Reckless

Reckless by Cornelia Funke and Lionel Wigram. Translated by Oliver Latsch. Read by Eliott Hill.
Once upon a time, a father disappeared, leaving his wife and two sons. One night, his oldest son went into his abandoned study and discovered that the dark mirror on his wall was really a portal to a parallel world, one where fairies and fairy tales were real. Years later, Jacob Reckless still divided his time between the fairy tale world and our world, but spent more and more time in the pretend world, where he kept looking for his father. He was at least able to ignore the problems in his life in the real world until the time when his little brother caught him leaving and insisted on coming with him. They had a chance encounter with some goyl, living gargoyle-like creatures of stone, and Will was infected with the stone plague, cursed to turn slowly to goyl. Now Jacob must use his skills and contacts as a hunter of legendary treasures from the old tales to find a cure for his brother before he is turned completely to stone. With Jacob and Will are Jacob’s friend Fox, a fox-girl; and Clara, Will’s doctor girlfriend.

It took a little while for me to get into this book – Jacob abandoning his little brother and their failing, grief-stricken mother isn’t at first a sympathetic character. It wasn’t until everyone started off on the mission in the fairy tale world that the story started to come together. Once it does, though the quest is nearly impossible and the obstacles enormous, the characters and the detailed world are just as important as the plot. It’s a dark fairy tale world, one where they find Sleeping Beauty, still looking young and beautiful but just as clearly dead, and where they make their way through a dark and dangerous wood to the abandoned home of a child-eating witch. (I appreciated that there were also healing witches, who’d recently formally separated themselves from their “child-eating sisters”.) The happy endings may be make-believe, but the magic of the world is still seductive and compelling. Meanwhile, our characters: Jacob is dealing with tons of guilt for having left his brother for so long and for letting something so bad happen to Will. Fox, born a human but more comfortable as a fox, is just moving from puppy-worship of Jacob to a more adult and decidedly more uncomfortable attraction. Will and Clara are watching his humanity and his memories of being human fade while stranded in a hostile world. It’s a little curious that this was billed as teen, because all of our main characters are in their 20s. Still, while there’s violence, it’s low on overt sexuality, and the struggles of slightly older than usual orphans trying to find their way is appealing to teens. The world edges a bit closer to horror than I usually like, but the characters were engrossing enough for me to overlook this. I enjoyed it quite a lot, and am taking the second book in the series, Fearless (out last month) home with me today.

Clockwork Princess

Clockwork Princess by Cassandra Clare.
This is the third and final book in Clare’s Infernal Devices series, which itself is a prequel to her ongoing, longer Mortal Instruments series. And if anyone isn’t aware, the movie of the first book in that series, City of Bone is coming out this summer.

I picked up the first book in the Infernal Devices series blissfully unaware that it was topping teen bestseller lists (how?? I read these several times a week!), only aware that it looked steampunky and I like steampunk. Now I’m addicted – it feels like a junk food addiction, and I’ve been struggling to articulate how these books can feel both beautiful and unhealthy. Warning: there is no way to discuss this without spoilers for the previous two.

Tessa Gray is not a Shadowhunter, but she’s been living at the London Institute for Shadowhunters, headed by Charlotte Branwell, since she escaped from the villains in the first book. Now she’s doing her best to help them. At the end of the last book, she got engaged to sweet Jem, even though she’s equally in love with bad boy Will and broke his heart getting engaged to Jem. (I was really annoyed with her, last book, for getting as upset as she did about this. We’ve known Jem has a short amount of time left to live since the first book, while Will is perfectly healthy and only just working out how to be nice. I really think Tessa made the best possible choice here.) But anyway, while the story opens with this drama and the romance of planning Tessa and Jem’s wedding, events move rapidly along. Will’s younger sister Cecily (still a teen – we are in a world of lots of beautiful teens and a few still not too old adults) arrives from Wales to bring Will home, but is sucked in when everyone at the Institute leaves to help fellow Shadowhunter Gideon Lightwood battle his father, who has turned into a giant demon worm. Naturally, this wins them more enemies on the Council, and the Consul is already engaging in a full-scale letter-writing war to have Charlotte (expecting her first baby) replaced as the head of the Institute. (He was expecting her to be submissive and pliant.) Then, the villain Mortmain, whom we’d all hoped was defeated in the last book, sends his evil clockwork men to bring Tessa back to him. Meanwhile, all of this action and fighting is more than Jem’s fragile health can really bear. In the end, though Tessa’s strapping young admirers would do anything to protect her, it’s up to her to stop Mortmain and his Evil Plans to Take Over the World.

This is a pretty tall book, 570 pages long, and I devoured it in a few days. Clare has that perfect balance of character interest, exciting plot, and beautiful setting that made it impossible to put down. Having a building full of beautiful young teens all of whom are involved in some sort of hopeless love affair contributes to the junk food feeling. They are all too beautiful! And they go sighing around after each other in a quite melodramatic way, which I’m a little ashamed to admit did not stop me from feeling for them. That being said, I was glad to see that the new romances in this book aren’t love triangles. Tessa does much less in the way of self-flagellation over her feelings for her two boys than she did in the last book, which was a great relief, and Will shapes up nicely. Love triangles are both over-done in current teen lit and hard to do well; especially now that Will has got his head on straight again, I really felt that both Jem and Will were good choices, making for a more believable triangle. And Clare resolved the whole thing in a beautiful, unexpected way. And even in the historical setting, Clare gives us equal partnerships in all of the romances, with none of the uneven power balances that bothered me so much in, say, Twilight. The only thing potentially wrong with the book (besides the Drama and sometimes overly descriptive writing) is that I didn’t find it inspiring Deep Thoughts. So maybe it’s the writing style and the feeling that I’m being manipulated so skillfully into not being able to put the book down that makes it feel unhealthy, like eating the whole box of Girl Scout Cookies at once. At least a book binge won’t have bad effects on my blood sugar, right? And if you have thoughts on this book, or on what makes books feel like Real Literature vs. (potentially less worthwhile) Pop Literature, I’d love to hear them.

Tree of Mindala Winners

Happy Monday, everyone!

It’s time to give away the three copies of The Tree of Mindala! Thank you to everyone who entered. I now go to http://random.org to come up with the winners. And…. Drumroll, please, we have:
#4 – Georgia Beckman
#2 – Julie Grasso
#11 – esivy

Winners, please look for an email from me and let me know what format you’d like your ebook in. Thanks again to Elle Jackson for writing and providing her lovely book, and to Renee at Mother Daughter books for introducing me to Elle.

I have a big stack of books I just finished reading that are waiting to be entered in the official review queue, so look for more reviews soon.

The Knitter’s Handy Book of Top-Down Sweaters

As I detour back to knitting, I remind you that my giveaway for The Tree of Mindala is running through Sunday. You still have time to enter!

The Knitter’s Handy Book of Top-Down Sweaters by Ann Budd.

Ann Budd is famous for her “Knitter’s Handy Book” series, all of which have patterns for basic knitted garments in a range of sizes and gauges, from lace weight to bulky yarn, babies to large men. In the past, these books have been practical, especially if you are a would-be knitting designer who needs a place to start before adding your own details. However, tables of how many stitches to knit or decrease are not so interesting just for browsing, at least not for me. This book adds a couple of nifty features that make it really stand out above her other books, as truly useful as they are. First, these are all top-down sweaters. I love top-down sweaters (Ok, I’ve only ever knit one, but still) because of the minimal finishing. Usually you knit down the body, leaving room for the sleeves, then add on the sleeves. Much better than knitting all those pieces flat – with lots of slow purling back if you want stockinette – and then spending hours sewing the flat pieces into tubes. Next, she includes fully designed sweaters with photographs – three or four patterns for each of the four basic construction methods. One of each style is designed by a different Famous Knitting Designer. This instantly ups the browsing appeal of the book and shows how the plain, basic sweater patterns can be turned into something really cool. I thought I might have loved the circular yoked Fibonacci Rings sweater in a different color scheme, and definitely liked the Quince-Essential Fair Isle sweater by Pam Allen. Other interesting designs included the Alpine Tweed Cardi by Jared Flood (the runaway favorite from the book on Ravelry) and the Cable Love Henley with a cable running all the way from neck to wrist down the saddle shoulder. The last section of the book wraps everything up beautifully with neck variations and lots of tips for finishing the sweater and making sure your sweater comes out looking handmade, not homemade. This is a great choice for knitters, and will accommodate either those just starting who want simple patterns or those branching out into designing.

How to Fake a Moon Landing

How to Fake a Moon Landing: Exposing the Myths of Science Denial by Darryl Cunningham.
This is a collection of linked graphic essays. Cunningham delves into the science and history of a number of current controversies, with the comic book format making it both easier to understand the facts as well as more fun. If this seems like it might be dry, it isn’t. The controversies are all current ones, with passionate defenders on both sides. Cunningham is always passionate in his defense of the scientific method, if sometimes impatient in his criticism of deniers. I’d assumed that I, as an educated person, would find myself on his side, but it turned out that I sometimes did and sometimes didn’t, which made things even more interesting. Even Andrew C. Revkin, the scientist who wrote the introduction, says that he thinks that Cunningham is a little too harsh on the opposition in a couple of cases.

Cunningham starts off with the case from the title, the supposed faking of the moon landing in 1969. This he readily disproves, frequently using evidence from the MythBusters episode on the same topic as evidence. At this point, I’m feeling happy fuzzy feelings about the book. Then, he moves on to homeopathy. (I should clarify here that this is about strict homeopathy, usually dispensed as little round white pills, not home or herbal remedies, which are often confused.) Homeopathy relies, he says, on the memory of water, a theory which has never been duplicated and the results of which – homeopathic medicine – can’t be proven to be effective. He then goes on to cite cases of people dying because of their reliance on homeopathic medicine to cure things like cancer and malaria. Well! On the one hand, I find the whole water having memory thing suspect. On the other hand, I use homeopathy in ways which don’t fit his description of irresponsible use of homeopathy. I’ll start with homeopathy and move up the scale to herbs and then conventional medicine if I don’t find it working or I’ll take it as recommended by my doctor in combination with supplements and conventional drugs. I’d never rely on homeopathy instead of allopathic medicine in a life-threatening situation, but I have seen multiple cases of homeopathy working when conventional medicine didn’t. And, since it’s cheap and can work when conventional medicine doesn’t, I don’t care if it’s just the placebo effect at work. I had fewer problems with his next essay, on chiropractic. The only issue I saw was that he said that no method for reliably improving back pain has ever been found, when studies have been published that showed the admittedly low-profile Alexander Technique to be more effective than both conventional medicine and massage. The article on the MMR vaccine and the supposed link to autism had more and very damning information about Wakefield’s unethical studies than I’d seen before. But again, while I vaccinate my children, my friends who don’t have reasons that aren’t related to this disproved study and that are much more nuanced than presented in this article. The next article included fascinating proofs of evolution, such as the stage-by-stage development of eyes and the illogic of how whale fetuses first develop and then reabsorb limb buds. Next up is fracking, which the scientist in the introduction thinks is safer than Cunningham does. He goes into the myriad problems, including the documented health problems with many of the known chemicals (most aren’t disclosed) used in fracking (including benzene, lead, sulphuric acid and formaldehyde), and the vast sums that oil companies have put into covering up potential health and environmental problems and convincing state governments to change laws to protect them. This he likens to the similar situation with tobacco, and we can hope for similar results in the future. The article on climate change was solid, and was done through a conversation with a penguin. The final article goes over the scientific method, how it works and why science can be trusted. Here – well, Cunningham seems to be a die-hard imperialist, while I’m more a person who believes that science explains a lot of the world, and then we have things like religion and stories to help with other parts of the world.

The illustration style uses a mix of simple line drawings and deliberately pixelated photographs that morph to drawings. The regular grid pattern with text on top is easy to read even for those not used to the comic book format, but that doesn’t mean that Cunningham is just looking for graphics that fit marginally with his text. He’ll start with something like a picture of a duck on a lake at the beginning of a story, where the duck isn’t mentioned in the text at all, but reappears throughout the story and turns out at the end to have been a highly relevant example. The book is put together in a way that makes it easy to follow along with sometimes complicated ideas. I put it in the Adult Graphic Novel collection at my library, but this would be a great book to start conversations about science controversies with both adults and teens.

The Tree of Mindala

The Tree of Mindala by Elle Jacklee.
Miranda Moon (almost 12) and younger brother Marcus are spending Halloween weekend at their grandparents’ cabin in the woods, abandoned since their disappearance several years earlier. When Miranda finds and shakes a snow globe she finds under the floor boards in their room, the children find themselves transported to the magical land of Wunderwood. They learn that Miranda’s turning the globe upside-down broke the magical bindings of the villainous Thornton, whom their grandparents – one from our world, one from Wunderwood – had trapped and bound years before. Before long, they are found by their grandmother’s sister, Raina. She begins training them in the magic that comes naturally to all Wunderwood natives, as well as introducing them to others in the ongoing movement to stop the evil Thornton. Because of the nature of the spell that had trapped him, people believe that Miranda is part of the potential solution as well. Thornton’s long-term mission has been to find the one tree in Wunderwood imbued with the life force of the whole wood, the Tree of Mindala, and use it to claim all magical power for himself.

This is a sweet yet exciting middle grade fantasy. Miranda is an imaginative girl who feels responsible for correcting the problems she unwittingly caused, even though she’s caught in a new world. It looks at the meaning of family from many different angles, from Miranda and Marcus’s initially argumentative relationship to the easy way in which they are embraced in Wunderwood by relatives they’d never known existed and the evil Thornton’s rejection of the family that raised him in favor of the politics of the blood father he didn’t know. I loved the magic of Wunderwood that permeates the world – I wish I had magical tree furniture that would make and rearrange itself to suit the current need! It’s obvious that Jacklee had a great time imagining the world and its magic system. She also comes up with an inventive solution for defeating the Big Bad that’s exciting without being too scary for younger middle grade readers, and manages prophecies without falling into the easy pitfalls of plot-by-prophecy.

There were a few things that I didn’t enjoy so much, though. The first third was layer upon layer of flashbacks, going back to Miranda’s past, as well as both the older and more recent history of Wunderwood, and I wanted to know what was happening in the present sooner. On a plot note, I was puzzled about why everyone thinks that Miranda is “Wunderwood’s Moon” as spoken of in prophecy, when Marcus and Miranda are both Moons who arrived in Wunderwood at the same time. Miranda’s character is more prone to action, but I was really puzzled by it turning into Miranda’s quest rather than a sibling quest. In the “I’m not sure whether this is good or bad” middle ground, usually in youth fantasy books, the kids are completely in charge of their actions. Even when adults are present, usually they either don’t get the grim reality (as in early Harry Potter) or defer to the younger people (as in Prydain). Here, however, while Miranda eventually finds and implement a solution herself, a lot of essential action is taken by the adults who are much more experienced magic users and have been working against Thornton for years. I’m still trying to decide if it would be better for Miranda to have more agency or if it’s cool that Jacklee shows a more realistic adult-adolescent situation. Ultimately, while I enjoyed The Tree of Mindala, I didn’t love it. I think I’m alone in this opinion, though, as all the people on Amazon and Goodreads did love it – so I do hope you’ll enter in my giveaway (open through this Sunday) for an ebook copy of it and make up your own mind.

This book was provided to me as an ebook by the author in exchange for an honest review. It’s available for purchase in print and ebook formats, but unlike most of the books I review here, is not yet available in public libraries.

Other bloggers’ takes on The Tree of Mindala
Music, Books and Tea
Pure Jonel
Wandering Thoughts of a Writer

Kid Lit Giveaway Hop – The Tree of Mindala

Welcome to the first Kid Lit Giveaway Hop, hosted by Mother Daughter Book Reviews and Youth Literature Reviews.

We are celebrating Children’s Book Week (May 13 to 19, 2013) by providing all of YOU, our loyal followers, with the opportunity to win fabulous children/teen’s books, gift cards, cash, or other prizes by hopping around to the almost 100 participating blogs/authors listed below in the Linky List. What better way to celebrate Children’s Book Week?

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Click here to see the other blogs in the giveaway hop.

Our Prize – 3 Lucky Winners will each win an ebook copy (any format) of The Tree of Mindala by Elle Jacklee


Contest runs May 13 to 19, 2013
Please leave a comment and tell us about your favorite fantasy forest (from a book, of course!) to enter this giveaway.

This is a middle grade fantasy novel, published this year, equally appealing to boys and girls.

Description: Soon to be twelve-year-old Miranda Moon’s overactive imagination has landed her in trouble again. This time, she’s been suspended from school. Since her Halloween weekend just got extended, her parents decide to take her and her straight-laced younger brother, Marcus, to her late grandparents’ old cabin. That suits Miranda just fine. She’s always felt there was something special about the place. Besides, she has a knack for making the best of things. But when Miranda finds a curious water globe hidden in the cabin, she and Marcus are catapulted into a world even she never imagined. A world where everybody already knows their family name and magic flows through the trees. A world called Wunderwood. But their arrival happens to coincide with the release of a sinister warlock from a forty-year imprisonment. Thornton Crow resumes his deadly agenda to find the source of Wunderwood’s magical power, the Tree of Mindala, and seize it for his own. As Miranda learns of her own connection to Thornton, she realizes that it’s up to her to end his cruel and relentless cycle of death that would steal not just magic, but also hope. With only the cryptic words of a prophecy to guide her, she holds the fate of the entire realm as well as the safety of Marcus and the newly found branches of her family tree in her hands. Miranda’s signature optimism is put to the ultimate test when she chooses to carry out the task that will save Wunderwood… or doom it forever.
(Contest details shown twice to be easier to find.)
Contest runs May 13 to 19, 2013
Please leave a comment and tell us about your favorite fantasy forest (from a book, of course!) to enter this giveaway.

Keep reading for a guest post from author Elle Jacklee!
When The Tree of Mindala was first released, a friend and fellow mom said to me, “It’s a little like having another baby, isn’t it?” Of course, nothing can compare to the experience of becoming a mom, but it was hard to deny that, in some ways, she was right…

First the idea for a story is conceived, much like that moment of human conception when not much about the finished product is clear, only that something truly amazing has happened. Then, as time goes on, details become sharper, and things start to take shape. You begin to feel connected to this miracle that grows each day. Before long, it’s a part of you and you’re a part of it.

There are days, in both scenarios, when the euphoria of creation has you walking on air. There are also days when you’re just a tiny bit (okay, maybe more than just a tiny bit!) afraid about what will happen once your newest addition meets the world. Will everybody adore your pride and joy as much as you do? Will the world appreciate the beauty that is your crowning achievement? And will you ever get a full night’s sleep again? But soon you realize there’s no turning back, so there’s really no point in worrying about any of that.

When I was expecting my first child, I daydreamed about what he would look like, which personality traits he would get from me and which from his dad, etc. It wasn’t long after he was born before it was clear that some of my expectations were not entirely “accurate”. Likewise, when I first sketched the characters in my book, I thought I had a pretty good idea of who they were. But as the story unfolded, some of their personalities emerged in ways I hadn’t expected. They had taken on a life of their own. With my children as well as my fictional characters, I’m still amazed at how their personalities continue to evolve. And in both cases, things just seem to go better when I allow them to be just who they are!

Now that they (my children and my book!) are here in the world, I no longer concern myself with those doubts I had while they were on the way. Deep down, I always knew that in the end it would all be worth it, and it has been. I just tell myself, just as I will tell my children, to always be true to yourself and always do your very best. And ultimately, doing one will be the same as doing the other.

As a proud mom, the stories that I will always be most interested in watching unfold will, of course, belong to my children. But I’m excited to share that I’m currently working on the second installment of the Wunderwood series, The Triad of the Tree. I’m really enjoying delving deeper into the characters and I can’t wait to share more of Wunderwood’s history with readers. But between my kids and this new addition on the way, one question still remains: will I ever get a full night’s sleep again? But I guess it doesn’t really matter… there’s no turning back now!

Interview with Martin Berman-Gorvine

I’m very excited to share with you today an interview with Martin Berman-Gorvine, author of Seven Against Mars. (In case you missed it, here’s my review of Seven Against Mars.)

Katy: What’s your elevator speech for Seven Against Mars? Do you have a specific audience in mind for it?
Martin: The loneliness and heartbreak of being a teenager are that much more intense when you are running for your life in an unfamiliar world, as are the 15-year-old heroines of Seven Against Mars. Rachel Zilber, who is trapped on the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942, and Katie Webb, who is fleeing from neo-Confederates in twenty-second-century Texas, find themselves in the pulp science fiction-style world of Rachel’s imagination, where it’s not only their own fate they have to worry about, but that of the planet Mars and perhaps the entire Solar System—not to mention their parents back in the “real” world.
Seven Against Mars has an evil villain it, and zap-guns, and space battles, and that dangerous mix of virgins and live volcanoes. Adults shouldn’t be deterred by the “young adult” label.

Seven Against Mars

Seven Against Mars by Martin Berman-Gorvine

Here’s the official plot description:

Trapped in the Warsaw ghetto in 1942, teenager Rachel Zilber escapes the horror by writing about the adventures of Zap-Gun Jack and Princess Anya of Mars. When her parents are captured by the Nazis, Rachel’s transported into her make-believe world, but the danger is far from over. Together with Katie, a girl from the future, Rachel joins Jack and a rag-tag band of misfits to fight the evil Lord Ares III of Mars and restore Princess Anya to her rightful place on the Martian throne.

The adventure is as over-the-top as you’d expect from an homage to pulp fiction, and this is done with a great sense of humor – both Rachel and Katie (who read Rachel’s book in the library) find that the bombastic hero speech so fun to read and write about is a little less easy to deal with in real life. There’s a lot more going on here as well. Rachel and Katie both wonder since Rachel’s imaginary world became real, if she could rewrite the pasts of their own world to rescue their parents. Rachel finds that the world that she imagined isn’t exactly as she’d written it in real life. All of it is fully fleshed out, some with details that Katie had imagined when she read it, some from Rachel’s subconscious or abandoned story ideas. While this leads to a lot of very funny moments, it also leads to a lot of introspection on Rachel’s part. She’d never imagined meeting the idealized version of herself that wrote as the love interest in the book in person, and finds it incredibly awkward. She’s shocked to find that residents of Mars speak what they call Marpolski, and that there’s even a colony of Hasidic Jews on Mars, which she’s been raised to view as backwards. As Katie and Rachel explore how the magic of the written word works, it’s looking at the relationship between author and reader. I’ll admit that it took me a chapter or two to get into the story, but once I did, I was hooked. Though Katie is a fine character, she’s never quite as fully developed as Rachel. This book wraps up its plot nicely, but finishes with introducing a new problem for our heroines to solve, so perhaps Katie will have more of a turn on center stage in the next book.

Seven Against Mars is being billed as a teen book, but, with lots of action and violence no higher than your typical Percy Jackson and just a smidge of romance on the side, this is a book with a lot of appeal for older middle grade readers. On the other end of the spectrum, there so many levels of things going on that there’s plenty to engage an adult reader as well. I fell hard for the combination of action, humor, strong characters, and reflections on identity and literature.

This book was provided to me in .pdf format by the author in exchange for an honest review. It’s available for purchase in print and ebook formats, but unlike most of the books I review here, is not yet available in public libraries. Check back here on Saturday as I interview Martin Berman-Gorvine in alibrarymama’s first-ever author interview.

Summer and Bird

Once again, friends know me well – this is one that my colleague Ms. S found for me. It came out in October and got lots of positive reviews, which I somehow missed entirely. Summer and Bird by Katherine Catmull.

This is a tale of what happens after the fairy tale. The Swan Queen took off her coat of feathers and fell in love with a human man, who hid her coat so that she would stay with him (but of course it was less simple than that). They married and had children and were happy. Or as happy as a couple can be when one remembers that she used to be able to fly and that her people might be lost without her, while the other knows that his beloved wife might be with him against her will. But the story begins thirteen years after they first fell in love. The children – Summer, 12, and Bird, five years younger – wake to find that both their parents have gone. They know nothing of their mother’s past. All they find is a note in pictures from their mother: a sun, a bird, a broken heart, a gate. They take this to mean that they are meant to go through the gate from their yard into the adjoining forest to look for their parents. Even this is not a straightforward quest, as they are separated, working in different ways both to get their family back and to repair the damage their mother’s absence has done to the Kingdom of the Birds. Summer meets an old man who leaves her a wooden egg to safeguard before he disappears; she learns about the Green Home that the birds used to migrate to and cannot without their queen; she makes friends with a wise old raven and journeys to the World Tree. Bird is taken in by the Puppeteer, a human woman who longs more than anything else to be a bird and the queen of the birds herself and plans to use Bird as her means to that end.

The story is filled with bits of nursery rhymes, poetry, and fragments of many myths, and a lesson repeated many times: everything really meaningful has more than one meaning. It’s all told in lyrical language that gives the book a mystical feeling, similar to a Patricia McKillip book, though written for children. One of the few negative reactions I had to this was, near the end, multiple people saying that Bird couldn’t be held entirely accountable for all of her decisions because of her youth. On the one hand, she is young, but on the other hand, the book is aimed at young people and is a story of young people doing their best, if not always right, to straighten out a situation that adults muddled in the first place. But this was a small misstep in book that I found otherwise close to perfection, beautiful and thoughtful, magical and real.