{milky sips.} Berry, Julie: The Scandalous Sisterhood of Prickwillow Place

September 23, 2014
Roaring Brook Press
MG Historical Mystery, 368 pages

There's a murderer on the loose—but that doesn't stop the girls of St. Etheldreda's from attempting to hide the death of their headmistress in this rollicking farce.

The students of St. Etheldreda's School for Girls face a bothersome dilemma. Their irascible headmistress, Mrs. Plackett, and her surly brother, Mr. Godding, have been most inconveniently poisoned at Sunday dinner. Now the school will almost certainly be closed and the girls sent home—unless these seven very proper young ladies can hide the murders and convince their neighbors that nothing is wrong.

The Scandalous Sisterhood of Prickwillow Place is a smart, hilarious Victorian romp, full of outrageous plot twists, mistaken identities, and mysterious happenings.

Now, I hope no one takes this the wrong way, but -

I really enjoy a good murder mystery.

(Just keep the words in that order and don't remember the mystery, and I think we'll all be good.)

I grew up on Sherlock Holmes, a little bit of Alfred Hitchcock's mystery anthologies here and there, and Agatha Christie adaptations, particularly Poirot and the beloved Miss Marple - some better than others. Do not get me started on the particular TV series that features Miss Marple as a patient, innocent bystander, replete with yarn and needles and some kind young man or other that actually gets the job done.

Do not.

In any case, I am particularly smitten if there is something afoot, plenty of red herrings, and a smidgen of humor to tie everything together.

So it might be a bit of a mystery in itself why The Scandalous Sisterhood of Prickwillow Place was allowed to languish on my shelf for a good few months pre- and post-publication.

I...honestly have no answers for you right now. I can definitely tell you that I regret said languishing and I might very well make up for it in the future with a re-read or two.

But let's talk about what makes me regret said languishing, and why you shouldn't make the same mistakes.

The Scandalous Sisterhood is comprised of several girls who were endearing to me from the onset and quite beloved at the conclusion: Dull Martha, Smooth Kitty, Poxed Louise, Disgraceful Mary Jane, Stout Alice (my personal, absolute favorite), Dear Rebecca and Dour Elinor.

The little monikers at the beginning of each name was a little confusing at the beginning, but once you're headlong into the story, it helps to know which girl will react which way - and it also rather adds to the humor of it all.

So. Our fair and often aptly nicknamed heroines are away at boarding school, under the eye of a rather disliked headmistress and her boor of a brother. And then, one night at dinner, the both of them drop dead. The meal was poisoned. There is a murderer among them.

Now, in normal society, the proper thing to do (one would hope) is to call the authorities and possibly the local media, if you really want a circus, and step back. But Smooth Kitty proposes something different. They conceal the evidence, pretend as though everything is absolutely fine, and find out the murderer for themselves.

And so the mishaps begin.

This is my first time reading anything of Julie Berry's, and I must say that she has a particular talent for engrossing, often wry prose and appropriately placed capers. My eyes didn't wander. There were no pointless drops in mood after a particularly tense scene and no unnecessary love interest (and rare as it is for me to say this, yes - the older girls' love interests were very, very necessary).

I'd give the entire mechanics of the novel a good A+.

This is definitely on the middle grade scale of things, but I think it has a pretty good crossover appeal if you like a quaintly written, good old-fashioned free-for-all. Also, a book where all the girls involved in a scheme are friends, genuinely care for each other and look out for each other's well-being! How very, very refreshing!

(#StopFictionalGirlCatfights2014.)

My only bone to pick, if anything, is the fact that I'm personally still blinking over the ending. One of the tapped criminals did not make sense in the grand scheme of things to me.

(It was for something besides the murder, which was pretty well thought out and made me a little nervous of eating in the house of anyone who might hypothetically want to see me laid out on the floor.)

In any case, I noted last night that I feel the morbid undertones would be of particular appeal for Tim Burton or Laika Studios to consider an adaptation.

I don't know how to make this happen, but considering that Laika has a particular eye right now for children's books (have you heard the good word about the Wildwood option?), I am crossing my fingers that eventually, the Scandalous Sisterhood might fall in the right hands to make that come together.

You never know.


Of note: There is, quite obviously, murder. There are some heart-wrenching developments and details and side effects of said murder, and the involvement of poison. This book does not feel like a threat to the faint-hearted to me, but your mileage may vary.

Disgraceful Mary Jane also has a way around young men, and not much sense at all at times when it comes to said young men. Again, this is a middle grade novel and said lack of sense hardly goes beyond the region of flirtation and batting eyelashes, but take it as you will.

{milky sips.} Hellisen, Cat: Beastkeeper

February 3, 2015
Henry Holt and Co.
MG Fantasy, 208 pages 

Sarah has always been on the move. Her mother hates the cold, so every few months her parents pack their bags and drag her off after the sun. She’s grown up lonely and longing for magic. She doesn’t know that it’s magic her parents are running from.

When Sarah’s mother walks out on their family, all the strange old magic they have tried to hide from comes rising into their mundane world. Her father begins to change into something wild and beastly, but before his transformation is complete, he takes Sarah to her grandparents—people she has never met, didn’t even know were still alive.

Deep in the forest, in a crumbling ruin of a castle, Sarah begins to untangle the layers of curses affecting her family bloodlines, until she discovers that the curse has carried over to her, too. The day she falls in love for the first time, Sarah will transform into a beast . . . unless she can figure out a way to break the curse forever. 

The other day, a good friend and I were talking about the middle grades we were raised on.

To properly describe it, I'd have to draw forward the example of that scene from The Lightning Thief, where Percy sips ambrosia for the first time and finds that it tastes like his mother's brownies - warm, fresh, soothing.

If I ever had the chance to taste test ambrosia for myself, I'm quite sure it'd taste like the books I chose carefully when I was younger: wild, deep-rooted in old folklore and enchantments, ancient and yet robust and timeless.

Not to say that I'd willingly drink down the taste of musty, pulpy paper and withering ink, as much as I love the real thing. I think it'd be more of a revitalizing tea or maybe a bracing lemonade laced with its fair share of sweet, earthy herbs that are wick to the very center, a few lumps of sugar to keep your spirits up as you run with wolves and hide in old hollows and maybe even find a new world where your winter coats should hang.

Lloyd Alexander, C.S. Lewis, Diana Wynne Jones (always, always Diana Wynne Jones) - they make up the core of my lifelong love story with children's fantasy.

And so, now, Beastkeeper.

The story drew me in as all those other books did: a young, empathetic heroine, an ancient family curse, stumbling through new circumstances and figuring out the set rules of magic with not much else than suspicious, talking animals, a questionable wild boy ally and previously untapped courage and love.

I am always won over by the promise of family devotion and love.

And lovely prose. The prose, more than anything else, made me settle down and make a nest for myself within the story.

To quote one of my own GoodReads status updates from last night (at only 30% into my e-ARC!): "I am starting to realize what a covetous creature I am. And why authors often compare themselves to ravens. I am highlighting words and perfect phrases to attempt to feather my own nest of impossible ideas. Cat Hellisen is pulling out all the stops of her mastery of words thus far, and I must enviously bow to the fact that I'm so very enchanted and my seven-year-old self is giddily spooning it all into her mouth."

(Another note I might add: I am quite picky about what goes into my nest.

I do not settle for any shade of yarn, any particular antique fork or old pocket watch or shining turn of phrase.

It has to be Just Right, like a tuning fork hitting the right frequency and jolting the rest of my heart into catching up and feeling like, "Yes, that word was meant to be right there."

Hearing from the author herself that she was very much inspired by classic fantasy, particularly Diana Wynne Jones - her favorite, Dogsbody, was also the very first I read! - and Susan Cooper also made me quite sure that she is very much my sort of people.)

Sarah tiptoed along the landing towards her parents' room and wondered what flavor silence was, and if it grew hard and brittle if you threw it away, or if people sometimes stepped on wads of discarded silence and it stuck to the soles of their shoes and made their footfalls softer.

And

Sarah tiptoed faster, the shadows clinging to her shoulders like shed ghost-skins.

Like that.

Exactly like that.

It also helps that Sarah is such a sympathetic wildwoods child. At times, I just wanted to hug her, to grasp her by her shoulders and tell her how I could see that she was trying, that she was giving it her all - in her body's strength and in her emotions - to figure out the tangled web around her family and the circumstances she was forced to shoulder merely for being born into a cursed family.

And that is something I feel children's literature can address so well: the prices paid for jealousy and hatred, how it really feels to struggle under a parent's sin and bear on as your normal world crumbles around you.

The particular details of the curse - how it devours her father and threatens her as well, even with her thinned blood and desperation not to succumb - are wrought in particularly deep and dark tones, and makes it all the more pressing for you to turn the page and find out how Sarah fares.

And now, a brief word on the ending. I am well aware that it will not be everyone's cup of tea. Approaching Beastkeeper as I did, with the understanding that fairy tales have evolved as they have, particularly with the knowledge that not every ending is happy (though, as you well know, many of these tales do and I myself am not at all averse to perfect conclusions), one twist in particular was very much expected.

Though it was still not that easy or less bitter to swallow.

To me, the entire denouement fit well with the story and the horrific curse as it stood. I won't say more and spoil it for you, but I am well satisfied with it and the hope that (to me) it offered for the characters when the curtains closed.

And, in a post-script of sorts: I just took a peek back at another middle grade fairy tale I read fairly recently, Ophelia and the Mysterious Boy. Within that review, I noted that young Kaye often had nightmares when reading particularly vicious and heart-wrenching fairy tales.

That fact and stage of my reading history still stands, and I think it's well noted that Beastkeeper will probably appeal in particular to the late middle grade and young adult set. There's a time for every story.

(As evidenced by the fact that I am positively licking my fingers post-Beastkeeper and not in a fit of torment.)


Of note: As I said before, the ending will not sit well with some. There is violence, some heart-breaking scenarios and death. There is also grizzly moments involving uncooked meat, brutal transformations (not the charming beast-to-man sequence found in Disney, mind) and a rather maddened witch or two.

I leave it up to the reader's discretion.

{milky sips.} Foxlee, Karen: Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy

January 28, 2014
Knopf Books for Young Readers
MG Fantasy, 240 pages


I received an advance electronic copy of this title from the publisher, in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Unlikely heroine Ophelia Jane Worthington-Whittard doesn't believe in anything that can't be proven by science. She and her sister Alice are still grieving for their dead mother when their father takes a job in a strange museum in a city where it always snows. On her very first day in the museum Ophelia discovers a boy locked away in a long forgotten room. He is a prisoner of Her Majesty the Snow Queen. And he has been waiting for Ophelia's help.

As Ophelia embarks on an incredible journey to rescue the boy everything that she believes will be tested. Along the way she learns more and more about the boy's own remarkable journey to reach her and save the world.

A story within a story, this a modern day fairytale is about the power of friendship, courage and love, and never ever giving up.

To be honest, as a kid, I was never really a dark and dreary fairytale sort of person.

One time, I had nightmares because I read a version of East of the Sun, West of the Moon complete with the gory “chop off your pinkie for your true love who turned into a bird and flew off because YOLO” scene. 

 

My mom banned me from the collection of fairy tales for the next few months.

As a brief note on exactly what kind of kid I was, I then merged from fairy tales into Goosebumps. At night. With dim lighting on. (What kind of kid was Kaye back in the olden days? One who didn’t take a hint from her dreams and liked to scare herself silly.)

So, keep in mind that Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy is a story that young Kaye would have devoured, and then scoured the entire household for a flashlight or two to keep herself company afterward.

Ophelia starts out deceptively light – to the point that I nearly put it aside, because the text seemed so very simplistic and childish. I will note that I adore picture books, and they have their warm, fluffy place in my heart even now. However, once you reach the middle-grade tier of titles, you expect something a bit more mature, something a reader – even one outside of the age group – can sink their teeth into without feeling inappropriately condescended.

In picture books, we find happy, small sentences for happy, small fingers: “She went up. She went down. She went into town.”

Ophelia has similar adventures, when she first starts exploring the mysterious museum that is her temporary home, and prison to the aforementioned Marvelous Boy she will need to rescue. She ventures into big halls. She ventures into little halls. She stops to take a peek at something incredible…and then she wanders out again.

It may seem all too light and easy – at first. Because then she finds the Marvelous Boy. And then you have these morbidly engrossing recaps of his adventure and his mission against the evil Snow Queen (not at all an Elsa, mind you – a child-slaying, land-freezing, cold-hearted witch) to look forward to.

Including one brilliant segment where one of the Queen’s evil owls EATS HIS FINGER in a trade, to cast a protective spell on him. There’s more to the scene than that, and it all does make sense once you read it, but that was definitely a point where younger Kaye would start checking her closet and outside her window to see if a snowfall was starting up.

This is not a picture book, ladies and gentlemen. This is a fairy tale that Neil Gaiman or Roald Dahl or Hans Christian Anderson would be proud of. This is the story of a queen who wants to kill a boy so badly that she will lock him up, and wait years to kill him before he can kill her. (I suppose some people would point out that two wrongs don’t make a right, but still.)

This is the story of a little girl, overcoming her grief for her lost mother, and finding her own ways to be brave while facing down man-eating birds, and asthma attacks, and her own young mortality.

And it all works – deceptive language and all. Perfectly. Though I have to admit, there were times I regressed to young Kaye and squeezed my eyes shut before I pressed forward on my Kindle, ready for the worst possible scenario.

(I am only just starting to realize that I was a bit of a softie, back in the day. Considering the way that I torture my own characters now, I wonder where that went.)

The thing was, you can overlook everything that might go wrong for Ophelia. I loved Ophelia. She was the type of plucky Everygirl that you want to see in fiction – the girl who could be next door, or you, just waiting for some evil undead ruler to rise up so that you can set aside your meek and mild-mannered ways and dig down deep to the hero within.

Ophelia has her little ‘puffer’, her quirks and sensibilities – including rejecting all the fantastic beliefs of her lost writer mother – and she has her doubts about a quest for a strange little boy locked away in a museum who has to kill a snow queen. And that is another beautiful thing about this book: it turns expectations on its head.

Ophelia is the type of girl that many would pat on the head and tell her to sit down, and catch her breath, and look at the pretty museum murals while thinking of a way to convince her father to carry out the quest for her. But she doesn’t.

I’ve seen complaints from other reviewers on GoodReads, mainly along the lines of this having been done before, and being done better. The fact is, there is no new fantasy under the sun. Everyone takes out some stitches, adds a few new patches, and their own twist of whimsy locked up inside like a Build-a-Bear heart.

That is what is done here, and I won’t say that it couldn’t have been done better. But it was done the way it was supposed to be done here (though I could have done away with that gratuitous finger-eating scene. That brought back some memories. Not good ones).

If you like Claire Legrand, as I do, you’ll enjoy this. If you enjoy stories where the children win in the end – but not without a lot of gasping and cringing – you’ll enjoy this.

 
Of note: Mild violence of the fairy tale variety, threats against young children, and some hair-raising scenes that are not out of the norm for the middle-grade set. If you are timorous or faint of heart, you’ll survive. Just keep your flashlight at the ready.

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