DreamHaven

One of the hardest things to do, I think, in writing middle grade fantasy, is to give children adventures where they are truly challenged but can still reasonably defeat some great evil. It’s even better if the young adventurers have to conquer something in themselves in order to succeed. In The Counterclockwise Heart both young protagonists must call on every bit of courage they have in order to save their countries. If the threats are maybe not as evil as the kids have been led to believe, then some of their battles must take place within themselves.

Alphonsus is the Prince of a country called Rheinvelt, adopted by the empress and her wife the imperatrix after being found as an infant in the castle walls. He has two huge secrets. One is his self-acknowledged cowardice, and the other is that the mysterious clock he has in his chest instead of a heart has begun running backwards. Esme is a sorceress, trained in exile by the remnants of magicians called Hierophants, and sent to Rheinvelt on a mission to kill the evil witch called the Nachtfrau. Esme is clever and ruthless, and also has a secret. The Nachtfrau is her mother.

The Counterclockwise Heart is a fairly complex story for middle grade, but it is told in straightforward prose that nevertheless does not speak down to children. As a plus, both Esme and Alphonsus have mothers, both of whom are important characters, just as brave and complicated as their children. In fact, everyone in the story has their own set of secrets and misconceptions, including the adults and the country of Rheinvelt itself.

The book won the Minnesota Book Award for Middle Grade Literature this year, a well-deserved honor. It should be read by middle schoolers of all ages. Brian Farrey has written two other Minnesota Book Award winners. One of them, With or Without You, also was a Stonewall honor book.

What? You’ve never heard of the legendary pirate, Amina Al-Sirafi? Whose gold-toothed smile and enormous figure was the last thing seen by who-knows-how-many men? The nakhudha of the infamous ship, the Marawati, which roamed the Indian Ocean, stealing horses from the Emir of Hormuz, and setting fire to the customs house in Basrah, and poisoning an entire feast in Mombasa?

And who, of course, had the audacity to be a woman.

But now Amina Al-Sirafi has retired, or perhaps merely gone into hiding. She has a leaky house to maintain, and both an aging mother and a ten-year-old daughter to care for. She has a bad knee. Her trusted crew are either dead or likewise retired. Her ship is getting by, doing routine trading (smuggling and only a little piracy) and she has not been on it for years. She does not miss her old life. At all. Really.

Which is why she protests when forced to embark on a new and dangerous mission. But not very much. The story, told in her own irreverent and cynical words, unfolds as most adventures do. There are sorcerers, sea monsters, storms, and ancient legends brought to life. There is an alliance with an island of mythical creatures and a treacherous demon possibly-not-ex-husband. But underlying all of it is worry about her daughter and true concern for the lives of her crew, informed by the triumphs and tragedies of their shared past.

Amina Al-Sirafi is one of the best “strong female protagonists” I have read. She is an indomitable fighter, courageous and fearsome. But the way she chooses to fight, and what she chooses to fight for, is all female. She is lusty, foul-mouthed, contrary, stupidly brave, and without a doubt a woman.

I’ve been a fan of Francis Hardinge’s wonderful, morally complex novels for young adults since reading The Lie Tree, which won a Costa Book Award for Children’s Book (best novel by an author residing in the UK or Ireland) in 2015. Her novels have consistently brought a teen protagonist through an adventure which requires obtaining, not increased physical or mental prowess, but the maturity to make a difficult decision.

The young protagonist of Deeplight, Hark, is an orphan who has grown up (at age 15) to be a thief and con man, dealing in magical relics. He starts out as the typical street-kid-with-a-heart, but becomes much more interesting. He is joined eventually by Selphin, a young woman whose mother is a pirate, who also has unexpected steel in her moral fiber. She is, interestingly, “sea-kissed,” which means she has lost her hearing during undersea diving. There is a community of “sea-kissed” and most of Selphin’s conversations in the book take place in sign language.

Hardinge’s books all have unique fantasy worlds with interesting magic operating under unusual conditions. Deeplight is no exception. Its world is called Myriad, a huge chain of islands which had, until fifty years ago, been ruled by vast, Lovecraftian undersea Gods. They have left behind relics with incredible power, an economy which centers on harvesting those relics, and an abandoned priesthood aging on a deserted island.

And Gods also, of course, leave behind secrets for unsuspecting teenage protagonists to discover. The secrets of Myriad are layered and complicated, but well within the understanding of the people like Hark and Selphin, who can grow to treasure them.

This is the story of three kids from Nola—an alternate, post-apocalyptic New Orleans, where music is magic, the dead drive taxis, and graffiti comes alive—who fight a great evil in the form of a devastating Storm. The Storm is Hurricane Katrina and also possibly a metaphor for generational trauma. It is eternal, but this time it is being brought about by a dangerous rogue Song and an undead bureaucrat. It is killing, one by one, all the other Songs whose magics power the city, and Nola is disappearing.

Perilous Antoine Graves is a young magician who is afraid of his budding power and his music. His sister Brendy, is young enough to have that childlike, illogical ability to see the truth. Perry’s best friend, Peaches, is a semi-magical girl who is very strong and virtually indestructible (and who seems to be based on Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking). Perry is probably in love with her. They are sent on a fairytale-ish quest and must find the courage to make the right choices even when it is not clear what they are choosing between.

The kids are not the only people whose choices effect the Storm. There is Casey who has different lives in different cities, Jaylon who first makes graffiti live, Mama Lisa the Wise Woman, and the ghost of Lafcadio Hearn. They are aided or hindered by the embodiments, or perhaps performers, of the archetypal Songs. But unlike in European fairy tales, they can rely on their family and the songs that are their history and heart. And everyone seems to know that there are no real grown-ups, only big kids, pretending. Everyone has room to grow.

The writing is as magical as Nola. Alex Jennings jumps seamlessly between street dialog and prose with the cadence of myth and music. A quote might be the best description.The kids have never ridden a “dead taxi” before, and perhaps it should be scary. But this is the description of its arrival, from page 157: “Perry heard hoofbeats clopping down the street. The sound didn’t seem quite right to him, though. It sounded—not dishonest, not exactly—but like it was pretending to be hoofbeats so as not to worry anyone.”

The author’s acknowledgments state that he was challenged to write “the Blackest fantasy he could concoct.” I think he succeeded, and now there is a new version of my childhood heroine, who is strong enough to carry a horse, and confident enough to believe her Pirate King father into existence, and has become indisputably Black.

I couldn’t get the formatting to work, so I divided this post and added another title!

Magic Teacher, by Rui Sekai and Kyou Kitazawa
The actual title (I Got Fired as a Court Wizard so Now I’m Moving to the Country to Become a Magic Teacher) is way too long, and pretty much sums up the plot so far. But I love the trope of the older, quietly powerful mage put in charge of a class of delinquent but brilliant students. This first volume introduces a cute middle-aged mage, his adorable (also middle-aged!) female student teacher, several disdainful and aristocratic faculty members, and an assortment of students with wonderfully ridiculous goals and talents.

Thunderbolt Fantasy, by Gen Urobuchi and Yui Sakura
This is a manga adaptation of one of the most unusual recent Japanese series; a saga set in China, written by Gen Urobuchi (of Madoka Magica and Fate/Zero fame), and “animated” by Pili, a Taiwanese puppet theater. For a puppet show, it is surprisingly intricate. And violent—my anime-watching group called it “Murder Puppets.”
So far, the new manga follows the first season of the serial closely, though the costumes are less spectacular. The plot has everything you might want in a fantasy—ancient sects guarding magical items, loyalty, betrayal, sword fights to the death, and an ancient evil awakening. It requires an enormous cast of heroes and sorcerers, both male and female. It also offers, not one, but two enigmatic and powerful young men who may or may not be on the side of righteousness. The one on the cover of Volume One is called (appropriately) “Enigmatic Gale,” but for now his name is Gui Niao.

Even after decades of watching every Hayao Miyazaki film that I could get my hands on, I hadn’t realized that he was a peerless artist who began his career as a manga writer and illustrator. Shuna’s Journey, his third manga, was published in Japan in 1983, just before he launched Studio Ghibli, which produced some of the best animated films in the world. This is the first time it has been translated into English.

Those of you who have seen Miyazaki’s films will recognize some of the elements. There is a wide-eyed but tenacious young man who goes on an epic journey to follow a dream. He is eventually joined by an equally wide-eyed, gently ferocious young woman and her sister. They ride an oddly familiar animal through desolate landscapes, parts of which can be recognized in some of the later films.

For those who have not seen ‘Laputa: Castle in the Sky,’ ‘Nausicaa,’ and ‘Princess Mononoke’ (to name a few), this book will be a wonderfully strange and inexplicable journey. Miyazaki uses a different sort of storytelling, in which the characters accept the unknown without question while holding tightly to their own, essential selves. There is a certain wisdom in finding that everything does not need to be explained.

This hardcover book is read front-to-back like a manga, but every page is a gorgeous full-color illustration. There are no word balloons, just simple text telling a story which could be read aloud to a child. The illustrations tell a slightly different story though, less heroic and somewhat melancholy, hinting at past disasters and future hopes. It is a book to be examined over and over, an experience which grows the more you pay attention to it.

Babel is an extraordinary book: It is outstanding in its intelligence, precise prose, and undeniably new and creative system of magic. It is the story of the fall of the Tower of Babel at Oxford University and, perhaps, the beginning of the fall of the British Empire and the reign of the English language.

The Tower in the book is the Royal Institute of Translation, standing at the center of Oxford University in 1828. Its exalted students learn the theory of language, the art of translation and, ultimately, the use of translation in magic. In this world, magic occurs in the gaps between the shades of meaning of the same word in two different languages, inscribed on each side of a bar of silver. To find the word pairs and activate the magic, an intimate knowledge of both languages is mandatory.

Babel is the story of Robin Swift, born in Canton, China and brought to England by a stern, distant guardian after the death of his mother. He joins three other brilliant and obedient young people who have shown an ability to learn the important languages—Greek, Latin and English—along with their own native tongue. The British Empire is expanding its boundaries and, together with trade alliances and all the world’s silver, it is scooping up languages. The successful few magician translators at Oxford can enjoy all the comforts of empire.

But Robin and his friends—two foreign men and two women—will never be truly accepted into society, despite their standing as student magicians. They also might not want to be a part of the system that trained them, no matter the benefit to themselves. They must learn the truth of the phrase, “An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.”

I’ve been a fan of Holly Black since before The Spiderwick Chronicles was made into a movie, which was quite a long time ago. Her books are usually quirky, edgy, occasionally dark fantasy, aimed at a young adults audience. Book of Night is her first novel marketed for adults.

Charlie Hall is a young woman who is trying to reform her past as a child thief and con artist, by working as a bartender at a shady tavern. This is working out about as well as such things usually do, which is . . . not very well. So it takes only the murder of a total stranger to hurl her back into a dangerous, magical world that wants her for past crimes and suspects her of present ones.

Charlie’s world works on shadow magic, using interchangeable human shadows which can be molded into decorative playthings or corrupted into powerful beings. The magic system is unique, sinister, and oddly limited, so that the most menacing thing in the book is the magicians and not the creepy magic they use. There is plenty of suspense, but no lurking horror, though I admit that, once I’d picked it up, I had to read all the way through to the end.