"City Spies" by James Ponti

Yep, it's the first one of these. It provides backstory info on Brooklyn (everyone on this team has a tragic backstory of some sort, otherwise they'd have parents), as well as introducing Charlotte as more of a character than just her cameo in book 3.

Overall, I had the hardest time suspending my disbelief with this one. Its plot isn't any more outlandish than book 3's (which involved a bunch of stolen nuclear warheads), but this one just kind of rubbed me wrong.

I think part of the problem was the characterization of the character "Mother" was rather off compared to the rest of the books. ("Mother" is the man--yes, a man named "Mother", it's an in-universe long story that I've forgotten--who basically acts as the mission control for the team, as well as the adult to accompany the main characters whenever they have to go somewhere that unaccompanied children couldn't realistically go.) He seems to be making it up as he goes along in this one, as opposed to in the other three books where he acts with a lot more forethought. Actually, a bunch of the characterizations were off, most notably with Kat (but that might just be because I like her best).

All in all, I'm glad that this is the first book in the series, because that means the plotting and character portrayals and such get better as the series goes on. Book 5 is out now, as well, which means I'm going to have to get it from the library.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for some mentions of child abuse (remember how I mentioned Brooklyn's tragic backstory?) and tense scenes.

Unlike the other three, this book gets 3 stars, for reasons I talked about above.

(Endnote: I've gotten fairly used to the fact that Paris is a guy, but I still can't make myself remember that Kat is short for Kathmandu, not Katherine.)

"The Girl Who Drank The Moon" by Kelly Barnhill

This is by the same person who wrote Iron Hearted Violet, and honestly, both books of hers that I've read have had very good covers. (This is distinct from judging a book by its cover, because I'm just judging the covers by themselves.) 

And good news: its narration didn't annoy me! It was written in third-person limited omniscient this time, as I wished Iron Hearted Violet was, which fixed the annoying-narrator problem quite handily. And the pacing was a lot saner, too.

The principal point-of-view character (you basically look over the shoulder of one character at a time) is a very old witch named Xan; the other principal POV characters include an even older swamp monster named Glerk, a girl named Luna who accidentally drank moonlight (our titular Girl Who Drank The Moon), and a guy named Antain who has serious doubts about the dystopian city most of the book's NPCs live in.

Speaking of which, the NPCs (sorry, it's technically incorrect to call them NPCs since this isn't a game, but they basically are) do live in a dystopia run by a bunch of old dudes and their unsecret police force. Even the old dudes are somewhat scared of the unsecret police force, which they don't actually run; they just kind of ask it politely if it could do things. Things such as remove one baby each year on the same day from the dystopia, and leave it in the forest for the witch to take. Nobody knows what the witch in the forest does with the babies, they just know that she wants them and orders the old dudes to bring them to her.

Plot twist: there is no witch in the forest. There never was. The witch is a lie, made up by the old dudes so they can keep the people of the dystopia in fear and so maintain their power.

Plot twist: the witch is real after all, and it's Xan. She doesn't actually want the babies, she just knows that people abandon a baby at the same place every year for no discernable reason, so she takes them to other, non-dystopian cities and places them in foster homes.

Obvious fact: Luna is one of these abandoned babies.

And now for something completely different: talking about a recurring symbol! The one that stood out the most, for me, was the madwoman's. (She went insane when her daughter was the child who got left in the forest for the witch.) (Her daughter went on to be Luna. Is anyone surprised?) If there was such a thing as a leitmotif in a book, the madwoman's would be paper. The first hint we get of this is someone telling someone else, "She's not allowed to have paper. ...You'll see why." (Not an exact quote.) This is because... she already has paper. A lot of it. Enough to make thousands upon thousands of origami birds, some of which can move (hence the paper cranes on the cover).

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A hard E10+ for some scary things; people get attacked by swarms of paper birds, and it is a dystopia.

I'm giving this 4 stars. It was good, but not good enough to get 5.

(Endnote: The dystopia and the old dudes and the unsecret police all actually have names, but I couldn't remember them while writing this and wasn't going to bother checking when the names I gave them work just as well.)

"The Witch Boy" by Molly Knox Ostertag

I picked this one up because it's by the same person who wrote D&D Dungeon Club: Roll Call. It's not as good as that one, unfortunately. I feel like the Five Worlds guys could have done a better job of roughly the same storyline, but I am rather biased towards them.

So anyway! The thing is about a magic family where all of the girls can do magic and all of the boys can turn into animals. Except then one of the boys (here comes our main character) turns out to be crap at turning into animals, but he's fairly decent at magic (even though everyone keeps telling him he's playing with fire and refusing to teach him anything, which means his primary method of learning magic is just to ditch turning-into-animals practice and eavesdrop on his sisters' magic lessons).

Once we've got all that out of the way, the plot starts. During Try To Turn Into Animals: The Field Trip, a wild creepy monster appeared! It promptly kidnaps one of the main character's brothers, then vanishes again. Naturally, everyone panics. 

Also, there's stuff with the main character making friends with a normal, non-magical girl, who ends up helping in the final bossfight by |smacking the creepy(ish) monster in the face with a baseball bat|.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A soft T for some scary imagery and people bleeding fairly badly after getting attacked. This book could make an interesting videogame in the right hands.

[EDIT: T15+, due to (again) {T15+ a character casually mentioning homosexuality as if it's just a normal thing.}. I'd hoped that was a one-time thing with the other book, but apparently not. Sorry, Ostertag, I'll be avoiding you from here on out.

I was going to rate this 2 stars simply for rubbing me wrong, but then I noticed the thing in the content warning tag above, so the rating got shunted down to 1 star.

(Endnote: The art in the kidnapping/abduction scene is pretty appropriately creepy, although when the monster actually fully appears it just kinda builds a bridge across the uncanny valley and stands in the middle of it. It looked a bit silly, is what I'm trying to say.)

"City Spies: Golden Gate" by James Ponti

Behold, book 2 in this series (of which I have read books 3 and 4). Having already defeated... actually, I haven't read book 1 so I don't really know but the answer is probably "criminals," the City Spies must now face their most dangerous foe yet: teenage drama.

Yeah, this book makes me glad that Sydney and Brooklyn have gotten their friendship ironed out in the next books, because they spend a lot of their time angrily avoiding each other. And then making themselves get along when it's mission time, only to go right back to drama when the mission is over.

I really liked that this book had a short backstory scene about MI6 recruiting Kat, stuck right into the middle of the book (around page 256). She's my favorite character, which meant that I'm happier than I would have been had the backstory scene been about, say, Brooklyn or Rio.

Anyway, there's also a lot of actual plot stuff revolving around a (mostly) retired agent who got assigned to find a mole in MI6, but instead he wound up dead. So the actual point of the book is about finding a bunch of stuff he left behind in order to find out who the mole was, while the mole tries to find all the stuff as well in order to preserve their identity.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ probably, for some scary scenes with a bunch of pirates hijacking a ship and also some fight scenes and explosions. It'd make a pretty decent stealth action videogame.

Like the others, this one gets 4 stars.

 

Favorite lines:

 

    "You know the Prince of Wales and you call him Jimmy?" asked Sydney.

    Page 408.

(Endnote: Throwing a sea urchin at them is officially my favorite way anyone in this series has ever incapacitated a bad guy.)

"Grayling's Song" by Karen Cushman

I'm just going to tell you up front that I didn't really like this one. It seemed like the author was trying to write it in an archaic style, but ended up just making everyone sound weird. Also, the characters weren't very likeable; I kept wanting to slap all but one of them.

Speaking of the characters, I've come up with a quote that describes each of them. None of the characters in question actually said any of this, but they may as well have.

Grayling: "why does it have to be meeeeeeeee i just want to go back home and not have to do this but also i will take charge because nobody else is doing it"

Auld Nancy: "i am older than you and therefore you should do what i say. also have i mentioned i am very old. and i can do weather magic except when i can't."

Desdemona Cork: "i am very pretty. give me things."

Pansy: "yes yes i am very cool and i want to learn magic and i am totally not super bad at everything you should trust me on this definitely." Alternative quote: *sulks*

Sylvanus: "i am most definitely awesome at magic, and in fact i teach magic. i can't really do much of anything with the magic i am most definitely awesome at, though."

the guy whose name I forgot: "yeah i'm just kind of here. i make paper. that is literally my only defining trait." (This is the guy who I didn't want to slap, because I kept forgetting he existed.)

Yeah, that might have had something to do with my opinion of this book. The plot is something about an evil creature showing up at the house of every magic-user in... some area, I'm not sure if this affected the whole world or just medieval not!England. Then it set the houses on fire, stole all the spellbooks, and turned everyone who owned a spellbook into trees. The transformation takes a while to work, which gives Grayling's mom time to tell her how to go about fixing things.

And, yeah, that's basically the whole story right there.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for some scary bits.

I'm going to give this book 2 stars. It's not terrible enough to get 1, but... it also isn't very good. At least I finally made good on my repeated pledges to read some worse books in order to get some variety in the ratings!

(Endnote: The words on the cover are swoopy enough that I thought the book was titled "Gravling's Song" instead, because my mind interpreted the Y's tail as just another flourish.)

"A Wrinkle in Time" by Madeleine L'Engle

This is an essay I wrote for a literature class. As such, this isn't a normal review, but I will stick a star rating and videogame rating on the end. Also, this review is part of my first completed quest.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

 In A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle demonstrates just how bad it would be if everything was exactly the same and points out the importance of being your own person, against a backdrop of science fiction.

The book’s characters visit multiple different planets over the course of the story, which serve to illustrate the point that a completely regimented, clockwork society is a very bad idea. The first planet, Uriel, is still attuned to nature, with untamed plains and peaceful gardens reflecting the inhabitants’ state of existence. By contrast, the second planet, Camazotz, is entirely regulated; the houses are all identical, the houses’ inhabitants are all identical, and the actions the inhabitants take are all identical, with no room for deviation. Anything that doesn’t fit exactly into the mold is removed and replaced. After leaving Camazotz, the characters visit the planet with the even stranger name of Ixchel; what we see of it is much less rules-oriented than Camazotz but still more ordered than Uriel.

The characters’ time on Camazotz also expresses the author’s argument about the importance of being your own person, which is a subset of point 1. Everyone on Camazotz is effectively mindless, under the absolute control of a single intelligence, IT (in all caps). They believe what IT wants them to, to the point of eating a “turkey dinner” that actually is just nutrient paste and perceiving it as a turkey dinner. Under the entity IT, they are doubtless able to achieve good results through coordination and numbers, but there is no room or ability for innovation. This is exemplified by the capital city on Camazotz being effectively a 1960s suburbia forever despite having the capability to advance. The most advanced technology seen is in the CENTRAL Central Intelligence building, and seems to have more to do with the sheer psionic power of IT (the entity) than scientific development.

A Wrinkle in Time could be categorized as soft science fiction; the “tesseract,” the book’s method of faster-than-light travel, is farther toward the softer end of science-fiction travel than different methods from different fiction, and this applies to other aspects of the story as well. The book is about on par with C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy in terms of science versus more magical or psionic aspects in the story, heavily favoring the pseudo-magical as opposed to scientific concepts. This quality is in line with the author’s purposes for A Wrinkle in Time, which focuses on the human elements of the story as opposed to the artificial components.

In conclusion, A Wrinkle in Time effectively makes its case that entirely conforming to the standards of everyone around you results in a loss of your own unique characteristics. The science-fiction elements of the story and the balance between scientific and pseudo-magical aspects serve to accentuate this.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: The upper edge of E10+ for some creepy stuff on Camazotz.

I'll give A Wrinkle in Time 4 stars, for being a good book.

(Endnote: In the original draft of this paper, I had the book incorrectly attributed to E. Nesbit instead of Madeleine L'Engle. It's fixed here, but that error will forever live on in the hard copy the teacher has.)

"Hazard" by Frances O'Roark Dowell

This is not my usual fare. Not being an angry teenager myself, I don't usually read books about angry teenagers, and almost never read books where almost the only person we ever see is an angry teenager.

The book is basically a character study of the titular character, Hazard (named that because of backstory reasons). Apparently he made an illegal tackle while playing football, which led his coach to believe he has anger management issues and take him off the team to send him to a psychologist. It's structured in the form of emails (often sarcastic) to the psychologist, attachments to those emails, and occasionally text conversations with other people.

There is exactly zero normal narration in this book, which means that the reader sort of finds things out about Haz along with the psychologist. Noteworthy things include what happened to his dad (all we know at the beginning is something is very wrong with him) and... yeah, that's pretty much the big mystery. Also, whether or not Haz actually has anger management issues or whether the tackle incident was just a fluke.

I think the one thing missing from this story is Jesus. Both Haz and |his dad| would have benefited immensely just from knowing that God still loves them no matter what happens or what bad choices they've made. Come to think of it, Haz's younger brother would also benefit just from having the solid structure of rules like the Ten Commandments in place to mean he can't just do whatever he wants. (The little brother seems to be under the impression that as long as nobody stops him, anything he does is fine.)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T skirting the line of T15+ for some language and just general maturity level.

Aaaaaaaand... 4 stars. On the low side of 4 stars, but it was good enough that I'll give it 4 despite the gaping Jesus-shaped hole in the middle of it.

(Endnote: On the cover, the author's name is styled "frances o'roark dowell", no capitals. I debated doing that with the title of this post, too, but realized it would just look like I didn't care enough to do the capitalization. Or like I didn't know enough to do the capitalization. It would have been dumb.)

"Iron Hearted Violet" by Kelly Barnhill

In my opinion, this book has a good cover but a really lame title. I picked it based on the synopsis (and to some extent the cover), which did not disappoint. It took a lot longer to get to the meat of the plot than I expected; I feel like the book could have been shorter.

 

It's narrated by an old storyteller guy, who annoyed me as soon as he started showing up in the story and not just telling it. I don't know why he annoyed me, but I think completely third-person omniscient narration would have worked better. Or the same narration, but by a different character. This guy seemed to be trying to be humble and ended up making himself unlikeable.

Anyway, the plot revolves around this evil monster that lives in mirrors and wants to take over the multiverse or something. That's a really bad description of the [REDACTED] (in-story, it gets power if you mention its name, and yet everyone in the story just says the name willy-nilly), and it's much scarier than that, but the description is accurate. The princess (named Violet, who has a perfectly normal cardiac-muscle heart) and a stableboy and three fairy-like creatures and eventually a dragon are trying to stop it, while it throws their world into chaos seemingly just for the heck of it.

As I said in the first paragraph, the book could have been a lot shorter without cutting out much plot. However, it didn't feel super long and tedious, either; it's one of those books whose perceived length is weirdly mutated and separated from how long the book actually is. Maybe it had pacing issues? Its pacing had issues of some sort, or perhaps "anomalies" would be a better word. It was weird (not the story, the pacing).

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+. People get shot with arrows and stabbed, the descriptions of the [REDACTED] are fairly creepy except when they leap back over the uncanny valley and become weirdly funny again, and there's these regenerating, flaming lamprey-salamander things that try to zerg the castle at one point.

3 stars. I feel like if it was edited to fix the narration and the pacing eccentricities, it would merit a solid 4, but as it stands it only gets three from me.

(Endnote: Did I mention |the sky| is a mirror in this world? Yeah. Let that sink in.)

"City Spies: Forbidden City" by James Ponti

After reading book 4 a while back, I've gotten book 3 of this series out of the library as well. This one has less hacking and explosions and more sneaking around and playing chess. Actual chess, as well as metaphorical chess.

Basically, there's this guy from North Korea who's made it as plain as he can that he doesn't want to be in North Korea while maintaining plausible deniability. Both the good guys and the bad guys want to recruit him. Also there's a bunch of stolen nuclear warheads, and chess. (I don't know tons about chess. Like, I can usually hold my own against other relative beginners, but I don't know the names of any openings or tactics or anything, or even how to do them.)

There's one plot point that revolves around a social media account that occasionally posts the same picture of St. Basil's Cathedral. However, something's off: the colors on the domes are slightly different each time. My guess as to a possible way of decoding it was, "Why don't you check how the computer encodes the colors and see if that gives you any clues?" |Guess how they cracked it.|

There's another character who's peripherally in this, and who's apparently a former member of the spy team: Charlotte. Her name is both a person name and a city name, so it didn't trip me up. Kat (Kathmandu) still does, though; I keep wanting to call her Katherine. 

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for kidnapping and some chase scenes. Like the next one, it would be a fairly fun stealth game. Unless they made a few alterations or had the chess take place in cutscenes, though, it would get a bit tedious doing all that, especially since most of the people chessing at each other are supposed to be really good at it and most of the people who would play the game aren't.

This one is as good as the next one, which is to say, I give it 4 stars.

(Endnote: I think I'll get book 2 out of the library next, and then book 1, and then I'll have read the entire series in reverse order.)

"The LEGO Technic Idea Book: Simple Machines" by Yoshihito Isogawa