Melissa Marr's Wicked Lovely combines realistic fiction with fantasy, much like Stephanie's Meyer's Twilight and its sequels, but substituting faeries for vampires. Aislinn, the main character of Marr's book, shares many characteristics with Bella, who is Meyer's heroine. They both struggle with, and at times feel overwhelmed by, a relationship with a man who is not mortal. The big difference in Wicked Lovely is that Aislinn does not love the non-mortal guy. She wants to stay with her mortal life and her mortal friends. Keenan, the "Summer King," has his own reasons, though, for wanting to convince Aislinn to commit to him and his faery world.
This story took a while to hook me, maybe because I was comparing it to Meyer's books and having to adjust to a different style. Also, the faeries in Marr's book are portrayed, in the beginning, as dangerous and even evil. Aislinn was not drawn to them, as Bella was to the Cullens family. In the end, though, I found this to be an enjoyable read. Marr manages to gracefully blend the two distinct worlds. Her evil Winter Queen is a really frightening villain, and it's nice to see that Keenan is a pretty complex character (I think he's actually better drawn in the book than is Aislinn). This is a YA book for the 16 and over crowd.
There are some seriously negative reviews for David Lee Stone's Ratastrophe Catastrophe posted to amazon.com, but I wanted to check the book out myself. My city's library has books 2 and 3 of the series (The Illmoor Chronicles) but not this one. Unfortunately, I didn't like the book. The characters were not well-developed and the plot was silly and confusing. I felt as though I were reading the transcript of a Dungeons and Dragons game -- not my cup of tea at all. There are some laughs here, though, and I think that there will be an audience for Stone's type of humor.I think I'll ask my boys what they think of the book.
Also see my May 5 update to this post.
Elizabeth Bird, writing in School Library Journal, has predicted that Frances O'Roark Dowell's Shooting the Moon will be "the one to beat" this year for the Newbery Medal. After reading this, I decided to read the book, and I'm very glad I did. This is a beautiful story, told in in the simple yet oh-so-powerful language of twelve-year-old Jamie Dexter, whose father is a U.S. Army colonel and whose 17-year-old brother, TJ, enlists and is sent to Vietnam. TJ's correspondence with the family consists of short letters to his mother and father and many rolls of undeveloped film sent to Jamie. Jamie learns a great deal about the realities of war when she develops these pictures. Jamie is a very likable character -- so sure, at the beginning of the novel, that she knows good from bad, right from wrong.
The anti-war bias of this book is clear, but I feel that the author is not at all anti-military. The book jacket informs us that she grew up as a U.S. Army brat herself, and the story conveys a strong sense of the positive side of army life for Jamie and her family. ("hooah! combat ready, sir!"). I really loved this book!
