Kindle Deals (Including Several Newberry Books!)

Let's start with the Newberry winners and honor books:

Mr. Popper's Penguins by Richard and Florence Atwater (plain/enhanced) - $2.99
Johnny Tremain by Esther Hopkins Forbes (today only) - $0.99
Catherine, Called Birdy by Karen Cushman - $1.99

Karen Cushman has a new book, WILL SPARROW'S ROAD, coming out next week.  I'll review it later in the month.

Books recently reviewed on In Bed With Books:

Smart Girls Get What They Want by Sarah Strohmeyer (review) - $2.99
Insignia by S. J. Kincaid (review) - $2.99
So Close to You by Rachel Carter (review) - $2.99

Also on sale for $1.99 is THE CENTAUR'S DAUGHTER by Ellen Jensen Abbott, sequel to WATERSMEET, which I reviewed back in 2009.

Other interesting deals:

Darren Shan: First Bites by Darren Shan - $2.99
This anthology includes CIRQUE DU FREAK, BIRTH OF A KILLER, and LORD LOSS - aka the first books in all three of Shan's popular horror series.

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (enhanced edition only) - $3.99
THE SONG OF ACHILLES retells THE ILLIAD through Patroclus' point of view.  I've heard nothing but good things and snapped this one up.

KidLit Cares

Author Kate Messner - I reviewed one of her books in July - has organized an auction of manuscript critiques, Skype visits, signed books, and other goodies to help with disaster relief due to Hurricane Sandy.  The winning bidders will donate their money directly to the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund.

The items on the auction are already out of my price range, but maybe you'll find something to bid on.  The Round 1 auctions are here.  Round 2, found here, starts November 12th.

Help New York out and get something cool for yourself.  Or just donate without bidding, that works too.

For those of ya'll in the greater New York area, keep an eye on the Sandy Hates Books sale, a November 17th fundraiser for flooded Brooklyn bookstore powerHouse ARENA.

Review: Rebel Heart

Book Two of the Dust Lands trilogy
By Moira Young
Available now from Margaret K. McElderry Books (Simon & Schuster)
Review copy

I cannot begin to imagine how people who have been eagerly waiting to read REBEL HEART will react to it.  I finished BLOOD RED ROAD and REBEL HEART back to back and enjoyed the both, but I have a feeling other people might be more attached to certain aspects of BLOOD RED ROAD.

REBEL HEART opens not too long after BLOOD RED ROAD ended.  (Hint: I'm going to talk about how BLOOD RED ROAD ended.)  Jack's gone east to tell Molly Parker about Ike's death.  Meanwhile, Saba, Lugh, Emmi, and Tommo are going west where there is supposed to be a well-watered land.  Saba's not on top of her game, suffering from the choice she made to mercy kill one of her friends.  (I may have the cardinal points wrong, because I am terrible with directions, fictional or non.)  The first scene is through Jack's point of view, letting the reader know he's in trouble with the Tontons before shifting back to Saba.

I love the flow of Saba's thoughts.  Moira Young writes her voice with a poetic cadence.  I'm not too big on the deliberate misspellings, but they aren't a terrible distraction.  I do dislike that Saba acts almost exactly as she does in BLOOD RED ROAD.  She tries to make it on her own; her companions follow.  She's surprised they're following her into danger; they prove that they're making their own decision and want to help.  (Lamely, someone tries to blame her for the bad things that happen to some of those following her.  Saba very explicitly tries to quest alone because it isn't safe.)

The other characters are quite swell, so I'm glad laser-focused Saba can't quite leave them behind.  There are several new additions to the cast that I enjoyed as well.  Obviously, since Saba is going after Jack in REBEL HEART, he appears onscreen much less.  I don't miss him much as I find their love story kind of blah.  I was more into it by the end of BLOOD RED ROAD, once Jack and Saba had spent some time together, but there's just something bland about Jack.  I think I might like him more if he weren't so involved in the love story.  He might not appear much in REBEL HEART, but he gets at least one really cool moment.

REBEL HEART does offer more information about Saba's world, as well as the plans of the Tontons under the leadership of DeMalo.  DeMalo is a terrific villain, especially with his weird staring thing.  I liked that he can seem somewhat sympathetic, despite the obvious evil of ordering the old and ill killed because they aren't fit settlers of the land.  Young isn't afraid to shy away from a little moral complexity.

REBEL HEART puts a great many threads in place for the final book of the Dust Lands trilogy.  There's the question of Lugh and what exactly happened to him while he was imprisoned.  There's the question of the land and who will rule it - and how.  There's the question of Saba and what she'll choose to fight for.  There are other questions to be answered too, but I don't think I can list them without spoiling things.

I'm not a big dystopian reader, but I find the Dust Lands trilogy compelling.  And there isn't much sense of the world before, so I can easily read it as a fantasy quest series.  It fits easily into that genre.  And I love that it stars a girl who rescues boys.  Saba is an amazing character.  She's a simple person who wants simple things.  But she'll go to extraordinary lengths to achieve her goals.  I can't wait to see how her story finishes.

Review: Victory

Book Three of the Resistance Trilogy
By Carla Jablonski
Illustrated by Leland Purvis
Available now from First Second (Macmillan)

I've just begun my CYBILs reading - don't worry, I wrote this review long before it was posted - and I've already been introduced to so many amazing books I wouldn't have discovered on my own.

Carla Jablonski and Leland Purvis's Resistance trilogy tells about the French Resistance through three episodes in the lives of Sylvie, Paul, and Marie Tessier.  In this final graphic novel, Marie rescues a downed pilot and Paul travels to Paris to deliver new codes just in time for liberation.  It's not entirely friendly to new readers - some old friends return and certain tragic events won't have as much weight without familiarity with the characters.

What I love about VICTORY and its predecessors is the moral ambiguity.  It's pretty easy to say Nazis bad, French Resistance good.  But the Resistance wasn't a monolith and sometimes their actions got bystanders killed.  And the French, living under Occupation, were often doing their best to survive.  Even the Germans had families back home that they wanted to return to.

Purvis's art is a touch messier than I usually prefer, but he does manage to make the large cast look distinctive and his art has a nice sense of movement.  Purvis also has a good sense of perspective and often uses interesting angles to liven up scenes.

VICTORY is short, but affecting.  With a World War II story, there's no guarantee that the protagonists will be all right.  But you want Paul and his sisters to pull through because they're risking so much to do what's right.  I definitely had a few moments of nail biting when reading VICTORY.

Fans of CODE NAME VERITY and VIOLINS OF AUTUMN will enjoy VICTORY.  Jablonski and Purvis took an interesting chapter of history and told it with compassion and verve.

Review: The Elementals

By Francesca Lia Block
Available now from St. Martin's Press
Review copy

Francesca Lia Block's style is as beautiful as ever, dreamy and almost more poetry than prose.   It can lean toward the purple, but I think it works with her lush stories wherein fairytales clash with harsh reality.  In THE ELEMENTALS, college freshman Ariel Silverman searches for her best friend Jeni, who went missing on a trip to Berkeley.  While searching, she falls in love.

THE ELEMENTALS may be published as an adult novel, but it reads very similarly to Block's YA novels.  Although, since it covers Ariel's first three years at college, it fits nicely into that new category of YA-style novels aimed at twentysomethings.  ("New adult," but that name is terrible.)  The sex is slightly more explicit than Block's YA novels, but she's never been an author to shy away from sexiness.  Her style revels in the sensual.

The various threads of THE ELEMENTALS don't always fit together neatly.  There's the search for Jeni, in which Ariel does not prove to be a master detective.  She's a teen looking for any answer in her grief.  There's her mother's cancer, which she ignores for much of the first year the novel covers.  There's her classwork and attempts to interact with her classmates which mostly fade away once she meets John Graves.  Ariel falls very deeply into John Graves, along with his strange roommates Tania and Perry.  Each element is important to Ariel's growth, but the novel felt episodic.

However, it's a beautifully told story.  I thought the person who took Jeni was pretty obvious, although others might not - there were several red herrings.  But the book is about Ariel's journey, not whodunit.  Block's magical realism is more intriguing than ever, as there's a sense that nothing magical at all is happening in THE ELEMENTALS.  Instead of this being a setting where some of the rules of are world simply don't exist, it feels like there is an explanation in line with our world.  It's a trick I haven't seen Block pull before.

I devoured THE ELEMENTALS in a single sitting.  It's a book that moves between lovely and creepy without blinking an eye.  It's cathartic, to see Ariel overcome her depression and grief, ready to make a future for herself.  When she enters Berkeley, she mostly attends the college in order to find out what happened to Jeni.  By the end, she's there for herself.  It's a fantastic story with an ending full of love and hope.