Hammer of Witches: review

Hammer of Witches by Shana Mlawski
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Magic, Monsters, and Christopher Columbus

“My uncle Diego always said there was magic in a story.”
In Shana Mlawski’s debut novel, “Hammer of Witches” (Tu Books, an imprint of Lee & Low Books, 2013), stories are magic—quite literally. Fourteen year-old Baltasar Infante has grown up listening to his bookmaker uncle’s stories—tales about imps who ruin the work of scribes, giant clay creatures that can be summoned with a word, and most of all, Amir al-Katib, the legendary Moorish sorcerer who turned traitor to Spain. But Baltasar always thought they were just that—stories—until he gets into a tight spot and accidentally summons a golem.
The creature saves his life, but he soon finds himself on the run from the Malleus Maleficarum, the sinister witch-hunting arm of the Spanish Inquisition. Along the way, he picks up a genie (although she doesn’t grant wishes; “[o]nly attention-starved genies do that, and I am not attention-starved!”) and pays a visit to Baba Yaga, the witch of Russian folklore, who tells him that his true mission is to find al-Katib and prevent the destruction of the world as they know it.
He finds himself on a ship named the Santa Maria, captained by one Cristóbal Colón (Christopher Columbus), heading into unchartered waters. Along the way, Baltasar masters his powers as a Storyteller, even summoning the Biblical Leviathan, with near-disastrous results.
Mlawski spins a terrifically entertaining tale, but her writing can sometimes be awkward and clunky (“In the middle of the room sat a large table carved from a single piece of wood, and in the corner lounged a fur-covered bed.” One can lounge on a bed, but I have never seen a bed lounge.). Baltasar can sometimes be annoyingly clueless. “So you’re saying there are spells that can make girls look like boys?” he asks one character, who responds, “Yes! In fact there are about a thousand stories that can do that. Because there are about a thousand stories about women dressing up as men to get the respect they deserve!” Well, knock me over with a feather duster.
These quibbles are distractions, but they shouldn’t be deal-breakers for most readers twelve years and older, especially if they like fast-paced historical fiction with a generous helping of fantasy. There is also a terrific author’s note at the end in which she explains which events and characters are historically accurate and which are products of her imagination (she acknowledges that while the people upon which the characters Baltasar and Pedro are based are real, they were most likely not wizards).

Sara Latta is a science writer and author of 17 books for children and young adults. You can learn more about her work and link to past reviews at http://www.saralatta.com. This review originally appeared in the May 19, 2013 edition of The News-Gazette.


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The Diviners by Libba Bray
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Jazz-era New York City comes to live in supernatural thriller

Once again, Libba Bray has sprinkled whatever magical fairy dust she employs onto her computer keyboard and come up with something utterly new and compelling. In the past, she has written Gothic fantasies (the Gemma Doyle trilogy), a book about a dying teenager who goes on a road trip with a loopy punk angel that somehow manages to be both wacky and heartbreaking (“Going Bovine”), and a novel about teen beauty queens stranded on a desert island (“Beauty Queens”). While her subject matter appears to be all over the literary map, her books have this in common: they are wildly inventive.
Libba Bray’s latest, “The Diviners” (Little, Brown and Company, 2012) is no exception. That said, “The Diviners” strikes me as even more ambitious in its attempt to make a statement about the American psyche in a particular place and time: New York City in the jazz age.
Seventeen-year-old Evie O’Neill has a party trick lands her into trouble: she can divine information about people from their personal objects. When she reveals an inconvenient secret about the son of a well-to-do family in their Ohio town, she is sent to live in New York City with her uncle, who runs The Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult. Not that Evie, a party girl and would-be flapper, minds leaving her boring hometown for the bright lights, nightlife, and shopping of the big city; she’s “pos-i-toot-ly thrilled.”
But when a paranormal serial killer (“Naughty John, Naughty John, does his work with this apron on. Cuts your throat and takes your bones, sells ‘em off for a coupla stones.”) begins to terrorize the city, Evie uses her power of divination to help catch the murderer—if he doesn’t get her get her first.
Bray brings 1920’s-era New York to sparkling life, from the slang of the era (Gossip is “chin music,” and a gullible young woman “was a real tomato who was not hitting on all sixes.”) to the speakeasies. But Bray brings in larger issues as well, touching on eugenics and the uneasy and sometimes ugly race relations of the time, the aftermath of World War I, and the intense interest in the spiritualist movement of the late nineteenth century. What brings it all to life are the amazing characters, many of whom, like Evie, have some supernatural power. There is Memphis Campbell, a seventeen-year-old numbers runner who once had the power to heal; a con man named Sam Lloyd who can make himself disappear; Theta Knight, a Ziegfeld girl who falls in love with a certain Harlem poet; and Henry Bartholomew Dubois IV, possibly the next George Gershwin.
“The Diviners” is the first in a planned series, made evident by the many dangling threads Bray neglects to wrap up by the end of the book. They only serve to make you tap your foot impatiently until the next installment in the series appears.

Sara Latta is a science writer and author of 17 books for children and young adults. You can learn more about her work and link to past reviews at http://www.saralatta.com. This review originally appeared in the April 28, 2013 edition of The News-Gazette. (www.news-gazette.com).


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Poison by Bridget Zinn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A fresh rom-com adventure

A lot of YA literature is about dystopia, dysfunction, and darkness. I’m not knocking dystopia, dysfunction, and darkness—some of my favorite books are pretty grim. But sometimes a funny, action-packed fantasy with just the right amount of romance thrown in, the kind of book that you devour with a silly grin on your face, is a very welcome breath of fresh air.
Let me introduce to your next breath of fresh air: “Poison” (Hyperion, 2013), by Bridget Zinn. Sixteen-year-old Kyra is a highly skilled potion master. She is also a would-be assassin who tried—and failed—to kill her former best friend, the Princess Ariana. Kyra knows that someone is intent on destroying her kingdom, and that somehow, Ariana is involved.
But when Kyra, a master sharpshooter, somehow fails to kill Ariana with her poison dart, she goes on the lam. Now, with the Princess in hiding and the king’s soldiers and her former business partners on her trail, she sets off to find her former friend and finish the job.
A book about a girl who tires and fails to kill her best friend is not dark? Indeed not! In her quest to find her friend, she acquires an adorable little pink, Rosie that can track like a bloodhound. She encounters a charming, funny, and outrageously handsome young man named Fred and his dog Langley as she is fording a river wearing only her embarrassingly frilly underclothes.
The two develop one of those classic, screwball romantic comedy relationships over the course of the book: they flirt, they quibble, they stomp off in anger, and yet…they can’t stay away from each other. She can’t tell him her secret, but, as it turns out, Fred has a secret of his own.
Full of twists and turns, cliffhanger chapter endings, evil characters and people who are distinctly not what they appear to be, “Poison” is a rollicking adventure from start to finish. Kyra and the Princess are strong female characters, and Fred is the kind of very cool guy who isn’t threatened by independent chicks. The ending is happy but not in the least bit sappy.
Sadly, readers who enjoyed “Poison” and look forward to this debut author’s next book will be disappointed. Bridget Zinn died, far too young, before she got a chance to see her book published. So cherish “Poison,” because it’s all you’re going to get from this talented young author.

Sara Latta is a science writer and author of 17 books for children and young adults. You can learn more about her work and link to past reviews at http://www.saralatta.com. This review was originally published in the Sunday, April 7, 2013 edition of the News-Gazette.


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The Book of Jonas (review)

The Book of Jonas by Stephen Dau
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The lives behind collateral damage

Fifteen-year-old Younis is injured and orphaned when a U.S. military raid gone awry hits his village in an unnamed Muslim country that resembles Afghanistan. With the aid of an international relief organization, he is sent to the U.S., where he is assigned to a well-meaning but rather clueless foster family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He changes his name to Jonas on the plane: “He suspects this will cause trouble; he does it anyway.”
“The Book of Jonas” (Blue Rider Press, 2012), Stephen Dau’s debut novel, is a powerful story examining the human costs of war. Younis—now Jonas—attends high school in Pittsburgh. He is a brilliant outcast, finding refuge in the school library, “an oasis of wooden bookshelves and learning.” The target of merciless bullying, Jonas at last snaps and hands one of his tormenters a savage beating. Jonas is sent to a counselor named Paul, who helps him work explore the trauma that destroyed his family and home.
Jonas is awarded a full scholarship to the University of Pittsburgh, where he makes friends and falls in love with a beautiful pre-med student from India. “Where do you go in your mind,” Paul asks Jonas repeatedly. In dreamlike fragments that punctuate the present-day narrative, the story of what happened in the days following the attack unfolds. Jonas’s story is interspersed with that of Christopher Henderson, an idealistic American soldier who found him in a remote mountain cave and nursed him back to health. Christopher’s story is told in excerpts from his diary; one of the entries tells the story of a baby gazelle that was adopted by a lioness—a parable that encapsulates the heart of this novel.
Jonas meets Christopher’s mother Rose, who has dedicated her life to finding her son, now missing in action. As she presses him for answers about the disappearance of her son, Jonas is forced to confront his emotional trauma and the knowledge of what really happened to Christopher.  Things begin to disintegrate as he begins to drink, often to the point of blackout. The ending is both heartbreaking and emotionally honest.
The book’s structure recalls a church service or mass, with short chapters within sections titled “Processional, Invocation, Remembrance, Communion, Confession, Atonement, Benediction, Recessional.” And in fact “The Book of Jonas” is a kind of prayer for the survivors of “collateral damage,” soldiers and civilians alike. Recommended for older teens as well as adults, this brilliant and timely novel is a must-read for anyone who wishes to understand the consequences of war.

Sara Latta is a science writer and author of 17 books for children and young adults. You can learn more about her work and link to past reviews at http://www.saralatta.com.

This review originally appeared in the March 17, 2013 issue of The News-Gazette (Champaign-Urbana, Illinois).


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Tell the Wolves I'm Home (review)

Tell the Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rifka Brunt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Love and grief in the time of AIDS

“Tell the Wolves I’m Home: A Novel” (Dial Press, 2012), by Carol Rifka Brunt is a coming of age story of love, grief, and renewal as two lonely people become unlikely friends. The only person who really understands fifteen year-old June Elbus is her uncle and the renowned painter Finn Weiss. June is shy at school; her older sister Greta, with whom she was once close, has turned mean and nasty. Finn, her godfather, confidante, and, to her shame, secret crush, shares her love of the medieval era and introduces her to the glories of Mozart’s Requiem.
June’s world is turned upside down when Finn dies of a terrible disease that her mother initially talks about only by tracing the letters A-I-D-S onto a table. At the funeral, June glimpses a strange man lingering at the edge of the crowd. June soon learns that the man, Toby, was Finn’s “special friend,” as her mother puts it.
Despite her initial mistrust, June forms a clandestine friendship with her uncle’s partner, since her family hates Toby and blames him for Finn’s illness. They work through their grief, talking about Finn’s art and passion for life. June comes to learn more about Finn, herself, and the nature of love.
Rifka Brunt absolutely captures the attitudes toward AIDS and the gay community in the mid-to-late 1980s: the homophobia, the stigma surrounding AIDS, the ignorance, and of course the pain of losing so many loved ones. Readers today who are not old enough to remember the AIDS crisis may shake their heads at June’s worry that Finn might have infected her by kissing her on the top of the head, but it’s important to remember that misinformation about the transmission of the virus was rampant at that time.
It was international news in 1987 when Princess Diana visited an AIDS hospital and shook hands with one of the patients without wearing gloves, to make the point that the virus could not be transmitted though normal contact; that same year, however, police wearing long yellow rubber gloves arrested protesters at an AIDS conference.
Tell the Wolves I’m Home is a 2013 winner of the Young Adult Library Services Association’s Alex Award, given to books written for adults that have special appeal to teens. Be forewarned: this beautiful book may very well have you doing the ugly cry.

Sara Latta is a children's science writer and author of 17 books. You can learn more about her work and link to past reviews at http://www.saralatta.com.

This review originally published in Sunday, February 24, 2013 edition of The News-Gazette.


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The Fault in Our Stars (review)

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Stellar Read—or Listen

I hadn’t originally intended to write a review of John Green’s “The Fault in Our Stars” (Dutton Juvenile, 2012).  Not because I don’t adore John Green (I do) or his books (ditto), several of which I’ve reviewed for this paper. But I like to spread the love to authors who may not have received the attention they deserve. John Green’s fans, a.k.a. nerdfighters, are legion. I thought I’d give some other deserving authors a few column inches.
Sorry, other deserving authors. I’ll get to you later. You might say it was in the stars that this week’s review is for the audio version of “The Fault in Our Stars” (produced by Brilliance Audio, 2012; narrated by Kate Rudd). I generally write about print books in this column, but I had hardly removed the earbuds after listening to Green’s most recent gem when I learned that it had just won the American Library Association’s Odyssey Award for best audiobook produced for children and/or young adults. Well done, judges, well done.
Hazel Grace Lancaster, the narrator, is sixteen. She has cancer, and must carry an oxygen tank with her wherever she goes. Despite an experimental drug that has bought her a few years, she is terminal. She meets Augustus Waters, who has lost a leg to cancer (“I had a little touch of osteosarcoma a year and a half ago…”) at a support group. The two kindred spirits, sharing an irreverent sense of humor and a searching intelligence, eventually fall in love.
Augustus manages to arrange a trip to Amsterdam so that Hazel Grace can meet the author of her favorite book, “An Imperial Affliction,” to find out what happens to the characters after the book’s abrupt ending. What happens during the trip should remain a surprise, but it’s significant.
In the hands of a lesser author, a story about two teens with cancer would be sentimental and maudlin. While “The Fault in Our Stars” deals quite honestly and often heart-wrenchingly with the problems of kids with cancer, it is also filled with Green’s trademark humor and intelligence.
As any listener of audiobooks knows, the narrator can make or break the listening experience. Kate Rudd does a wonderful job of bringing the characters, especially Hazel Grace, to life. At 31, she is young enough to sound quite convincing as a teenager. In an interview, she admits that there were at least 100 pages where she is actually crying as she’s reading. So that explains Hazel’s very convincing breathlessness and the frequent catches in the voices of the parents.
Listen to this book in a place where you won’t mind if anyone catches you weeping or laughing out loud. If they do, just share one of your earbuds.


Sara Latta is a children's science writer and author of 17 books. You can learn more about her work and link to past reviews at http://www.saralatta.com.

This review originally appeared in the Sunday, February 3, 2013 edition of The News-Gazette (Champaign-Urbana, Illinois).





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The Vanishing Act (review)

The Vanishing Act

Near the beginning of Mette Jakobsen’s debut novel “The Vanishing Act” ( W.W. Norton, 2012), Minou, the story’s 12 year old narrator tells the reader “You might not believe my story. You might read it as a fairytale, a fable straight out of my imagination.”

            Despite what Minou says, this quiet, slim novel is very much a fable, a tale of love, loss, and aching loneliness. Minou, her father; a kind, mad Priest; a magician named Boxman; and a dog called No Name live on an island “so tiny that it can’t be found on any maps.” One year earlier, her mother walked out into the cold morning with her umbrella and a turtle and disappeared from their lives. While everyone else on the island has given up hope of finding Minou’s mother, the girl is convinced that she is alive, off on an exciting adventure from which she will soon return.

            Jakobsen throws the reader into Minou’s world with the novel’s opening sentence: “It was snowing the morning I found the dead boy.”

Minou, and her father carry the frozen boy to their house, laying the body out on the mother’s empty bed for three days until the delivery boat could come to pick him up. The boy, Minou is sure, holds the secret to her mother’s disappearance, and she confides in him, a silent confessor.

So, too, does her father, a philosopher who believes that he is a descendent of Descartes. Logic and reason, in his mind, is the key to finding the ultimate truth—a belief that Minou has adopted and fervently hopes will help her untangle the mystery behind her mother’s disappearance. In flashbacks, we learn more about her mother, an artist who arrived on the island with just one red suitcase filled with “five dresses, eight jars of paint, two brushes, and a white enamel clock that didn’t work,” as well as a peacock nestled in a golden bowl. Both Minou’s mother and father were scarred by a war that, although unnamed, seems very much like World War II.  

The other characters in this sparse narrative are equally enigmatic. There is Priest, who performs Tai-Chi like exercises every morning, bakes pretzels that no one wants to eat, and sends out origami animals during his sermons to Minou and No Name.  The Boxman, a retired magician, now makes the boxes the magicians use when sawing women in half. All are a part of the story of the disappearance of Minou’s mother.

Jakobsen’s writing is lovely and captivating. After reading this book, you may find yourself revisiting Minou on her island “so tiny that it can’t be found on any maps.”

This review originally published in the Sunday, October 21 edition of The News-Gazette.

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