"Unseen Magic" by Emily Lloyd-Jones

It's official: I kinda want to live in Aldermere.

Aldermere is the sort of magic-laden small town that crops up sometimes in light, fluffy books, with whimsical things like a teleporting magic tea shop, friendly-ish ravens who like you if you give them food and steal your trash if you don't, doors that lead random places if you don't label them, et cetera. Also a creek monster that sometimes eats pets, and weird monsters that occur if you don't burn the tea leaves after you've steeped them.

Yeah, the main character falls afoul of that last one. Her name is Finley but she's referred to as Fin for the entire book, and I was at a loss as to what her actual name was until like halfway through. Basically, she has anxiety, and the tea from the tea shop can get rid of it for a while. All it costs... is a memory. But that's okay too, because she has lots of things she'd rather forget. (Honestly, I'd go there just to feed it memories of times I did embarrassing stuff.)

Then the old lady who owns the tea shop falls and she can't get up. The trouble is, Fin has run out of anti-anxiety tea. So she tries to make some herself, doesn't know you're supposed to burn the tea leaves, and accidentally creates a weird monster.

The monster breaks into the tea shop, steals all the tea, and starts being a doppelganger of Fin (made from tea and sacrificed memories) and messing stuff up. |However, turns out she's not the one messing things up; it's a guy named Ben, who successfully hid his status as the bad guy for most of the book.|

Also, there's a bunch of weird unexplained stuff (like Fin's "list of things you're afraid of", which contains things Fin is afraid of for no apparent reason and avoids, and the memory of an overheard conversation about someone who saw something when Fin was leaving school one day, which caused her mom to take Fin to Aldermere). The second time the conversation came up, I was like, "Y'know, that's got to be tied to the memories Fin used to pay for the tea." |I was right. Fin used the tea to deliberately expunge all her memories of a figure known as... her abusive father. All the things on the "list of things you're afraid of" are tied to it, as is the conversation. Her mom confirms this.| 

All in all, it really surprised me that "Teafin" (as Fin and her cousin termed Fin's tea doppelganger) |wasn't evil. The author did a good job not annoying me with it; when I was complaining about Ice Wolves, I mentioned that not having your bad guy be actually bad can be one of the most annoying things in fiction. I think it helps, here, that while lots of the messing stuff up was attributed to Teafin by Fin and her cousin, nobody outright states that it was actually Teafin's fault. They just have people being like "oh, a fire started at the shed" and the reader is left to infer that it's been caused by Teafin. So, yes, someone you trusted was the bad guy and the "bad guy" was actually fairly nice, but it didn't annoy me. Way to go, Emily Lloyd-Jones!| (Sorry about the random gap in the spoiler tag, but I couldn't get the text of the link to recolor, and it looks less dumb this way.)
 

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E, probably. Maybe E10+ for some scary bits with Teafin and |memories of Fin's abusive father, contained within Teafin (who's made of Fin's expunged memories and also tea)|.

I'm giving Unseen Magic 4 stars; it was good, but not stellar. 

Favorite lines:

    Most of Aldermere's residents scoffed at those who came to town looking for magic and walked away with postcards instead--but no one stopped selling those postcards, either.

    Pages 39-40. 

 

(Endnote: If you like magical realism, maybe give this a go. It didn't get five stars, but it does get a recommendation.)

"Under Their Skin" by Margaret Peterson Haddix

(Forewarning that this book is very heavy on plot twists, so most of the post will be spoiler tagged.)

Well, I rather wish there could have been a tad bit more closure at the end of this book. However, it seems there is a sequel, In Over Their Heads, so maybe I should get that one out of the library.

The protagonists are two twins, Nick and Eryn. Their parents are amicably divorced. Their mom gets married again. They now have two stepsiblings, Ava and Jackson, also twins... but they don't have to see them, ever. And they don't get to see them, ever. 

If you were thinking "sus", that's pretty much what Nick and Eryn thought. They make it their goal to find out what on Earth is up with these mysterious absent stepsiblings. Turns out, |they're robots|.

And so is (sing it with me here, 🎵plooot twiiiist🎵) |Nick and Eryn's mom. And their dad. And their stepfather. And their stepfather's former wife. And everyone else they know who's older than them. And literally everyone in the world above the age of twelve. (Note to you: Nick and Eryn are twelve, and therefore not robots.)|.

As a video the school principal shows Nick and Eryn explains, |humanity is extinct. Or was until very recently... about twelve years ago, in fact|.

Yup, |we got wiped out, nobody knows how. Nick, Eryn, and everyone under the age of twelve were revived from frozen embryos that two scientists had managed to preserve for a couple hundred years until all the damage from the cataclysm that wiped out humanity was fixed|. 

More twisty plots ensue, ending in |Nick and Eryn and their entire family (including Ava, Jackson, and all four parents) going to a secret facility at Mammoth Cave. And there, Nick and Eryn learn that| (🎵plooot twiiiist🎵) |it was robots that killed humanity. We made war robots, because of course we did, and then they broke and started trying to destroy all humans. But they didn't count frozen embryos as humans, so a couple of scientists squirreled them away and made caretaker robots (all the "adults") to take care of the humans when they were finally reactivated. Also, there's a note that says "if you are reading this, get rid of the robots, because they murdered all of us".|

And then, after a bit of denouement with the rest of the family finding Nick and Eryn, the book ends and I was like "AAAAAAAARGH" and going to rate this three stars. Then I went looking and found out there's a sequel, so now I'm not mad.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for the scenes where |the outwardly-human robots basically open up so they can have diagnostics run or whatever. It wasn't terrible in a book, but I feel like it would be kind of creepy when animated for a cutscene.|

It gets 4 stars, up from 3 since I realized it has a sequel.

(Endnote: |Having all the adults be robots was an interesting plot twist. Having all the robots be not evil was a far better one|.)

"Out of Range" by Heidi Lang

This book definitely has an interesting narrative style. It's like if the author knew that you're supposed to start as close to the action as possible, but she also wanted to provide extensive backstory. So she did both.

Basically, the odd-numbered chapters are the action, unfolding, and the even-numbered chapters are the backstory. This made it kind of confusing, because some of the odd chapters reference stuff in the even chapters that we hadn't gotten to yet. However, it did keep me reading, because I immediately wanted to know "are they going to be okay?" and waded through intermittent school drama to get more of the unfolding story, whereas if it had just been "first half of the book is school drama, second half is action" I probably would have DNF'd the book out of frustration. What I'm trying to say here is basically: it worked, Heidi Lang.

The book's about three sisters--Abby, Emma, and Ollie--who have been utter jerks to each other for the past year or so. Their parents sent them to a wilderness camp with no cell phone service or stuff like that, so they could learn to get along. The camp did not, in fact, teach them to get along. However, getting lost in the wilderness for a couple days takes care of that problem nicely.

Parts of it strained my credulity, especially the fact that |a wildfire forced the main characters to run off into the wilderness to escape it, but then it's not really mentioned again. Maybe it was| a potato soup fire or something. The story kind of jumps from one hazard to the next, and none of them have any real lasting effect on their struggle to survive (well, except for |the fallout from Emma almost drowning|, which still only lasts a couple chapters). Basically, everything menaced them for a bit and then ended suddenly. And I get why, because this situation still has to be realistically survivable, but surely there are ways to make it realistically survivable without resorting to making the situation unrealistic.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E, probably. Although I might possibly rate it E10+ for, as my mom would put it, "scenes of peril".

Sadly, I must give this book 3 stars, because most of the "how did we get here" was set against the backdrop of scohol drama ("scohol" is an intentional misspelling of "school", btw), which I happen to dislike. The other reason, the one this got demoted to 3 stars instead of 4, is that as mentioned above, it strained my credulity.

I do not have any favorite lines.

(Endnote: I've intentionally misspelled "school" as "scohol" in one of my other posts, too. Do you remember which one?)