MISS PEREGRINE'S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN, Ransom Riggs

Yay, I managed to meet my “probably in April” deadline! For a review that’s seven months past relevance (when the film adaptation hit theaters). Actually, no. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children will have relevance well after people have forgotten the Tim Burton version, banished to the same memory cupboard as Dark Shadows and Alice Through the Looking Glass. The novel itself is five years older than its film counterpart, but thanks to its two sequels, there’s more meat to eventually dive into. So, where does this grand adventure populated by remarkable and somewhat frightening children begin?

Florida.

Well, if you need to start in a non-magical place full of its own peculiarities, might as well be Florida.

In truth, Ransom Riggs’ opening falls in line with the impulse of many fantasy writers setting up ordinary heroes before entering the extraordinary world. That is, his version of Florida is, for the most part, benignly mundane. Sort of a shame. I mean, where are all the alligators? Instead, we get right to Jake Portman, the teenage protagonist. He’s going about a typical day at a job he doesn’t want, living with a family that doesn’t appreciate or understand him. A familiar beginning, but let’s proceed.

A COURT OF MIST AND FURY, Sarah J. Maas

You think Maas is going to go through the whole color spectrum? First ACOTAR in red, then ACOMAF in blue—maybe green next time? Or yellow? Or purple? Ooh, if she’s going with the thesis-antithesis-synthesis model, then I’m predicting purple. Hegelian dialectic, bitches!

What the heck am I talking about? Just how A Court of Mist and Fury basically flips so many things from A Court of Thorns and Roses 180 degrees! Some fans of the first book will like it; others will hate it with all the passion that only shippers can feel. My disclaimer for this review may put off Tamlin/Feyre lovers (do they have an official name? Tumblr, enlighten me!), but I must be honest: I liked Feyre and Tamlin in as much that he made her happy, or at least could be romantic with her to a nauseating degree. He brought light and love into her life—so it’s a shame their relationship takes a bleak turn that only worsens over the course of the book, for various reasons.

THE SCHOOL FOR GOOD AND EVIL: A WORLD WITHOUT PRINCES, Soman Chainani

Ah, yes, the first in what will probably be a continual string of sequels in several fantasy series I may half-regret starting somewhere down the road. Sequels are generally a tricky business, especially since they’re almost always part of a trilogy, tetralogy or so on. First books have the benefit of introducing a world and its characters while not being obligated to explain everything. The second installment has to both expand on the setup in a meaningful way and not be a thinly veined rehash of its predecessor. Then again, many second installments are revered as the best part of a series because they can dare to push the heroes to their limits and close on a dark ending. A World Without Princes delivers a blend of all of the above, sometimes to its own detriment.

The story continues closely from where the first book left off: Agatha and Sophie are back in their village, now made famous by their fairy tale. For the few months, Sophie basks in the fame while Agatha just wants everything to be normal again. When their fame dies down, Sophie grows restless for attention while being overshadowed by changes in her family life—her father is getting married to her dead mother’s best friend, who Sophie suspects her father had an affair with even while Sophie’s mother was alive. Agatha tries to comfort Sophie and be content with their Happily Ever After. Too bad she can’t make herself forget Tedros, the prince she started falling for back at the School for Good and Evil. As the rising tension suggests (along with the book’s title), events propel the girls from their village back to the school—only this time their exit is triggered by one of them.

MAGNUS CHASE AND THE GODS OF ASGARD: THE SWORD OF SUMMER, Rick Riordan

Is it just me, or does it seem like Norse mythology got really popular all of a sudden? Neil Gaiman’s American Gods is getting a miniseries (which in all fairness has only a couple Norse deities, no spoilers), Marvel is making its third Thor-centric film, and now Rick Riordan is throwing angsty teens at the mercy of Norns, Valkyries, dwarves and giants, not to mention the gods themselves. Now, this isn’t Riordan’s first mythology rodeo, as anyone who loves the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series can tell you. In fact, the Greek and Norse pantheons aren’t the only divine playgrounds he’s visited in his books. But what of the stories themselves? Is each new hero basically Percy Jackson with a different coat of paint? It may seem so with newcomer Magnus Chase, but the clever reimagining of the worlds of Yggdrasil and the characters joining Magnus in this adventure offer much to enjoy.

TIGER LILY, Jodi Lynn Anderson

When it comes to adapting Barrie’s story of a fantastic land where children never grow up, the aspect that just about everyone stumbles on is the portrayal of his Native American characters, who even in the original story suffer from the influences of colonialism and racism. Jodi Anderson attempts to not only tackle a new vision of Neverland’s native residents but put them in the spotlight as a culture and a collage of diverse characters. That doesn’t spare her from some deserved criticism of the stereotypes and caricatures she employs, as better dissected by Debbie Reese in her review of the book. Forgive my willingness to leave the problematic elements to the scrutiny of critics with a better grasp of the prevailing racial issues in Western literature that Tiger Lily reflects. I’ve honestly struggled to post this review out of fear that I wasn’t giving the Native American portrayals their due analysis, as my own knowledge on the subject is limited. For anyone interested, you can read Reese’s article here, and I recommend you do. I’ll mostly stick to assessing the story elements on the whole.

ONCE UPON A TIME: RED’S UNTOLD TALE, Wendy Toliver

Hey, what’s black, white and Red all over? It’s ABC’s latest attempt to hold on to audience interest in their fairytale franchise—and it’s not too shabby, if I may say so. Certainly a step up from how our beloved Red Riding Hood was utilized in Shadow of the Queen.

Unlike previous addends to the OUAT lore via printed media, Toliver’s novel takes us back to an earlier period in Red’s life, filling in bits of backstory and fleshing out her relationships with Granny, childhood hunk-friend Peter, and other members of her village. It also has a YA flavor, but not to an irritating degree. It follows several tropes of coming-of-age stories without becoming too cliché. You have romantic and sexual awakening, school bullies, weird dreams the hero doesn’t understand but have something to do with finding her true self—yeah, that does sound more overdone when you break it down, but Toliver’s easy, fluid yet intelligent writing style articulates the understandable trials of entering adulthood and makes them feeling organic and visceral to her (well, ABC’s) characters.

THE SCHOOL FOR GOOD AND EVIL, Soman Chainani

I have a feeling ‘Wicked’ is going to be the basis of comparison for a lot of fairytale-inspired books I’ll review in the future. In The School for Good and Evil, the inspiration isn’t so direct, but it’s traceable.

We have two heroines, teenage girls from a village where, every four years, children fall under the threat of being snatched away to a school where they’ll learn to become heroes or villains in fairy tales. Sophie is our blonde, pink-loving aspiring princess (despite not actually being royalty) who dreams of being chosen for the School for Good, meeting her prince and having a happily Ever After. As a means to secure how ‘good’ she is in the eyes of the mysterious Schoolmaster, she has befriended graveyard-dwelling, drab Agatha, whose favorite hobby is lighting and flicking matches wherever she goes.

Despite their opposing personalities (and how obviously Sophie reached out to Agatha for dubious reasons), the girls see each other as friends. Indeed, they're the only real friends they either have. Understandably, the night of the Schoolmaster’s visit results in both girls being taken to the school, albeit with Agatha trying to save them from such a fate. What neither anticipates is that Agatha is dropped in the pretty, pristine halls of the School for Good while Sophie plops into the repugnant castle of the School for Evil.

ROSES AND BONES, Francesca Lia Block

I honestly didn’t know what to expect when I began reading this book. Yes, a promising opening to a review, but any readers unfamiliar with Block and her writing style might be taken by surprise, too. If you feel so bold, prepare to be swept away by the flood of poetry, swirling with startling imagery, dark themes and shards of tales as old as time refashioned in the landscape of American culture.

Roses and Bones is not actually one book, but three shorter novels (novellas?) Block began publishing in 2000. Psyche in a Dress comes first and, as though anticipating how many unwary readers would open this book, hits us right off with free verse. The story follows one girl, the daughter of a Hollywood director, on a journey of growth and self-discovery in the guises of many characters from Greek myth. If you ate up such stories in grade school like I did, you’ll enjoy piecing together the references Block weaves in each chapter; for those who had more productive ways to spend their free time, you might end up spiking the book on the ground out of frustration. Or not, if you’re too sucked in by Block’s lyricism and deft word-craft already. Which you should be.

THE ISLE OF THE LOST, Melissa de la Cruz

It’s not the first time that a creative mind has posed the question, “What if these beloved characters had kids?” Just ask J.K. Rowling and every fanfic writer on the internet. It’s also not the first time Disney was ready to profit on nostalgia and a thriving fanbase at the risk of tormenting those same fans with corny-as-hell songs and butchered characterization.

Well, the Disney Channel film Descendants has at least one of those things down pat. Thankfully the prequel novel The Isle of the Lost doesn’t come with a soundtrack.

Parents and adult Disney fans should be aware that this book and its TV counterpart are targeting a young demographic. The writing meets those expectations with overstating the obvious and inserting casual hip lingo, yo, into the third-person narrative voice. But what about the story and its characters? If they’re interesting enough, can they overshadow the writing style?

Ehhh—kind of.

A COURT OF THORNS AND ROSES, Sarah J. Maas

What better way to kick off this blog than with the latest hot release from Sarah Maas: her fairy-laden rendition of Beauty and the Beast? For better or worse, Beauty and the Beast is to blame for much of my favorite fantasy and romance tropes. Generally, the results have been happy ones. As with anything good and lovely in life, though, some marred versions of the story (e.g. Twilight) that miss the core themes or assault you with unlikable characters have crawled out of the abyss. They’ve made me second-guess my love for the classic tale.

A Court of Thorns and Roses is not one of those versions. I know. High praise.

The story follows Feyre, a young woman whose family has fallen from prestige. Her sisters, Nesta and Elain, still behave like nobility despite their crushing poverty, and their father has fallen into an apathetic daze. So it’s on Feyre to provide for them with her honed hunting skills. Her life changes when killing a wolf lands her at the mercy of a hairy and horned creature called Tamlin. He demands that she repay the life she’s taken with her own. Instead of death, as Feyre expects at the hands of what she realizes are fairies, her punishment is to live the rest of her life in the Spring Court, Tamlin’s domain, north of the Wall that separates humanity from the fae realm Prythian. Feyre slowly learns not only that her High Fae captors are more than monsters, but a secret threatens both Fae and humans, and only she can save them.