two quick book notes
Sep. 9th, 2008 02:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyjadwigaBoth from the kids/ya section:
Diane Stanley, A Time Apart.
When 13-year-old Ginny Dorris's mother is diagnosed with serious breast cancer and needs to undergo treatment, Ginny is shipped off to her father in England who she has never gotten close to. However-- this is the twist-- her father is running/on site supervising an Iron Age "living archaeology" project. So, here's Ginny thrust into a primitive environment against her will, terrified for her mom. She does pretty well, too-- she's done some pottery before, she knows how to cook, and she actually does a good job at minding five-year-old Daisy, so we don't have the 'incompetent city girl thrown in over her head and whining' meme, thank goodness. The author used notes her mother had made about the "Living in the Past" Iron Age project the BBC did, so it's not completely off base, either. The best thing about this book is that it evokes various genres of standard (or unstandard) stories, but manages to avoid their cliches.
Zilpha Keatley Snyder, The Unseen.
Less lighthearted, more disturbing and definitely more decidedly supernatural than most of Snyder's works, especially the more recent ones. Snyder combines bits of family story with the story of a young girl granted a tool to see "The Unseen"-- creatures that are all around us but that we usually can't see. Some of the unseen are pleasant; others, not so much. Now what?
Unlike Snyder's earlier works, which had relatively happy endings with a few supernatural hanging threads, this has a relatively placid ending, with the supernatural rather tidied up and the family story left more hanging. Still, a curious and intense book.
Diane Stanley, A Time Apart.
When 13-year-old Ginny Dorris's mother is diagnosed with serious breast cancer and needs to undergo treatment, Ginny is shipped off to her father in England who she has never gotten close to. However-- this is the twist-- her father is running/on site supervising an Iron Age "living archaeology" project. So, here's Ginny thrust into a primitive environment against her will, terrified for her mom. She does pretty well, too-- she's done some pottery before, she knows how to cook, and she actually does a good job at minding five-year-old Daisy, so we don't have the 'incompetent city girl thrown in over her head and whining' meme, thank goodness. The author used notes her mother had made about the "Living in the Past" Iron Age project the BBC did, so it's not completely off base, either. The best thing about this book is that it evokes various genres of standard (or unstandard) stories, but manages to avoid their cliches.
Zilpha Keatley Snyder, The Unseen.
Less lighthearted, more disturbing and definitely more decidedly supernatural than most of Snyder's works, especially the more recent ones. Snyder combines bits of family story with the story of a young girl granted a tool to see "The Unseen"-- creatures that are all around us but that we usually can't see. Some of the unseen are pleasant; others, not so much. Now what?
Unlike Snyder's earlier works, which had relatively happy endings with a few supernatural hanging threads, this has a relatively placid ending, with the supernatural rather tidied up and the family story left more hanging. Still, a curious and intense book.
