Review: Silver Phoenix by Cindy Pon

This book will make you hungry. I'm not kidding. I had to fight the urge to order chinese takeout more than once. Pon uses culinary dishes to great effect, creating a distinctly east Asian fantasy novel. I swear I could smell the food while reading.

From the back cover: "Ai Ling can see into other people's minds and reach into their spirits. But she doesn't know why this power has awakened inside her. She only knows that it is growing. It leads her on an epic journey -- one that brings her to to edge of the deepest evil."

Mythology plays a significant part in this story as Ai Ling and her traveling companions, two brothers, encounter strange beasts, spirits, immortals and other worlds that seem to co-exist with our own. Some of these mythical scenes went by too fast for me. The text felt too rushed to continue the storyline and so some sections felt like they were not fully realized. Many traditional fantasy novels are heavy on world exploration, developing the setting. Many, what I consider "light" fantasy novels are heavy on character development/relationship building and the setting gets much less attention (Graceling comes to mind). I found Silver Phoenix to be somewhere in the middle but perhaps leaning towards heavier character development.

The text lingers on the relationship between Ai Ling and her traveling companions. A romance crops up between Ai Ling and Chen Yong. With Ai Ling's special ability she spends time analyzing, not unlike regular teen girls, what others are thinking. While there is action in this novel and plenty of other-worldliness, I think young readers who enjoy watching the development of relationships will be as drawn to this story as much or more than traditional fantasy readers. This text counts towards the POC Reading Challenge!

Publisher: Greenwillow, 2011 (hardcover in 2009)     Pages: 338
Rating: 3 Stars     Source: Received from the author for participating in the POC Reading Challenge. Thanks, Cindy!

Review: Eaters of the Dead by Michael Crichton

I was totally surprised by this book and really enjoyed it. First of all, I like books that have layers of narration. So, as in Heart of Darkness, there’s an unnamed narrator quoting the main character (Marlow) the entire story. Or, like in Washington Irving’s stories (i.e. Rip Van Winkle) there’s this guy, Geoffrey Crayon, pretending to be the author who is supposedly writing the book from some documents he found. I love that sort of literary device.

So, when Eaters of the Dead opened by announcing the recovery of a famous manuscript, and that this book was the most accurate retelling of the original account of Ibn Fadlan’s epic adventure of one of the first encounters of an Arab with Norsemen, well, I was eating it up. And the first chapter is actually from a real manuscript which Crichton uses as a way introduce the voice of the Ibn as narrator before taking over the writing process.  

My husband read Eaters of the Dead when he was a kid and remembers it being one of his favorites. So, I decided to give it a try. What my husband didn’t realize, and what I began piecing together while I read, was that Eaters is a retelling of Beowulf. I read Beowulf a couple years ago for a class so some of the names of people and places, like Rothgar (Hrothgar )and Heorot, were familiar. Many names have been changed or altered so I had to wait for the story to unfold before I was like, yeah, this is a sweet retelling of Beowulf! Now, I remember Beowulf being terribly boring. Eaters of the Dead is not boring. It was spooky and sometimes funny.

Some of you may know the movie that was based off of this book – The 13^th Warrior with Antonio Banderas. The movie is ok. It’s fairly entertaining. But no surprise, the book is better. It was just a lot of fun to read.  I think I prefer Crichton’s historical fiction books better than his urban sci-fi books. I liked The Great Train Robbery, too. Technically, Eaters is sci-fi but it’s set a long time ago so I’m saying it counts as historical fiction.

If you like tales of sea voyages, Vikings, cultural clashes or good old fashioned sword fights then this book may be for you.

Publisher: Avon, 2006 (orignally 1976)     Pages: 304

Rating: 4 Stars                Source: IC Public Library

Review: The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan

Who needs college when we have Rick Riordan to educate and entertain us?

My husband took a college course this summer called “Classical Mythology” and he kept coming home boring me to death with ancient stories of gods’ family abuses, murders and intrigues. I took a course awhile back in which we read Homer’s The Odyssey, The Oresteian Trilogy by Aeschylus (great plays, btw), and three plays by Euripides (which I also enjoyed). I even “stared” as the evil Medea in a classroom performance (in which my American Girl dolls, Samantha and Molly, played my dead babies. I dressed them in “togas” from pillow cases).

While the original Greek stories are full of drama, drama, drama The Lightning Thief offers a lighter approach to classical myths. While not a parody, The Lightning Thief was actually pretty funny.

I enjoyed Percy’s point of view as a 13-yr-old struggling with ADHD and dyslexia who finds out he’s a demigod – a child with one mortal and one immortal parent. He winds up at Camp Half-Blood (for demigods) to find himself in the middle of a family feud between the gods on Olympus. He accepts a dangerous quest to put things straight and to clear his name of theft.

Along his journey, that spans the continental United States, Percy encounters several mythological characters including Medusa (avert your eyes!), Ares (god of war), Hades (god of the Underworld) and my favorite scene of the book was with Procrustes (“The Stretcher”). Riordan brings these ancient characters into the 21st century in surprisingly clever ways while remaining true to the gods’ traits. The Greek gods are known for acting selfishly, constantly making mistakes on a colossal scale, and they are still at it in Riordan’s book.

This is a great adventure story for kids while teaching them about mythology. Why bother with Greek mythology at all? Our own society, or “Western civilization,” borrows much from the ancient Greek. From language to architecture, story-telling to mathematics, philosophy on education to government, our shared “Western” culture has been built on the work of many Greek thinkers. These myths investigate human qualities they thought were important – human qualities taken to extremes by gods, heroes and anti-heroes in order to test, if only hypothetically through story-telling, humanity’s potential strengths and weaknesses. This is just one reason why Greek stories are so interesting and still relevant.

Riordan’s story offers the best of Greek mythology. It tells us enough about a myth without revealing the often sexual/brutal natures of these myths. The book mentions that gods have affairs with mortals and sometimes between the gods. This is as racy as the book gets. I don’t think it’s any shocker to kids these days that some adults have affairs or how they complicate life.

Percy thinks he’s just a “mistake” to his immortal father (I teared up when he thought this). Other “half-bloods” struggle fitting in with step-family members. I think children occasionally feel, if only for brief moments, that they don’t belong in their family. In this way, I think any kid can identify with Percy and his desire to find “family.”

Other themes in this book are friendship (I loved Grover!), trust, betrayal and self-confidence. All around, this was a fun read. I really enjoyed the mythology and the story was original and captivating. I recommend readers be at least 9 (the vocab may challenge them but shouldn’t hinder their reading pleasure. However, plot twists may throw them). Readers may wish to keep a “glossary” of Greek names since they can be hard to keep track of. I was surprised there wasn’t one in the book.
Publisher: Hyperion Books, 2005     Pages: 377     Source: Purchased from Amazon
Rating: 4.5 Stars     Recommended Age: 9 and up

Review: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by J.K. Jemisin

Looking for a page turner? Look no further. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin is a fantasy novel that pulled me in to its strange world and had me returning as often as I could spare a minute to pick up the book.

Summary from Shelfari:
Yeine Darr is an outcast from the barbarian north. But when her mother dies under mysterious circumstances, she is summoned to the majestic city of Sky. There, to her shock, Yeine is named an heiress to the king. But the throne of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is not easily won, and Yeine is thrust into a vicious power struggle with a pair of cousins she never knew she had. As she fights for her life, she draws ever closer to the secrets of her mother's death and her family's bloody history. With the fate of the world hanging in the balance, Yeine will learn how perilous it can be when love and hate - and gods and mortals - are bound inseparably together.

The title of the book is somewhat misleading, in my opinion. I thought this story would be an epic, a story that traversed a vast kingdom. But the majority of the action takes place in the castle-city of Sky. So, I was disappointed in this respect.

The beginning was set up well. The politics and intrigues of the royal family are quickly reveled as are the gods trapped in mortal bodies who are at odds with the royalty. I thought that this conflict between the royalty and the gods was the main point to the story. While it is important, the plot actually turned into a romance between Yeine and the dark lord, Nahadoth. I don’t mind political intrigues with a little romance but this story was a romance with a little political intrigue. The romance between Yeine and Nahadoth was interesting with his split personality, but the romance was overdone for my taste, particularly because I wanted more of the original plot and kept waiting for the epic to begin.

The story is told in first person by Yeine and it is Yeine’s personality, strong and inquisitive, along with Jemisin’s writing ability, which kept me turning pages. I wanted to see Yeine solve the mystery about her family and was never sure how things were going to play out. I appreciated the humor which offered the right amount of comic relief.

The relationships between the gods were more than a little weird. Jemisin draws from many myths about gods to bring hers into creation. While most of the gods’ back story was interesting there are some parts about their sexuality that the reader is supposed to accept as normal for the immortals that was just disgusting. This is not a focus of the novel but I don’t understand what purpose mentioning these relationships served. I think mentioning the sexual relationships between family members could have been left out. It certainly didn’t make me want to see Yeine hook up with one of them.

While reading I kept making comparison to Stephanie Meyer’s sci-fi novel The Host. Both novels explore the idea of having two personalities within oneself or being inhabited by another entity or personality. They explore the ideas of one’s conscious and subconscious and what makes a person’s identity. They look at how we go about choosing what kind of person we want to be. I wasn’t a big fan of The Host and think Jemisin’s writing is way better but, if you liked The Host, you may appreciate The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.

If you’re looking for a fast read, a romance or a new look at mythology this novel might be for you. I enjoyed the pacing that kept things escalating right up to the end. Some of the answers I saw coming, some I didn’t. While this is the first book of a trilogy I felt The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms stands well on its own. Overall, I liked this book but could have done with less romance and more action and adventure.
Publisher: Orbit, 2010     Pages: 228     Source: IC Public Library
Rating: 3 Stars     Recommended Age: adult