The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

From Goodreads:

Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.

Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie—magical, comforting, wise beyond her years—promised to protect him, no matter what.


Neil Gaiman is hit and miss for me. I love his brand of magical realism...sometimes. Sometimes he wraps it up in a bit too much darkness and I find myself slogging rather than enjoying. Neverwhere was a slog for me while Graveyard Book was enjoyable. American Gods and this one, The Ocean at the End of the Lane are somewhere in between.

One thing I kept coming back to over and over while reading The Ocean at the End of the Lane is how much I prefer being an adult. I've said it before and I'm sure I'll say it again- being an adult is the best. Yeah, there's responsibility but also you can eat cake for breakfast and see a movie in the middle of the day. The boy at the center of this book mentions more than once that when you're 7 you're at the mercy of adults. You have to do what they say, go where they tell you to go, sleep when they tell you to go to bed. The narrative reminded me of Buffy the Vampire Slayer's whole "high school is literal hell" analogy- having no freedom sucks. It doesn't matter whether you're at the mercy of parents and teachers or a paranormal being from "the old country" who is determined to confine you to smaller and smaller areas and make it so no one believes you when you say your babysitter is actually a monster. Kids are powerless and I think this book really nails that feeling.

So much of this book is just about childhood- the way adults will always take the known path whereas children will explore the hundred other ways from A to B. The way children imagine and fear and play. The way things shape our lives and we forget about them because we were young, even if we feel the echoes decades later. 

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

From Goodreads:

Under the streets of London there's a place most people could never even dream of. A city of monsters and saints, murderers and angels, knights in armour and pale girls in black velvet. This is the city of the people who have fallen between the cracks.

Richard Mayhew, a young businessman, is going to find out more than enough about this other London. A single act of kindness catapults him out of his workday existence and into a world that is at once eerily familiar and utterly bizarre. And a strange destiny awaits him down here, beneath his native city: Neverwhere.

I read Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book at some point and loved it. I also read American Gods and thought it very good. He's got such a rabid cult following that I assumed I would love just about anything he wrote. But....I didn't.

Neverwhere was just a little too dark for me, I guess. The characters were plenty engaging (seeing a publicity shot for the radio broadcast really helped me envision them) and the plot was adequately twisty but I think the biggest part of the problem is that I couldn't see myself in the world of Neverwhere I wouldn't want to. It's a dark, violent, unfriendly place and apparently I like my alternative universes a little more sunshiney. Oh well.

Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer

From Goodreads:

Eoin Colfer describes his new book, Artemis Fowl, as "Die Hard with fairies." He's not far wrong.

Twelve-year-old Artemis Fowl is the most ingenious criminal mastermind in history. With two trusty sidekicks in tow, he hatches a cunning plot to divest the fairyfolk of their pot of gold. Of course, he isn't foolish enough to believe in all that "gold at the end of the rainbow" nonsense. Rather, he knows that the only way to separate the little people from their stash is to kidnap one of them and wait for the ransom to arrive. But when the time comes to put his plan into action, he doesn't count on the appearance of the extrasmall, pointy-eared Captain Holly Short of the LEPrecon (Lower Elements Police Reconnaisance) Unit--and her senior officer, Commander Root, a man (sorry, elf) who will stop at nothing to get her back.

It's pretty clear that I have a passion for reading and I've been worrying about how to share that passion with my children for years. Since my first (and thus far, only) baby is a boy, I've started to keep my eye open for books that might appeal to 8-18 year old boys since that seems to be the hardest age to find good books for. My little brother loved Harry Potter but pretty much lost interest in reading after the series ended because very little interested him after that and books sort of became lost to him. Sad.

He did mention liking Artemis Fowl when he was younger so I picked it up.

I was ridiculously and pleasantly surprised by Artemis Fowl. I was expecting a main character much more like Harry Potter in temperament so I was pretty surprised that Artemis is a rather cold, calculating, nerdy, unsentimental criminal mastermind. It says something about the author, Eoin Colfer, that despite these rather unfuzzy personality traits, I still loved Artemis and wanted him to succeed.

The story is a great combination of fairy folklore (fairies! Leprechauns! Trolls!), modern technology (command centers! Night vision goggles! tracking devices!), and general good old fashioned evil genius. I started this book with an 11 year old boy in mind and ended up losing myself in it and just enjoying it without sparing another thought for whether or not a 6th grade Wes would enjoy it.

It's definitely going on my "Boy List" and I'm excited to see if the rest of the series measures up!

Sorcery & Cecilia or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot by Patricia C. Wrede & Caroline Stevermer

The Goodreads description of this book sucks so I'll just tell you a bit about it myself.

The two authors started writing letters to one another in character without any design beyond their own entertainment. They did not discuss the plot outside of their letters. They simply wrote to each other as two cousins, Kate and Cecelia (Cecy), who lived in England in a slightly alternate universe soon after the Napoleonic Wars. After the letters got more and more awesome and finally came to a lovely conclusion they looked at what they had done and said, "hey..this is kind of like a book."

I have been really lucky this week because this was yet another really really awesome book that I can unashamedly recommend to people.

I am indebted to Katy for recommending this book on her own book blog because I spent an incredibly pleasant evening on the couch ignoring my family while totally absorbed. It's just so lovely and charming and wonderful and I was totally grinning like an idiot most of the time. It felt a bit like a Jane Austen novel in a world where magic exists and what could be better than that?

Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl

According to the back cover:

Lena Duchannes is unlike anyone the small Southern town of Gatlin has ever seen, and she's struggling to conceal her power and a curse that has haunted her family for generations. But even within the overgrown gardens, murky swamps, and crumbling graveyards of the forgotten South, a secret cannot stay hidden forever.
Ethan Wate, who has been counting the months until he can escape from Gatlin, is haunted by dreams of a beautiful girl he has never met. When Lena moves into the town's oldest and most infamous plantation, Ethan is inexplicably drawn to her and determined to uncover the connection between them.

I got an ARC of this one from the publisher (thanks to Janssen's secret ninja channels, once again) and I was really really excited when it showed up and then it sat. And sat. and sat. on my bedside table for like 2 weeks. Because I have a huge stack of library books with a time limit and I had to work through some of them first.

I FINALLY got around the reading it over the past couple days and, despite the fact that it has a ridiculously high rating on Goodreads, I just felt kind of meh about it. But since pretty much everyone else who has read it seems to disagree with me, take my opinions with a grain of salt. You may love it, who knows?

Pros: I really loved the setting and the Southern gothic touches. It made it different from anything else I've read lately and I could totally smell the damp and see the swampiness and the busted down old graveyards and houses and whatnot. The story itself is fine. The supporting characters were really enjoyable...I loved Macon and Link in particular, but even the nasty kids at school and Lena's family members who showed up in small scenes were fun. I loved that I couldn't figure Amma out..she was this God-fearing crazy voodoo person and I loved her. Plus the cover is really pretty.

Cons: It was about 200 pages too long. 626 pages is a long freaking book and I'm really not sure how those pages were filled. It's Twilight length but lacks the Twilight relationship development. Granted, Twilight was ridiculously heavy-handed, but you GOT the relationship. I didn't GET Lena and Ethan. A little more development there would have gone a long way in helping me love the main characters together. Also, I felt like there were several rather big questions left unanswered but the ending implies that this might be the first in a series? So maybe those will get answered later? I don't know, but these were things I waited like 550 pages to find out and then there was no satisfactory explanation. Which was annoying.


If you really like YA fantasy, this is probably worth a read. If not, don't bother. It won't convert you to the genre or teach you any grand life lessons or anything.

Enna Burning by Shannon Hale

Again deferring to Goodreads:

Enna and Princess Isi became fast friends in The Goose Girl, but after Isi married Prince Geric, Enna returned to the forest. Enna's simple life changes forever when she learns to wield fire and burn anything at will. Enna is convinced that she can use her ability for good--to fight Tira, the kingdom threatening the Bayern borders--and goes on secret raids to set fire to the Tiran camps and villages. But as the power of the fire grows stronger, she is less able to control her need to burn. In her recklessness she is captured by the Tiran army and held captive by a handsome, manipulative young captain who drugs her to keep her under his influence. Can Isi and her old friends Finn and Razo rescue her without sacrificing themselves? And with the fire still consuming her, will Enna find a way to manage the gift that threatens to destroy her?

Here's the thing with me and fantasy:

I like fantasy but I need a lot in the story that I can relate to. Like little bits of fantasy in a larger story that contains lots of normalcy. Which is why I really enjoyed Goose Girl...sure, there was that wind talking thing, but it felt like such a small footnote in the overall story. In Enna Burning, the fantasy is a much larger part and I just felt overwhelmed by it. I still enjoyed the story and think Shannon Hale is pretty much awesome, but I didn't enjoy Enna Burning as much as its predecessor.

That's totally personal preference though because some people like large doses of fantasy. Plus, even though it's not much of a love story, there's this scene in a tent where Finn thinks Enna is sleeping and he kind of declares his love for her and it melted my stone cold heart. So there's always that.

Fire by Kristin Cashore

I'm not super great at writing summaries so I'm going to defer to Goodreads:

Fire, Graceling's prequel-ish companion book, takes place across the mountains to the east of the seven kingdoms, in a rocky, war-torn land called the Dells.

Beautiful creatures called monsters live in the Dells. Monsters have the shape of normal animals: mountain lions, dragonflies, horses, fish. But the hair or scales or feathers of monsters are gorgeously colored-- fuchsia, turquoise, sparkly bronze, iridescent green-- and their minds have the power to control the minds of humans.

Seventeen-year-old Fire is the last remaining human-shaped monster in the Dells. Gorgeously monstrous in body and mind but with a human appreciation of right and wrong, she is hated and mistrusted by just about everyone, and this book is her story.

Wondering what makes it a companion book/prequel? Fire takes place 30-some years before Graceling and has one cross-over character with Graceling, a small boy with strange two-colored eyes who comes from no-one-knows-where, and who has a peculiar ability that Graceling readers will find familiar and disturbing...

Janssen got an ARC of Fire because she has secret ninja channels that allow her to get the year's most anticipated books early and then she shares them. Because she's awesome like that.

This book was 461 pages and I finished it in well under 24 hours. It was just. that. good. I really enjoyed Graceling but you could kind of tell it was a freshman effort. The story was great but had a few pacing problems and I had a couple nitpicky issues with the writing. And then Kristin Cashore all went and grew up on us and that stuff was remedied in Fire and the whole thing just flowed so much better.

Also, a lot of people have mentioned this, but this book is just so pretty. I read an interview with the author somewhere and she gave mad props to her cover person because, seriously. PRETTY.

Also, fair warning: everyone in this book is having sex (in an "off screen" sort of way) and the relationships are all crazy and you will need a flow chart to figure out who is related to who in name and who is related to who by blood because those things are frequently different.

Overall, I give it an AWESOME.

Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief and The Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan

I picked up The Lightning Thief on Playaway at the library because I liked the cover and the really really short blurb on the back sounded fun.

It totally sucked me in. It was greatly helped by the fact that I loved the narrator, but it was just fun. It didn't expect to be taken seriously. All the characters, especially the minor ones, are realistic and worth caring about. I just loved it.

I was totally shocked to see a preview for a Percy Jackson & the Olympians MOVIE when we went to see HP. Turns out there's like a whole series and it's been out for a while and they've been best sellers? I pretty much live in a cave.

So then I got The Sea of Monsters. It's another short, fun story with wonderful characters you just want to be BFF with. I've already put books 3 and 4 on my library queue and I'm really looking forward to hanging out with the characters a little while longer.

They're not The Great American Novel but Rick Riordan knows that. These books are often laugh-out-loud funny and I love the blending of Greek mythology with modern day situations. Great reading for a Summer afternoon.


Summaries on Goodreads here and here