The Legend of Lady Ilena -- Patricia Malone, 2002 (read 21-24 June 2007)

I have a lot of different favorite kinds of books. The Legend of Lady Ilena is several of them!

• Believable historical fiction: Well, Ilena is completely fictional; we have no evidence that anyone like her existed. It was a stroke of genius, in my opinion, to situate her lightly in Arthurian times, a setting where it's easy for modern readers to suspend disbelief. I'm easily annoyed by implausible details in historical fiction, so I really appreciate books that suck me into the past without making me stub my toes on what a normal person would consider minor errors. Of course, any writer of historical fiction has to make a lot of things up; what matters to me is that the fiction harmonize well with what we do know. Ilena is strong and smart and very much of her own time.
  
  
• Strong women who really fit into the stories being told about them: See the last sentence above. It helps, as I said, that we don't know too much about sixth-century Britain, and it probably helps me that so much of what I do know is colored by all the historical fiction I read growing up. I also have a decided weakness for lady knights -- not the easiest characters to write into real history! Whatever their story, it's always a great pleasure for me to read characters I both like and believe in.
  
  
• Traditional stories re-explained: Malone has managed (against the odds!) to contribute something really new to the masses of historical fiction set in Arthur's time. She's done it in part by avoiding Arthur himself, leaving him a vague, faraway presence, but she's done it well.
  
  
• Just plain good writing: This is one of my basic litmus tests, of course. To really love a book, I have to enjoy its prose and its characters and the world it creates. It certainly helps if there are lines that makes me grin both with humor and with revelation. I don't know if Malone is the first one to have this insight, but I loved her idea that the unearthly barking of Hearn's Hounds (the ghostly hunt at Halloween-time -- you might remember it from The Dark Is Rising) might be the same sound as the honking of migrating geese.
  

I just love literary craftsmanship of all kinds.

I'm looking forward to checking out Malone's second Lady Ilena book; the Amazon reviews suggest that it won't be disappointing.

The Tale of Despereaux -- Kate DiCamillo, 2003 (read 19-20 June 2007)

Another box checked on the "things I've been sort of meaning to read for a while now" list. I finally wrote this review last Friday -- Friday the 13th! -- while sitting in a strange library,* taking a break between endurance bouts of integration.

* Not strange anymore -- I technically have a card for this library now (and all other public libraries in Maryland).

The most striking feature of The Tale of Despereaux is its extreme cuteness. The story's prose is charming to the point of being laugh-out-loud funny (sometimes on purpose, sometimes not). The invocation to the reader annoyed me somehow, although Adam thought it was charming.

Surprisingly although the story is sometimes a bit too conscious of itself as a story -- too much "Reader, this happened" and "Reader, that happened" -- it never struck me as too very self-conscious about the cuteness. It's appealing in a very obvious way, yet not in an acutely embarrassing way. It's really just sweet.

The trials Despereaux faces weren't as tense for me, as a reader, as they were for Despereaux himself, but that might be different if I were younger. Overall, I was charmed by the plot. I particularly like the way the story's resolution depended on almost every character having a bit of good in them. I also liked that it came about in spite of almost everyone having bit of doubt about themselves or their actions.

Since finishing Despereaux, I've seen Ratatouille, which has some obvious superficial similarities. I liked Ratatouille better, I think. On the other hand, I would not have appreciated it in precisely the same way if I hadn't just read Despereaux, so there you are.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince -- J. K. Rowling, 2005 (re-read 31 May-4 June 2007)

I've just finished re-reading the Harry Potter series in anticipation of Book 7. I re-read them pretty frequently -- probably at least once a year, and definitely when there's a new one coming out. They bear re-reading well; there are always details I forgot or didn't notice, and it's fun to read them all in a row, to watch the whole story unfold. This time, of course, I was looking for clues about all the mysteries Book 6 sets up: Is Snape good or evil? What's going to happen to Harry? Can I guess any of the things he's going to find on his quest?

The Rope Trick -- Lloyd Alexander, 2002 (read 3-4 June 2007)

Another quite satisfying ending. It leaves a number of loose ends, but they're not irritating omissions; rather, they seem like exciting mysteries, which fits the magical and mysterious feel of the whole book.

I'm noticing a certain similarity between The Rope Trick and The First Two Lives of Lukas-Kasha (also by Alexander, published in 1978). Both are set in thinly fictionalized versions of real countries several centuries ago, but that's true of nearly all of Alexander's children's books. I'm more struck by the subtle sameness of the magic in these two books. Magic plays completely different roles in the two plots, but the rules about magic are something like this: People who try to do magic are mostly conjurers doing tricks; but sometimes, sometimes they really can do magic.

I've been reading a lot of Alexander since I learned that he died this May -- I read the Prydain and Westmark books when I was younger, and The Arkadians, but I missed all the others. I'm glad to find that Alexander's writing (both his use of language and the stories he has to tell) is still as compelling as it used to be. I'm particularly enjoying the way he writes about family love, romantic love, and friendship; it's such fun to watch clever characters learn to understand and take care of each other, and their love (of whatever kind) seems so genuine.

The Perilous Gard -- Elizabeth Marie Pope, 1974 (read ~31 May-3 June 2007)

A wonderful book! Not entirely surprising, since it's a Newbery Honor book. It's based on the Scottish ballad of Tam Lin, and I enjoyed it much more than Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock, which is based on the same legend. This is saying a lot, since I'm quite a Jones fan.

Kate, the heroine, is an interesting person, someone I can identify with. All the characters seem like people I'd enjoy talking to. A good book, of course, may or may not have characters like this, but it definitely was pleasant.

I did keep noticing two flaws in the book:

• Pope used Tudor period details well, displaying the results of what must have been plenty of research without including a single historical detail that didn't seem necessary at the time. Even Kate's thoughts were backed up with details about her upbringing in and around Tudor royal courts, and her personal exposure to a few of the great thinkers of the period. Still, her thought processes often seemed too modern, even post-modern. In particular, her conclusions about the clash between Christian and pagan lifestyles felt too much like Marion Zimmer Bradley to be believable in a Tudor lady-in-waiting. They were very nicely disguised as period-appropriate thoughts, though.
  
• In a few places, I found it too easy to predict what was about to happen -- particularly just before the very end.
  

These problems were far outweighed, however, by my favorite thing about this book: It has an ending that's exactly right. It's so unusual for an ending to be satisfying! Usually the book stops before it really seems done; less often, there's a real denouement, but it doesn't happen at all the way I wanted it to. This book is one of perhaps five or ten I've read with truly satisfying endings.