A Review of House of Shadows by Rachel Neumeier

Neumeier builds a strange and solemn world in her latest book, beginning with eight sisters who must sell two of their number to survive after their father dies. The first sister is sold into what appears to be a high-class brothel, but we learn that in this partly Asian-inspired culture, girls can be trained to become “flower wives,” a type of concubine whose children have some legal status even though they are not the offspring of the higher-status legal wives. In this case, Karah is so devastatingly beautiful that the respected Cloisonné House pays a very large sum for her—and must then find a way to protect her from rival trainees.

Nemienne is apprenticed to a far different master, a mage named Ankennes. She has a knack for magic that her sisters only saw as dreaminess. Nemienne practices spells, yes, but she also practices going into the darkness under the mountain, a place that’s as much a magical dimension as a physical location. Challenging the darkness is the most important task Nemienne must face.

Another major player is Taudde, a young magician-bard from enemy kingdom Kalches. He hasn’t come for the reasons people in power suppose, though. Those people find out who he is and blackmail him into helping them in unpleasant ways. Then there’s Prince Tepres, who doesn’t suspect the plots against him and falls hard for Karah. Last but certainly not least is Leilis, a girl who was meant to be a flower wife but instead is a sort of glorified servant in Cloisonné House. She has more power over the doings in the house than one might think, however.

All of these people are intriguing, rich characters. And all of them wind up coming together in dangerous, complex ways when the dragon under the mountain stirs.

Really, my favorite character just might be a mysterious cat named Enkea who deigns to live in the mage’s house. And my favorite passage is a story Karah tells to some visitors at Cloisonné House.

There’s a stately, poetic feel to Neumeier’s writing that evokes older fantasy such as Tolkien’s famous work or perhaps more accurately Patricia McKillip’s or Ursula LeGuin's. The author certainly has a way with words—and with ideas. Here’s an example:

The steps of the [mage’s] house were like the house itself: rough and oddly angled, with unexpected slants underfoot. The polished statue of a cat sat beside the door, gray soapstone with eyes of agate. Nemienne touched the cat’s head curiously. The stone was silken smooth under her fingertips. “There’s no bellpull,” Enelle said, stating the obvious because she was nervous. “I think the cat is the bell,” Nemienne said with an odd certainty, running her hand across the statue’s head a second time. Before them, the door unlatched itself with a muffled click.

I also like how Neumeier gives Ankennes his own rather personal take on the situation in the kingdom. The contrast between his views and what the king sees reminds me that in many books, mages and wizards seem unbiased to the point of lacking personality—or else they are bad guys or good guys in simplistic ways. This is not true of Ankennes.

House of Shadows feels gravely atmospheric and stylized. The book is marked by ritualized storytelling and plot evolution—as if the author were an Indonesian shadow puppeteer. Rachel Neumeier has written an intricate fantasy world, and I’m happy to get the sense that a sequel might be in the works.

Note for Worried Parents: This book is for teens. It has a mature tone, and the talk about flower wives and references to their lesser sisters, the prostitutes (though they are not called that) pretty much seals the deal.

A Review of The Magic Cake Shop by Meika Hashimoto

Emma is a terrible disappointment to her parents, who are what you would get if you crossed Roald Dahl with People magazine. Take a look at how the story begins:

Mr. and Mrs. Burblee were very beautiful. Mrs. Burblee had a delicate chin, dainty earlobes, and a charming smile. Mr. Burblee had a rugged chin, manly earlobes, and a winning smile.

When Mrs. Burblee went for a walk, many a man tripped over his feet in a rush to say hello. If Mrs. Burblee said hello back, the goggle-eyed man usually fell off the sidewalk, sometimes into oncoming traffic.

Mrs. Burblee took this as a compliment.

When Mr. Burblee took a ride on his motorcycle, he liked to grin at the lady drivers at stoplights. They usually fainted. In the past year, Mr. Burblee had been responsible for eighty-two traffic jams.

He liked to keep count.

In between causing traffic accidents, the Burblees spend their time "powdering, perfuming, and polishing." They also sit around and talk about how beautiful they are. Oh, and write odes to Mrs. Burblee's feet.

What they don't talk about is their daughter Emma, who is neither polished nor beautiful. They put her on a diet and everything, but the child is grubby. Also interested in starving children in far-off countries and other topics that have no appeal whatsoever for the Burblees. She even wants to learn to bake fattening desserts! After she embarrasses them at a dinner party supposedly held in honor of her tenth birthday, they send her off to live with her awful Uncle Simon.

Simon has a Roald Dahl pedigree, as well. (Think The Magic Finger.) He loves to hunt and kill small animals. He loves to make Emma's life miserable, too. She has to cook and clean for him. Cooking usually means making "backyard stew," composed of squirrels and songbirds Simon has slaughtered. Except—Emma discovers a wonderful cake shop when her uncle sends her out to get huge amounts of pastries (for him, not her).

To Emma's delight, magical baker Mr. Crackle takes her under his wing. Other people in the town of Nummington also reach out to her with kindness, and Emma begins to feel cared for for the first time. She is beginning to be truly happy when an evil stranger shows up at Uncle Simon's house. He has plans that will make a lot of money, but he intends to use Mr. Crackle for his unpleasant schemes. To protect Mr. Crackle, Emma interferes with their plans, only to watch them come up with a new and more horrible plan that will involve the gifted baker, anyway.

Not that these two villains are a match for Emma and Mr. Crackle—but before they win the day, things will get rather poisonous.

Hashimoto has a clean and upbeat style as she tells a delicious little story of villains and magical pastry making for younger readers. I think 7- to 9-year-olds would be the best audience for this one. Note that bits and pieces of her plot require some extra suspension of disbelief, but who cares? All I know is I want a magic cake shop in my town!

A Review of Pie by Sarah Weeks

Alice's aunt Polly is the Pie Queen of Ipswitch, and when she dies, everyone in Ipswitch is upset. Not only was Polly such a nice person that she gave her pies away rather than selling them, but people were really hooked on her pies. Pie even amped up the town's economy. After all, Polly was a 13-time winner of the national pie contest, the Blueberry. (Someone else entered her pies.) And her shop, Pie, had become a real tourist attraction.

Alice is especially sad because she was very close to her aunt. To her surprise, her aunt leaves her a legacy, her grouchy cat, Lardo. And she has left her award-winning pie crust recipe to Lardo!

Now half the town is baking pies, trying to win the Blueberry. Including Alice's mother, who has envied Polly for years and resented the fact that Polly didn't use her gifts to make a lot of money.

Alice's father doesn't bake; he sneezes. He's allergic to cats.

Alice is not interested in making pies. Her own talent is for songwriting. And now she is trying to get along with Lardo, not the world's sweetest feline. When Lardo disappears from her room, Alice worries that he has been catnapped.

Also, what is magazine reporter Sylvia DeSoto really up to? Let alone Mayor Needleman's wife, or Alice's principal, Miss Gurke?

With a town full of secrets and failed pie crust, Alice and Aunt Polly's shop assistant Charlie set out to play Nancy Drew and one of the Hardy Boys, respectively. Sure, Charlie is good at fixing Alice's uncooperative bicycle chain, but he makes a pretty good friend, too.

Alice is inclined to be self doubting, worrying about all the things she's said and done wrong. It will be clear to readers that what Polly most wanted to leave her niece was not a pie crust recipe; it was simple, everyday happiness.

But happiness seemed as far from Alice's reach as the disappearing pies in her dream. She lay in bed wondering if things would ever change, and that's when she remembered something her aunt Polly had once told her.

"Things do not change; we do."

"Did you make that up?" Alice had asked.

"No, a man named Henry David Thoreau said it. Do you understand what it means?"

"I'm not sure."

"If you want things to be different, you have to start by changing yourself."

Of course, Alice, being a self-doubter, takes this memory the wrong way and decides she should change everything about herself. Stuff like her singing, her imagination, and her hunches. Readers will be quick to realize that Alice's new goal is not a wise one. Sure enough, a few pages and a peach pie later, Alice gets it right. Other characters also grow and change, replacing old perspectives with new ones.

This is a fairly slim book, a cheerful, unintimidating story of adventure and friendship—and pie.

A Review of Bliss by Kathryn Littlewood

The Bliss family owns a magic bake shop in a small town. Not only are their baked goods extra yummy, but they can also act as magical solutions to problems. For example, Mrs. Bliss makes a special recipe to save a small boy who is in a coma after having been struck by lightning.

Bliss is written in the third person, but it is told almost entirely from the point of view of Rose, the Blisses' responsible, too-ordinary, too-plain, and slightly anxious 12-year-old daughter. She's the one entrusted with the whisk-shaped silver key to the magical vault when her parents are called out of town.

Littlewood has fun with her cast of characters. Rose's siblings include 15-year-old athlete and heartbreaker Ty, who's so full of himself and so adored by others that he hardly ever has to do a lick of work; 9-year-old Sage, who's a clown; and 3-year-old Leigh, who mostly makes messes. Rose is the only one in the family with dark hair, and she feels practically invisible—especially around her crush, Devin Stetson. We also get Chip, the laconic, tattooed muscleman who works in the bakery, and an elderly babysitter who smells weird and yells with a Scottish accent.

But the real star of this show is "Aunt" Lily, who shows up about five minutes after Rose's parents leave. It is so obvious that she has come to steal the Bliss family's magic cookbook that you may find yourself, as I did, telling Rose not to be a sucker for pages on end.

However. Lily is a bit more complicated than that. Yes, she's nefarious, and she has put some kind of spell on the kids so they won't tell their parents she is there when the elder Blisses call home.

But in addition to scheming, Lily is actually a lot of fun. In addition to being sneaky, she makes people feel good about themselves. She is charming with a capital C!

Rose and Ty run into trouble when they copy out some recipes from The Cookery Booke and experiment with them, hoping to show off to Lily without letting her into that vault.

A love potion and a truth potion cause all kinds of craziness in town, as does a backwards spell intended to reverse the previous spells.

Littlewood's humor shines brightest when she crosses over into parody, most notably when a dozen or so girls Ty has plied with both the love potion and the truth potion show up at the bakery looking for him. Until now, no one has done a Mean Girl quite like this one.

Out the backdoor, six rabid girls had pressed their flushed faces to the glass. More girls bounced on the trampoline, trying to get a look into the kitchen over the heads of the others. A girl stood on each of the swings—even the baby swing—and one brave girl had climbed on top of the rusty barbecue grate, ignoring the bits of burned hamburger stuck to the grill. Their eyes were bulging out of their heads, big as Ping-Pong balls.

This was scary stuff.

... Then a singular voice rose from the back of the crowd. "If he doesn't come out now, I will rip someone's face off!" One girl, taller and stronger than all the others, was hurtling toward the front of the crowd, throwing shorter girls to the ground as she passed them. That girl was Ashley Knob.

Her long hair had been curled into fancy ringlets so shiny and so blond that you had to squint to look at them directly. Her lip gloss shimmered like an expensive watch. Slung over one shoulder was a bag from which a frightened Chihuahua looked out, clearly wishing he were somewhere else. A ring of space opened up around her. Even in the depths of a spell, the girls of Calamity Falls always knew to make way for Ashley Knob.

Ashley screamed, banging on the window with her fists. "I will set all the furniture from my daddy's store on fire and throw it through this window!"

And that's just one of the results of Rose and Ty's baking!

Little by little, Lily hones in on the coveted cookbook, not to mention the magic ingredients kept in the secret cellar. One of the funniest things in the book is how Lily skewers the way Rose's parents use their magic, pointing out that their side of the family "[has] done nothing with [The Cookery Booke] but squander its power by running popular local businesses in small, eccentric towns." Most kids will miss the fact that Littlewood is sending up fantasy tropes, but older fantasy readers will no doubt enjoy the author's satirical moments.

The book gives us a couple of twists and turns before the Bliss parents come home, as well as a cliffhanger ending that sets readers up for a sequel. I am not a fan of such endings, but Bliss is nevertheless a clever, fun read for the middle grade crowd.

Note: I received an ARC of this book from HarperCollins. It will be coming out on February 14.

A Retro Review of Sorcery and Cecilia or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer

This book has been around since 1988, but it has since been reprinted. In case you're thinking that's a long title, there's even more: the subtitle is actually "being the correspondence of two Young Ladies of Quality regarding various Magical Scandals in London and the Country."

Sorcery and Cecilia is an epistolary novel, a fantasy, a romance, and a suspense novel. It fairly percolates of Jane Austen. Hmm, perhaps "seeps" would be a better verb, since there's an awful lot of tea drinking here, relieved only by a little of the titular hot chocolate.

Cecilia Rushton is stuck at Rushton Manor in Essex, while her cousin Kate is in London experiencing a high ton season with her sister, the lovely and self-centered Georgina. There is gossip of clothes and parties in their letters, but also of the mysterious marquis of Schofield and a neighbor honored by the Royal College of Wizards. This isn't Jane Austen's England, after all, although it's a close match except for the wizards!

Pretty soon Kate is stumbling into a hidden garden and nearly suffering death by hot chocolate, escaping with nothing more than a hole through her skirt where the chocolate touched it. And Cecilia is rolling her eyes at the sight of every boy in the district falling in love with a girl named Dorothea. When they figure out that the woman with the chocolate pot is the same Miranda who is the terrifying mother of Dorothea, Kate and Cecilia rightly suspect a plot.

Meanwhile, Cecilia comes across a boy named James Tarleton spying rather ineptly in the bushes, and Kate meets Thomas Schofield, the mysterious marquis himself, who proposes an engagement-of-convenience while he does his own spying on Miranda and her ally Sir Hilary Bedrick. Neither of the boys takes the girls very seriously, unaware that Cecilia and Kate are beginning to tackle the villains themselves, armed with magical charm bags and elegant society manners.

Then Kate is nearly turned into a tree and her cousin Oliver, Cecilia's brother, disappears. The chocolate is getting very hot, indeed!

This comedy of manners in letters is an intelligent book, one that will be appreciated by reader who like Jane Austen and perhaps Diana Wynne Jones. TV-brained readers might feel impatient at its relatively slow pace, but others will enjoy its slow build and the clever little twists, not to mention the way the book turns the traditional regency romance on its head by the introduction of magic and two strong-minded girls.

And, as you might guess, James is falling for Cecilia and Thomas is falling for Kate, though it takes the four of them quite a while to figure that out! The romance doesn't overpower the storytelling; it just adds spice.

About the only dull bit in this book is the explanation of the spells wrought by the villains. Otherwise, I think you'll find it a delightful read for a summer afternoon—preferably in conjunction with a delicate rose-patterned teacup filled with Earl Grey tea.

Note that the authors have written two sequels, The Grand Tour and The Mislaid Magician or Ten Years After. These are likable, if not quite as good as the first book. I recently reviewed a new spin-off by Stevermer, Magic Below Stairs.

A Review of Abby Carnelia's One & Only Magical Power by David Pogue

Technology reporter David Pogue has come up with a very funny premise, although the follow-through is a bit more ordinary. As we learn in the first chapter, not to mention the title, Abby Carnelia has a magical power: when she tugs on her ears, she can make a hard-boiled egg spin.

Only—that's it! No variations, no additional applications, no broad-ranging telekinesis; just ears and egg spinning. (Raw eggs don't work, either.) Here's how the book begins:

You've probably seen the ads for Abby Carnelia's Find-Your-Magic Centers on TV. Or maybe you've seen a Find-Your-Magic Center at the shopping mall, tucked in between the Gap and the drugstore. But Abby Carnelia herself didn't discover her own magical power until she was eleven years old.
This is how it happened.

Once she learns of her ability, Abby naturally wants to know more about magic. She ends up getting into a surprisingly inexpensive summer camp for young magicians. At first Abby is discouraged to discover that the other kids are practicing stage magic, not the real thing. Then she does finally meet other kids with magical powers, and all of them go off to an "advanced camp."

The other powers are just as quirky as Abby's, if not more so. I will just share one: a girl who can float off the floor, but only a quarter of an inch, and then only if she pictures a certain goofy scenario involving buffalos.

One of the best characters is a boy named Ben, who, after he decides Abby isn't nuts, helps her perform her egg act in suitably grand style for the camp magic show. Then Ben joins the kids with magical powers as they change camps, even though Abby is pretty sure Ben's power isn't magical at all.

The rest of the plot, which depends partly on a cleverly censored set of e-mails that the author lets us read, plays out rather typically, corporate villains and all. But readers will find that Abby and her new friends are an appealing bunch. I especially like how they figure out some terrific applications for their odd skills when they attempt to make their escape from the second camp.

Abby Carnelia's One & Only Magical Power is a friendly read, and you'll have fun watching Abby try to find a place for herself in a world where egg-spinning doesn't seem particularly useful. I actually got more of a science fiction than a fantasy feel from this book, perhaps because the powers are so focused and non-wandy. There's obviously a message here about uniqueness and individual worth, but it's plenty palatable, tucked in between the lines of Abby's adventures with her new gift and her new friends.

A Review of Theodosia and the Eyes of Horus by R.L. LaFevers

You know those kids that really should be CEOs of multinational corporations at the age of seven? The ones who look with disdain at the foolish adults who haven't sufficient sense to bow to their wills? The ones you're nice to now because they'll be running for president or prime minister, if not queen, in a couple of decades—and winning?

Yes, Theodosia Throckmorten is one of those kids. Not because she's bossy or precocious in a sitcom kind of way, but because she knows what she knows and doesn't suffer fools gladly. Theodosia is busy, and adults seem to have a tendency to get in her way. As she puts it in the first two sentences: "I hate being followed. I especially hate being followed by a bunch of lunatic adults playing at being occultists."

In Book 3, Theodosia and the Eyes of Horus, our 11-year-old heroine continues using her knowledge of Egyptian magic to remove the curses from objects shipped to the Museum of Legends and Antiquities that her parents run. The year is 1906, mummies are all the rage in London, and sometimes they're even real.

The adults interfering with Theodosia are a motley crew. We have the slightly deranged Aloysius Trawley and the Black Sunners, who seem pretty sure Theodosia is a reincarnated goddess and are cranky about her lack of willingness to come around and share her supposed power. Then we have the traitor Admiral Sopcoate and his cronies, who escaped in the last book and now show up demanding the strange artifact Theodosia's brother Henry has discovered in the museum basement—the Emerald Tablet. Soon it seems everyone is after the tablet, including the mysterious and possibly fraudulent Egyptian magician, Awi Bubu. Theodosia's mentor, Lord Wigmere, is not helping matters any. He keeps trying to pressure her into working with his representative at the museum, Clive Fagenbush, who gets on Theodosia's last nerve.

Really, at this point, I don't mind what shenanigans Theodosia is up to; I just like watching her in action. Whether she's putting a sand-in-the-pants curse on Fagenbush or arranging a secret funeral, it's all about this character's stern dedication to ridding the museum of ancient spells and keeping the bad guys away from objects of power.

LaFever's humor adds a great deal to the books. For example, she has a lot of fun contrasting Theodosia's idea of proper (read: expedient) behavior with what the adults around her think a young lady should be doing. (It doesn't hurt that Theodosia's absent-minded Egyptologist parents never dream that their daughter could be getting herself into quite so much trouble.) Former pickpocket Sticky Will and his brothers continue to add comic relief, along with some much-needed assistance.

As in the previous books, Yoko Tanaka's occasional black-and-white illustrations add to the author's storytelling.

This book reveals intriguing information about Theodosia's ability to sense magic, especially curses, which moves the series arc forward. Although the problems in Theodosia and the Eyes of Horus are solved by the end of the book, we also learn the direction the next installment will take. I look forward to reading Book Four in this clever, rambunctious series.

I do recommend reading books one and two before you tackle LaFevers' latest. While you can catch the gist of what's going on by simply diving in, the story will be that much more effective if you backtrack to read Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos and Theodosia and the Staff of Osiris first. For one thing, young readers will be able to steep themselves in the nuances of Egyptian magical lore, as studied and applied by our heroine.

I'll just end by mentioning that I like how School Library Journal puts it on the jacket flap of the new book: Theodosia is "a combination of Nancy Drew and Indiana Jones."

Note for Worried Parents: There's some occult Egyptian magic in these books, including a case of haunting and a mild ghost removal ceremony, if that sort of thing concerns you.

Update: At writer Ellen Oh's blog, her daughter Summer has done a very nice interview with R.L. LaFevers about this book and the Theodosia series.

A Review of Thirteenth Child by Patricia C. Wrede

I’ve been looking forward to this book coming out for months! So when I saw it in the bookstore yesterday, I snatched it up, ran home, and read the whole thing straight through. Why, you may ask, such transportations of delight? Well, fantasy is my favorite genre, and Patricia C. Wrede has written some very fun books, most notably the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, starting with Dealing with Dragons. She also coauthored Sorcery and Cecilia or the Enchanted Chocolate Pot and its sequels with Caroline Stevermer—novels of manners set in an alternate England where magicians are the norm.

Another reason I’ve been dying to read Thirteenth Child is because it clearly falls in the new subgenre I’ve been talking about, rural fantasy. (See my blog entry for January 16: “Move Over, Steampunk!”) With this book, Wrede is starting a new series called Frontier Magic, in which Americans in the 1800s have magicians to help them settle the Wild West (only here they're called Columbians). Wrede’s world is new in other ways, I discovered: the frontier is populated by “natural” animals such as mammoths, bison, and woolly rhinoseroses, along with magical creatures such as steam dragons, spectral bears, and swarming weasels.

On the far side of the plains were mountains, sharp and high, that no one had seen but a few explorers. Papa said that at least ten expeditions had tried to find a way through them to the Pacific Ocean, but only three men had ever come back alive, and they were stark out of their heads. There was a monument in the capital to Lewis and Clark, who headed the first group that went missing, back in 1804. It was more than wild country; it was unknown.

Alternative history, indeed! But there’s more: formerly, magicians led by Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin erected the Great Barrier Spell, intended to keep the lethal beasts of the frontier from overrunning and devouring Columbians. Now Eff and her family are moving out to the edge of the frontier, where her father will teach magic at a small college.

Eff is the hero of our story, though she thinks she's its villain. Because she is the thirteenth child, her superstitious uncles and aunts and cousins tell her over and over that she will turn out to be evil and should have been drowned at birth. To make matters worse, her twin Lan is the golden boy, seventh son of a seventh son and mightily magical. Fortunately, he and Eff are very close. But one of the reasons Eff’s parents are moving out west is to get away from the relatives who treat their daughter as if she were cursed.

The story telling has an epic feel, beginning when Eff is five and ending when she is eighteen. Eff and Lan attend a small public school out in the settlement, though Lan is given supplemental lessons to cultivate his gifts. It doesn’t occur to anyone except the amazing Miss Ochiba that Eff might be plenty gifted in her own right. Miss Ochiba schools Eff and her friend William in Aphrikan magic during after-school tutoring sessions while Lan is busy learning the more commonly valued Avrupan (European) magic.

We also meet the Society of Progressive Rationalists, who abhor magic and are determined to build a settlement without using any at all. One such rationalist, Brant Wilson, studies with Eff’s father and turns out to be a bit of a hero; he also turns Eff’s older sister’s head. Another character of note is “Wash” Washington Morris, a circuit riding magician who troubleshoots problems in the scattered settlements.

In time, Eff’s gifts begin to show in unexpected ways as she and her family and friends take on a problem that is destroying the crops of the entire region. It’s not dragon fighting, but it’s a matter of life and death for these struggling farmers.

Thirteenth Child reads like historical fiction, and I was thoroughly caught up in the way the Columbian settlers handled their challenges. One of the strengths of the book is the way Wrede captures the "can do" feeling of frontier living and this era in our country's history. Her greatest success, though, is the character of Eff and her story, which is what really kept me going. I did get a little bogged down near the end of the book during explanations about different stages of beetles, but that’s the only place my reading faltered. I can assure you that Patricia C. Wrede’s latest series, like a settler taming new land, is off to a brave, strong start.

A Review of Thornspell by Helen Lowe

Fairy tale retellings are almost always done from the princess’s point of view, so it’s nice to read one from the prince’s perspective. Offhand, the only other book I can think of with a similar point of view is Alex Flinn’s Beastly, a modern-day retelling of "Beauty and the Beast." Of course, in the case of "Sleeping Beauty," the princess is out of commission for much of the story. Hence Thornspell, Helen Lowe’s retelling of the rose-covered fairy tale about an eerie hundred-year enchantment.

As a boy, Prince Sigismund reads stories of Parsifal and the Grail quest and dreams of becoming a knight-errant. Raised quietly in a castle on the west edge of the kingdom while his father goes south to fight a war, he looks out over a forbidden forest, wondering about the legend of a hidden castle there. Eventually he comes under attack by an enchantress calling herself the Margravine zu Malvolin, who appears at the castle gate and tries to enlist Sigismund to her cause. The boy barely escapes and becomes very ill, but he is helped by shadowy figures who appear to wish him well. Sigismund also begins to dream of walking through the legendary castle in the wood.

In response to the near miss, the king sends Sigismund a bodyguard and trainer named Balisan. The man is mysterious and powerful, and he seems to know a lot about magic. He introduces Sigismund to the fairy who healed him, the Margravine’s adversary.

In time, Sigismund journeys to the capital city and his father’s castle. There he is befriended by a smiling youth named Flor who, if readers are paying the least bit of attention, will immediately strike them as the back-stabbing type. Malvolin’s attempts to stop Sigismund from freeing the princess in the wood continue, but with the help of his allies and a magic sword, the prince ultimately triumphs.

Sigismund is such a likable boy, then hero, that I think you will enjoy spending time with him. The only thing I didn’t love about this book is something I’ve seen popping up a lot lately, and that is an obsessive need to explain every little plot point and bit of magic in detail, dialoguing it to death. Really, as long as a story hangs together, long explanations and swathes of backstory are simply a distraction. There’s a Hercule-Poirot-gathering-everybody-in-the-library feeling to some of the discussions in this book, is all I’m saying. (Of course, J.K. Rowling did it for pages with her ghostly Dumbledore near the end of Book 7.)

I’ll note that Balisan teaches Sigismund meditation practices to bring out his heritage of magical power. Again, I’ve seen this mixture of Eastern religion and European fairy tale magic in other fantasy I’ve read lately. Since our modern world is becoming a real cultural mix, I suppose such blendings are inevitable. I recently read a book where it was handled very badly, but Lowe manages to pull it off, mostly by making Balisan a magical figure from another land.

Quibbles aside, Helen Lowe’s Thornspell is an excellent addition to your library of fairy tale retellings—my favorite subgenre. Girls who like fantasy and fairy tales will want to read this one. And, while it isn’t a guy book the way the Alex Rider books are, boys who read fantasy should also like Thornspell, putting themselves in the place of good-hearted prince Sigismund as he struggles to defeat an old and evil adversary.