets into some friend drama by ignoring her friend in favor of wedding prep, but to be fair, said friend did volunteer to help with everything and then did basically nothing. I'm not a huge fan of Thea. She seems like another rather selfish BFF character. Thankfully, Blaire's books are loaded with other good characters to make up for Thea's suckiness. 

While the first book is a little stereotypical and fluffy, the second really succeeds. Both are well-written. I like this author's voice a lot. But the second has Blaire getting caught up in too much planning again, though this time it's for her 5th grade community service project. That's the kind of thing you want to overextend yourself on because it's for a great cause. 

No friend drama with the girls this time, but Blaire struggles to befriend a shy, standoffish new boy in her class. 

Blaire's newly-diagnosed as lactose-intolerant and she struggles with this in both books. 

I really enjoyed both of these. They seem very realistic with less once-in-a-lifetime big ideas than some of the past GotYs. 

AMERICAN GIRL OF THE YEAR: Gabriela

 
Hey, look, it's the Girl of the Year 2017. Oh, poor Gabby. They did you wrong. 

Gabby is a multitalented girl. She's a dancer in various styles as well as a poet. She struggles with a stutter, which is less focused on in this first book, though there are a few incidents with it.

The main plot of Gabby's book is her helping to raise funds to reopen her mother's community arts center, where all her non-school classes are. It's a good book with a lot of great moments and I love the cast. Shakespeare-loving Isaiah is my favorite. 

The only flaw for me is the poetry. She's into poetry. There are a lot of poems in the text. I get it. I'm just not into poetry at all, so they bore me.    

This was easily the best of the three books for me. Gabby learns her best friend Teagan is going to a special STEM school instead of the same one as Gabby, so she feels like she'll be alone against her nemesis Aaliyah. On the first day, Gabby and Isaiah, along with all the other sixth graders, are pelted with water balloons and they learn that sixth grade initiation is a thing. That sparks Gabby to run for sixth grade ambassador, so she can work to unify the school and end initiation. The annoying thing about this book is that the initiation itself should have been stopped by adults. Pelting younger kids with water balloons and leaving them post-its with mean nicknames that can last forever is flat-out bullying. It shouldn't take a student's efforts to stop this. The book has a nice resolution and Aaliyah actually is an interesting character once you get past her "you hurt my feelings so I bullied you to hurt you, too" mistake. 

  The third Gabby book is written by a different author, though you'd never know it. This one has Gabby taking on too much. Her ballet class is preparing to go en pointe, she's working on a solo and a duet piece for a poetry slam, and she's got to make not one but two Halloween costumes while also working on the class Halloween festival. She goes back and forth while considering a very large decision and also dealing with Teagan, who's now jealous of Aaliyah. 

Gabby's books are pretty good, though as I mentioned, the poetry element never captures my attention. Like at all. I like everyone as a character for the most part. Gabby's books make me wish they'd occasionally do an additional book for the friend character. I'd like to get into Aaliyah's head in her own story. 

AMERICAN GIRL: Tenney

 
So here's Tenney, who we talked about in Z's entry. 

I'm sorry, but you can't convince me this girl wasn't supposed to be GotY. FOUR BOOKS? FOUR? 

So Tenney is from Nashville. Her full name is Tennyson Evangeline Grant, which is pretty awesome. Her entire family is musical. Dad owns a music store. Mom runs a hot chicken food truck. Dad, Tenney and her brother are a band, though you don't hear much about them after the beginning of the first book. Tenney is a singer/songwriter who wants a career in music. 

Book 1 is her struggling with her parents not wanting her to start her music career yet, despite her getting a really good opportunity. 

Book 2 has Tenney struggling with handling critique and dealing with a drummer/musical collaborator who she doesn't get along with. She's also got friend drama, because she's supposed to be helping best friend Jaya (on the cover there) with a fundraising effort for Jaya's cousin in Bangladesh whose school got damaged by a tropical storm. Jaya is getting more help from Holliday, a girl Tenney doesn't trust because Holliday is frequently mean to her. 

Book 3 is pretty much Tenney vs. Logan. Now that they've signed a contract together to play as a duo, they've got to start really collaborating on original songs. Logan tends to not look very dedicated though and it's getting to Tenney. Turns out Logan has a lot of family drama going on. 

Book 4 is Tenney vs. Logan Round 2: This Time It's Christmas. 

All their problems get ironed out. The entire cast is honestly likeable, though the little sister gets annoying and Logan makes you grit your teeth constantly. They're decently written books, but they're just not very interesting. I'm not musical. I don't care about the songwriting process or performing or recording or any of that jazz. 

I don't feel that Tenney deserved four books. She's not that fascinating. I was more interested in Jaya and even Holliday. Tenney's books focus solidly on Tenney and put the friend characters almost entirely in the background. I would have liked a book that wasn't centered around music and instead actually added character development to the cast. 

With these books, a good writer combined with good characters and good development can make them work for me, even if the girl's chosen theme is something I'm not interested in. I know practically nothing about ballet, but I loved Isabelle. However, a lot of these more recent offerings have been failing at firmly keeping my interest.

AMERICAN GIRL: Z

Z is a different sort of American Girl. Suzanne "Z" Yang is one of only two contemporary characters that were released. These came alongside the regular 2017 Girl of the Year. There were criticisms of the other contemporary girl, Tenney, saying that she was originally supposed to be the GotY and Gabriela the second contemporary. This seems quite possible. 

I prefer Z to Tenney, because she's very similar to my favorite AG doll. It's nice to see a Korean-American character. 

Z is a filmographer who makes stopmotion videos featuring her American Girl dolls. She has a group of friends and online followers called Z's Crew. 

The first book has Z making her first "real" movie, a ten-minute piece for a competition. The second book has her on the road with her mother, a filmmaker, learning how to be an assistant. In both books, she makes error after error until she learns a lesson and then she succeeds. 

The books are a bit different because they're written by two different authors. 

They're decent, but far from the best in the series.

AMERICAN GIRL OF THE YEAR: Lea

American Girl of the Year 2016 Lea spends two of her books in Brazil. 

Lea's special for me. I remember seeing her at Kohl's and pointing her out to my mom. I hadn't read her books yet. 

Not too long after, my aunt passed away rather unexpectedly. My mom surprised me with Lea, saying she was a gift from my aunt, since I wouldn't be getting one that year obviously. When I started reading her books, I learned that Lea was from St. Louis...the city my aunt spent most of her life in. 

Lea's first book chronicles the first half of her Brazilian adventure. she and her parents are visiting Zac, Lea's much older brother, who's doing his senior year in undergrad as a study abroad. 

Lea and Zac have issues reconnecting, which stem from Lea's being a bit oversensitive when it comes to him and him being...well, an oblivious dumbass. 

Lea meets a girl her age, Camila, and Camila's older cousin Paloma, who Zac develops a crush on. Both girls and Lea's dad help Lea conquer her fear of swimming in the ocean, which she's never even seen before. 

Lea lost her adventurous, world-travelling grandmother not long before and her connections with Ama throughout the entire trilogy are nice. 

The second book finds Lea and Zac in the rainforest outside Manaus, staying with Zac's host family. After an accident in their previous location, Lea's dad is recovering from a broken leg and her mom stays with him, but everyone agrees Lea is capable of joining Zac for this next planned leg of their trip. 

Lea struggles with facing new fears. She wants to see Amazon wildlife, but is afraid of a nasty rooster belonging to Zac's host family and is even more afraid after an accidental spill off the side of a boat into the Amazon. 

Then Lea and Zac find a baby sloth in the rainforest. She's clearly injured and there's no sign of her mother. They rescue the sloth, Zac having emailed a professor who knows a wildlife sanctuary. But when Lea posts pictures of the sloth and tells the story, her best friend is angry that she interfered with wildlife. They work things out online, but Abby's another idiot. Her whole reason for being angry was that she thought Lea just took a baby sloth, not that there was no sign of the little animal's mother. Lea blames herself for not telling the story better, but shouldn't her best friend know her well enough to know she wouldn't do that? 

The third book is set back in St. Louis. Lea is excited that Camila is coming for a visit. The girls and Lea's best friend Abby are taking a children's photography course. Lea wants to become a better photographer, while the other two are beginners. 

When visiting a century-old house Lea's mother is resorting, Lea and Camila find an old photo of a girl wearing the same compass necklace Lea's "Ama" wore. This sets Lea off on a search to find out how this girl was connected to her grandmother. Sadly, she neglects Camila and Abby steps in to spend time with the Brazilian girl. I liked her a little better in this book, but she still makes Lea cry when she says Lea will never solve the mystery. Pretty nasty thing to say to your best friend who's still missing her grandmother. Why do these girls tend to have such terrible friends? Predictably, everyone makes up, Lea's photography is excellent, and they find the girl in the photo who tells them more about her past and her friendship with Lea's Ama.

I enjoyed Lea's books a lot, though they're far from perfect. The cast of characters is mostly solid and at least she does something different. Her rainforest experience is also very different from Jess's, which helps differentiate the two. 

AMERICAN GIRL OF THE YEAR: Grace

Vacation is the perfect time to knock out some more book reviews. I brought a ton of books with me. I always bring way more than I can read. I'm starting with trying to finish off my American Girl of the Year reviews, including some I've never read before!

I left off with Isabelle back in...February? Isabelle was the last GotY to have the older book format with lots of illustrations. Grace's book begins the new style that are basically just chapter books. The only pictures here are the ones on the covers. 

Mary Casanova is Grace's author. She also did Jess, Chrissa, and McKenna's books, and a couple mysteries, as well as Cécile: Gates of Gold, one of my precious Girls of Many Lands series. 

Grace was the GotY for 2015.

Grace's first book is set mostly in Paris. Her mother has to fly over to help her younger sister, who's about to give birth. Grace comes along for the 5-week stay. 

Grace's aunt Sophie runs a bakery alongside her husband Bernard. Bernard has a daughter named Sylvie, who's a year younger than Grace. 

Grace and Sylvie get off to a rocky start, but manage to patch things up once they finally both communicate to each other that neither has a good grasp of the other's language. 

The fourth book in the series, which comes only in ebook form, is Grace & Sylvie. This was written by a different author, but it blends seamlessly with the first book. 

Even though it was the last one written, I suggest reading it second. It tells a lot of the story from the first book only through Sylvie's eyes, so you really can see what she's going through. 

So Grace fixes things with her cousin and gets into the swing of helping in the bakery. She also spends a lot of time with a stray French bulldog she names Bonbon. At the end, Bonbon ends up coming home with her!

The second book picks up right where the first left off with Grace only just arrived home from Paris. She struggles with training Bonbon, who's been a street dog for who knows how long. 

Then she struggles with her friends. The three had planned to start a business together before Grace learned she was going to Paris. While there, Ella and Maddy began a dog-walking business, which Grace felt very left out of. To her mixed feelings, that ended up not working out, but she returned to the US with the idea to start a French baking business. Both her friends are slow to get on board. Neither is into baking. Ella's dad just lost her job, so she has no money to help buy baking supplies. Maddy's just...kind of a brat. She only wants to do things her way and she only really wants to do what she's good at (the more artistic stuff). (I swear, there are a lot of girls named Maddy in books. This one is the redhead.) 

The three girls eventually figure everything out with the help of their parents, Grace's grandparents and her older brother. 

The third book finds the girls' back in school with their business doing very well. Unfortunately, the bad things start to come. Maddy's mom brings them bad news about needing business licenses and an approved kitchen, which would mean Bonbon could never set foot in the family kitchen again. Not likely. Grace gets the idea to work from the kitchen at her grandparents' bakery and it's going great, with supervision from Ella's dad who's still out of work, until her grandparents announce that business is so bad they're going to have to sell. 

Grace brainstorms and gets an idea to revamp the bakery into one that looks a bit more French. (Of course.) People start to believe the girls' business has taken over the old bakery and with the orders pouring in, Grace's grandparents realize they need to team up. So both bakeries join forces and that saves her grandparents from having to sell and the girls from having so many orders they can't possibly fill them all. Ella's dad is also hired on as a part-time manager with the potential to go full-time, so that works out, too. 

Grace's books are good, but not the most enjoyable for me. I'm not into baking. Or French anything really. I do love a good macaron and a Napoleon, but I don't want to read about baking prep for pages and pages. I like Grace and Ella a lot, but Maddy never grew on me after her obnoxiousness in the second book. 

School Drama Books

 

I read all of these recently and thought I'd combine them into one review. 

Louise Simonson is well-known in comic circles. She's done writing for Marvel, DC and a lot of other things. 

This graphic novel collects the (sadly only) four issues of Junior High Drama. Each issue focuses on a different character with a different problem. 

Kamilla is a very talented singer, but her body image issues are holding her back. Lilly gets caught up in mean girl drama. Lucia is afraid of her first boy/girl party. Allie is a star athlete who learns she has diabetes in a dramatic way, then has to cope with all the changes in her life. 

The art is gorgeous and the writing is great. Definitely a good read for anyone into stories about school-type problems. The cast is very diverse, too!

The next two are by the same author with very minor overlap. I actually read Pipi's book first, though it comes second, so start with The Reckless Club instead. 

Just don't judge Vrabel's writing based only on this. I found her writing for Pipi way stronger. This isn't bad, it's just less polished. 

The Reckless Club is obviously inspired by The Breakfast Club. It's five student stereotypes in detention. Only their detention takes place on the last day of summer before high school and they serve it by volunteering at a nursing home. 

Not all of the characters are likeable and I wish this had been a little longer to give them more development. 

Jason is The Nobody. He actually appeared the most in Pipi's book and he's by far my favorite of the five. 

Rex is The Rebel. I like her a lot. 

Lilith Bhat, the Drama Queen, has one of the best names ever. She's the school's actress, but unlike in most other school-set books, she's not popular. I love that she's Indian, too. 

Ally is The Athlete. I'd say she's the least developed and definitely the least likeable of the five. 

And Wes is The Flirt. The popular guy who leads all the trends, but both gets tired of having everyone follow him and also craves being needed. 

Their adventures in the nursing home are both poignant and fun. I loved the character of Agnes. I want to hang out with her. 

My only real gripe, aside from not getting to flesh out the characters enough, is that there's a very brief  racial discussion that felt 100% forced. Like she was told to cram it in there and it came out terribly. It had absolutely nothing to do with the plot whatsoever and it could easily have been left out. I really hate forcing issues that are relevant to the real world but have no place in the plot into books. There are plenty of books out there about those topics. Don't try to do it if you can't do it well.  

This one was great. Reckless Club is a fun, occasionally emotional, quick read, but Pipi is a journey through one girl's trek to cancel out all the humiliations she's built up over the years. She has a list of one for every year of school and some of them are really bad. 

The journey is a bit predictable. She gets caught up in it and neglects her best friend, who's a really popular athletic girl. Said athletic girl is made more interesting by having her be super obsessed with a fantasy book series, so she's like popular, athletic...cosplaying fangirl? She overlooks another character, who by the end grows to be another good friend. And she's forced to change her views on other characters. 

There's a ton of diversity in this, which I love. And all the characters from The Reckless Club make appearances. You can start with Pipi if you want to, but then you'd know where the Reckless gang ended up before you even get to meet them.

Fall Horror Part 1!

 

It is officially fall, my favorite season! I was feeling fall-ish a couple days ago and started rereading some of my favorite old horror anthologies from childhood. I've only ever written about one of them here apparently. The others were adulthood reads. 

So I thought I'd dedicate a post to these five childhood faves. These are even still my original copies. 

I'm going to mention each story and the gist of it, so if you don't want spoilers, don't read all this. 

I'm going to start with Haunted Tales. This isn't a well-known one at all. It's a skinny little book from 1989 that only has 7 stories in it. 

The opener, "Give Me My Gold," is a spin on the classic ghost coming to get whatever someone posthumously stole from it. 

"Dream Spell" is by far the best story in the book. It's always the one I remember most. Three kids wake up from nightmares where they've been tortured by an old woman, and all three have various injuries: one has burns on her legs, a second welts around his neck, and the third has three broken ribs. The doctor connects their last names and weaves a tale from 300 years ago. Three bored young girls blame a local woman to cover their asses after they've pulled some pranks on the town. It smacks of Salem and the woman is sentenced to death. Her spirit has come after these descendants. Two of them are down the line of two of the girls and the third comes from the judge's bloodline. When asked about the descendants of the third accusing girl, the doctor reveals that it's his family. As the father of one of the kids scoffs, a nurse bursts in and says the doctor's daughter has been in an accident. She looks as if she's been run over by a large wheel, which is exactly how the poor woman died 300 years earlier. If you've ever read Lois Duncan's "Gallows Hill" or watched "I've Been Waiting For You," you'll see some similarities. But this story was written 8 years before Gallows Hill. And in my opinion, did the theme better justice.

"The Crazed Camper" is your typical kid bullied at camp turns into camp ghost legend.

"The Reflection" is a decent revenge story about a self-centered judge. 

"The Ship in the Bottle" is a neat one. A young boy finds a ship in a bottle, then finds himself trapped inside it, like everyone who's opened the bottle. All the kids are forced to work on the cursed pirate ship, including the kidnapped daughter of the witch who placed the curse over a century before.

"The Wedding Feast" is okay. The wedding of a murderous couple doesn't end well. 

And "The Cry of the Cat" is about the revenge of a murdered reclusive cat lady. 

They're not the strongest stories overall, but it's worth the quick read just to check out "Dream Spell."

Oh, yes, Tales For the Midnight Hour! These were the other welll-known horror books aside from the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series. J. B. Stamper did some excellent work. 

The initial book is actually surprisingly old. It published in 1977, so it's even older than me! 

"The Furry Collar" is an interesting twist on the murderer hiding in the house with two young female friends, but it doesn't have the most logical ending. Like how did the surviving friend live? 

"The Black Velvet Ribbon" is a version of the take off the ribbon and her head falls off story. 

"The Boarder" is creative. A boy is unnerved by his family's boarder, follows him one night, learns he's a burglar...and accidentally on purpose kills him, then grows up to become him. 

"The Ten Claws" is about a series of murders where the victims are killed by ten sharp claws stabbing them in the neck. Sort of a version of the witch hidden in plain sight ends up mutilated when she's injured in shapeshifted form, but more open-ended than other versions of this.

"The Jigsaw Puzzle" was very predictable and a bit weak.  

"The Face" is a Western tale. Not bad, but not great. 

"The Mirror" I don't care for. 

I'm sure it's no surprise, but "The Egyptian Coffin" is my favorite of the book. It's got a destructive museum night watchman getting his comeuppance, but it's just written well and I love the details. Although there were no fox-headed gods. That's a jackal, J. B. 

"The Old Plantation" and "Phobia" are okay, I guess. Not into either.

"The Train Through Transylvania" has the main girl worried about vampires and naturally she's attacked by one, but only after thinking another person was the vampire, not the one that actually turned out to be him. 

"The Attic Door" was predictable, but I liked it anyway. Mad scientist experiment stuff.

"The Tunnel of Terror" I enjoyed. It's a little bit comedic. 

"The Fortune Teller" is less supernatural horror and more a crime tale.

"The Stuffed Dog" makes no sense. The story clearly says the husband dies a mysterious death and the dog dies after. The wife has the dog stuffed and this year, her grandson has to help her carry the dog to the cemetery, which she visits every year so he can hang out with his former master on the anniversary of their death. The kid is terrified of the dog, so of course it comes to life after he burns it. The grandson is found dead in the same manner as the husband, but that's what doesn't make sense. Why would the living dog kill the husband and then die? And how would a living dog create a manner of death in which the victim's "arms and legs were sticking out stiff from his body?" 

"A Free Place to Sleep" is good. It's based on the famous Berkeley Square haunting. 

"The Gooney Birds" is the final tale in the book. The last tale is always an outdoorsy camping one about a group of boys. The youngest is always named Ty. This one has them devoured by giant gooney birds after one of the idiots stabs two of their eggs. 

More Tales came out ten years later in 1987. I want to say this was my first one in the series. I would have been 9, so just about the right age. I probably got the first book later on. 

"The Shortcut" is about a kid riding a bike past a cemetery and coming home with a skeleton hand dangling off the seat. 

"Trick-or-Treat" has an asshole kid getting his comeuppance on Halloween thanks to a vampire.

"The Hearse" is really well done. It's the elevator operator story. You know, "room for one more." Only this time it's a different vision, different setting that I won't spoil. 

"At Midnight" feels like it was also borrowed from legend. Girl loves a highwayman and promises to meet him at a certain time, but she's stopped from getting there until late. He's there, but he's off somehow, and takes her back home. She's left him with some token, in this case a scarf. Then she learns he was hanged at the time they were supposed to meet and when she sees his body, he's wearing the scarf. 

"The Black Mare" is a shapeshifting witch story. 

 "The Love Charm" is also about witchcraft. Simple little love potion story about why it's always important to follow directions. 

"The Mask" has a writer bringing home a souvenir mask from Africa and not heeding the warnings of the shopkeeper. This was good. 

"Right Inn" is a nice comic piece I won't spoil. 

"The Collector" is my favorite story from all four of these books. It's about a kid who's taken up collecting moths and displaying them. Against the warnings of a local old woman, he captures and kills one that's supposedly cursed. Then the moths come for him...

"A Ghost Story" is great. It's another comic piece.

"In the Lantern's Light" is really weird. I'd love to know her inspiration for this. 

"Footsteps" is a creepy take on ghostly footsteps. 

And "A Night in the Woods" has Ty and the gang dealing with a werewolf. 

Still More Tales is from 1989. 

"Cemetery Road" is a version of the kids dare the new girl to do something in the cemetery and she regrets it theme. But it's not stab into a grave and actually nail your nightgown hem and die. No, she has to get the leather collar around the neck of a cat statue. And you know the cat's gonna come get it. 

"The Wax Museum" is really good. There are a lot of detailed pranks pulled by an asshole kid, who then wants to spend the night in the museum. Naturally, he's found the next morning "and when Robbie reached out to touch him, he felt only the hard, cold smoothness...of wax." Stamper revisits this theme in "House of Horrors," her contribution to the awesome Thirteen YA horror anthology from 1991. However, "The Wax Museum" was a way better story. 

TAILYPO. Enough said. Tailypo is my favorite of the legendary supernatural stories. 

I totally took a break from this review to see if anyone made custom Tailypo plush, but none get his look quite like it is in my head. 

"Words of Warning" is a great haunted house story. Bored boy is stuck in New England with his parents who want to see the changing leaves. The gardener for the inn they're staying in warns him to stay away from an abandoned house. He doesn't get why he's warned and other boys aren't, and then again why the house doesn't affect two other boys like it does him. But he also feels a strong pull to the house, so of course he goes there...only to learn he and he alone of the boys has something in common with all the ghosts.

"The Ghost's Revenge" is a take on the wartime bride who promises not to marry if the fiancee is killed, only to break said promise so zombie fiancee has to come haul her away from her wedding. Stamper reuses the name Lucy Potter in a different story. I think in the fourth volume. 

"A Special Treat" is my second favorite of all these tales after "The Collector." (I love Tailypo a lot, so I can't just lump it in with everything else, because it's a legend and not an original Stamper story.) Lisa's husband won't eat red meat, which she enjoys, because his mom told him not to before she ran out of him and her husband. Well, what do you think Lisa does? Sneak feeds her husband red meat and outs him as a werewolf. His furry mom's instantaneous appearance after he's started to shift is great. 

 "The Magic Vanishing Box" is about another dangerous find in an antique shop. You know these characters are all like horror movie white people. Don't catch your hand in the box. Oh, too bad.

"Wait Til Max Comes" has the successively larger talking cats. It was Martin in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. S. E. Schlosser has it as Emmet. I always enjoy this one.

"The Old Beggar Woman" is the rich woman who won't share her wealth and says the old "just as long as this ring will never return from the sea." Then it's in a fish and boom, she's cursed. 

"The Masked Ball" has another (equally predictable) vampire red herring.   

"Skin-and-Bones" is the deadly hitchhiker theme. Not the vanishing one, but the murdering one. A bit of the hook urban legend, too, with her hand hanging off the carriage's hook at the end. 

"The Snake Charmer" is a bore white girl in India who is being driven insane by the music of a snake charmer who won't go away from his place outside her house. When he asks for a lock of hair, she gives it, which horrifies her parents when they return. They race into her room and find the charmer's snake trying to kill the doll the girl cut the hair from. 

"The Snipe Hunt" has the boys enduring a snipe hunt test. Only Ty wins when he actually brings one back to the campsite...or does he?

I think this is the strongest book in the series overall. 

And finally, we have Even More Tales. I honestly cannot remember if I had this in childhood. I know the first three are my original copies, but this one? I'm not sure. I want to say no, because the condition is worse than the other books and I kept my things pretty nice. So who knows when I found out this existed? It came out in 1991.

"Voices" is about a girl plagued with voices that tell her bad things are going to happen. The point of view is actually her friend...who she ends up passing the voices to. 

"The Gecko" has a city dweller buy a gecko to let it loose in his apartment and eat up all the roaches. But what does the ever-growing gecko eat when he gets all the bugs?

"The Head" is an odd story that seems like a ghost story, but I'm not sure what it's actually supposed to be. City girl that just moved to the country isn't taken seriously by her parents when she keeps seeing a headless woman outside. Then they meet a lady who agrees to stay with the girl while the parents are at a school parent night...only for that lady to be the headless woman. 

"Better Late Than Never" has a guy not knowing he's dead. 

"The Golden Arm" is the famous legend. 

"Dead Man's Cave" is a stupid kid going in a haunted cave while his younger brother tries and fails to stop him. 

"The Midnight Feeding." When you babysit a vampire. 

"When Darkness Comes" is about a painting showing a dark castle with one single light in the tower. And when the light goes dark, you've got problems. I swear I know this story and it could be tied to Glamis Castle, but I could also think I know this story from this book. 

"King of the Cats." You guys know this one. I love it. "Then I'm King of the Cats!"

"The White Dove" is the dying wife who makes her husband promise not to remarry. Similar theme as the dead soldier coming back for his fiancee, only the dove actually lets the newer couple get married and then plagues them. She's typically shot at by the husband. 

"Cemetery Hill" has kids stretching a wire across a road to yank off men's hats and scare them. But, as you can guess, they aim a little too low once...

"Claustophobia" is about a boy who is forced by his aunt to climb into the chimney and retrieve the hidden diamonds she stole years ago. He's angry when she dies and leaves him useless furniture, so he has a plan to steal the jewels off her corpse, which comes alive long enough to make sure he's trapped in the coffin with her. 

"The Island of Fear" is the last tale of poor Ty. Stuck alone on a small island this time. Another camper appears and he's relieved, only to eventually realize this kid is the shapeshifter on the island that he was warned about. It's a werewolf again. Just say werewolf, Stamper. 

Even More is the weakest of the lot for me. The best stories are the ones based on old legends.

So there's the first installment of my fall spooky story time!