Tag: the help desk

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

A Monsters Calls is a fantastic coming of age story. Conor’s mother is very sick. Since her illness, Conor has been treated differently at school and works hard at home, trying to keep everything running smoothly while she’s resting. He’s had a nightmare too- one that wakes him screaming almost every night. But then, one night, he dreams a different dream in which a monster formed from a yew tree comes to his home…

This book gave me goosebumps, it’s so good! I especially liked the monster’s tales.

Here’s the first time Conor meets the monster: “… here was a monster, clear as the clearest night, towering thirty or forty feet above him, breathing heavily in the night air. “It’s only a dream,” he said again. ‘But what is a dream, Conor O’Malley?’ the monster said, bending down so its face was close to Conor’s. ‘Who is to say that it is not everything ELSE that is the dream?'” pg 38 (ebook) Who’s to say?

“‘Here is what will happen, Conor O’Malley,’ the monster continued, ‘I will come to you again on further nights.’ Conor felt his stomach clench, like he was preparing for a blow. ‘And I will tell you three stories. Three tales from when I walked before.’ Conor blinked. Then blinked again. “You’re going to tell me STORIES?” ‘Indeed,’ the monster said. “Well-” Conor looked around in disbelief. “How is THAT a nightmare?” ‘Stories are the wildest things of all,’ the monster rumbled. ‘Stories chase and bite and hunt.'” pg 40-41 (ebook) Love, love, love! “Stories are the wildest things of all.” Yeah, they are.

I love the relationship that develops between Conor and the monster: “He (Conor) heard a strange rumbling, different from before, and it took him a minute to realize the monster was laughing. ‘You think I tell you stories to teach you lessons?’ the monster said. ‘You think I have come walking out of time and earth itself to teach you a lesson in niceness?’ It laughed louder and louder again, until the ground was shaking and it felt like the sky itself might tumble down.” pg 70 (ebook)

One more small passage that I had to include, not because it’s particularly important to the story but because it’s so very true: “Conor stared out the window… “How long are you here for?” he asked. He’d been afraid to ask before now. His father let out a long breath, the kind of breath that said bad news was coming. “Just a few days, I’m afraid.” Conor turned to him. “That’s all?” “Americans don’t get much holiday.” pg 103 (ebook) Mic drop!

This is a young adult book, but if you’re looking for more excellent fairy tales (like the monster’s stories) you may want to pick up In the Night Garden (The Orphan’s Tales, #1) by Catherynne Valente or, for another amazing coming of age story with fairy tale elements, try The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman.

Thanks for reading!

The Interminables by Paige Orwen

The Interminables by Paige Orwen

Interminable adjective. 1. Incapable of being terminated; unending  2. Monotonously or annoying protracted or continued; unceasing; incessant  3.  Having no limits.  (dictionary.com Unabridged.  Retrieved May 22, 2016 from dictionary.com website http://www.dictionary.com/browse/interminable)

The Interminables takes place in a world where magic is real and so are nightmares.  Prior to the events in this tale, an immortal being attacked all the cities on Earth and essentially destroyed civilization as we know it.  She was killed but for an extreme, unspecified magical cost.  Now, the scars left by this insane immortal dot the world and leak magic like radiation, producing strange items and twisted, dangerous creatures.  The Hour Thief, Edmund, and his best friend, an archtypical ghost of World War I named Istvan, struggle to bring order and heal those injured by the remains of this struggle.  Behind the scenes, an even greater evil begins to stir…

The Interminables is a type of science fiction/fantasy that I love.  It doesn’t dwell too much on the how’s of the situation, but jumps head first to the what’s, who’s, and why’s of the story.  And, this is an incredibly ambitious world in the sense that not only are the characters dealing with untamed and uncontrollable magic, but also the dimensions of alternate worlds have collided and merged with our own.  So, there are beings and powers in this place that are far beyond anything that exists in the real world.  It’s an exciting premise and the reader can almost feel the storytelling potential exploding from the very first page.

The Hour Thief is not only immortal, capable of teleportation, and able to move with super human speed through time- he’s also a librarian! : “…the Hour Thief was finally returning to real field duty, after fourteen months missing and then years of sticking to nothing more than librarian work and his usual mysterious excursions by night.”  My favorite kind of super hero.

Who is the Hour Thief? :  “He was, for all intents and purposes, a conman who dealt in stolen moments.  The hours that slipped away when no one was watching.  Lives, plain and simple.  He’d been thirty-five for seventy years and he could say that only because none of the time he’d lived since 1954 was originally his.”

I loved how Orwin described two beings, who are essentially immortal, dealing with technology. : “Edmund… fished the device responsible out of his other jacket pocket.  It was roughly the same size and shape as a pack of cards and combined the services of a clock, a calculator, a telephone, a radio, a camera, a film projector, a phonograph, a library, a dedicated staff of field researchers, an electric facsimile of the Delphic oracle, and a flashlight, but it was easier to call it a telephone.” When put that way, our devices really do seem to be magical.

Istvan, sends a text message, and it comes out more like a telegraph: “Istvan fiddled with the phone a moment longer… “I’ve sent a message to the Magister, I think, but I’m not certain it went through.”… Edmund glanced at it.  Recovered, it said, on our way presently stop.”

My favorite moment in the whole book, an interchange between Edmund and Istvan :  Edmund set the ritual knife down.  “Are we always this interesting?”  Istvan knelt and retrieved his own blade, wiping it on the hem of his uniform before handing it to him.  He was a doctor.  It would be all right.  “Oh yes.”

In the acknowledgments, Orwin says, “The original project grew out of a desire to preserve some of the characters developed by myself and my friends in the MMORPG City of Heroes…”  I also played that game!  The ability to customize and create your hero was so much fun, but the game itself became repetitive very quickly.  Orwin did such a great job taking a one dimensional idea and giving it a time piece, wings, and a limitless world to explore.  The Interminables is a lot of fun and not interminable to read, at all.

If you’re looking for read alikes, I’d recommend Triumff: Her Majesty’s Hero by Dan Abnett, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore (graphic novel), or Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs (young adult title).

Expected publication date: July 5, 2016.  A big thank you to NetGalley & Angry Robot Publishing for the opportunity to read and review a digital copy of this book.  And, thank you, for reading!

Archivist Wasp by Nicole Kornher-Stace

Archivist Wasp by Nicole Kornher-Stace

Overall, I enjoyed Kornher-Stace’s tale about a girl with claw marks on her face who traps and studies ghosts because she’s a priestess of a goddess who lives in the stars. I felt like Archivist Wasp was a combination of The Last Apprentice/Wardstone Chronicles by Joseph Delaney and What Dreams May Come by Richard Matheson. There’s also some dystopian and survival elements to it. There’s a few moments of rough language in here and some quick, brutal violence, but nothing worse than what a young adult would read in The Hunger Games.

Kornher-Stace throws the reader into an alien world with zero explanation or background info and it’s a lot of fun to pick out the story from the details. Take this passage describing a ritualistic painting in Wasp’s home:“The bones of the painting were nails, hammered straight into the wall to pick out the stars of Catchkeep’s constellation. And around them She had been outlined in thick black paint, all teeth and legs, Her back curved like a rainbow, caught in mid-leap over a shadowy abyss. … Catchkeep Herself was black and red. Stepping close to Her you could make out the outlines of handprints, darker where they overlapped. Wasp’s first day as Archivist, they’d rushed her here before the blood of the fallen Archivist could dry on her palms, and to the painting she had added the shape of her hand, which was the shape of her predecessor’s death.” pgs 14-15 ebook. Dark, eerie, awesome.

Wasp feels trapped in her role as priestess and lacks the confidence in herself to do anything else. Her personal development and stepping into her power is one of the main arcs of this story: “…beneath all her talk, she knew that what she was about to try would fail, as everything else she tried had failed, and then her life would go on as it had always done, pacing out the length of its leash, smashing into empty air at either end like a bird against a window. Take the knife out of the doorframe. Sweep the dust from the little house. Restock its jars with the useless dead.” pg 67 ebook. She’s a very strong, and believable, female main character. Think Buffy the Vampire Slayer… but with ghosts.

Kornher-Stace’s description of the afterlife was just like what is portrayed in What Dreams May Come or Otherwhere by Kurt Leland, the deceased shape their surroundings with the energy from their thoughts and emotions. In the ghost’s world, Wasp sees demon-like dogs that attack her again and again: “Still don’t believe the hunt is real?” Wasp shouted. She was having trouble modulating her voice. Her teeth were chattering too hard. She had never been so tired. “We bring our own monsters with us,” said the ghost. “It looks like these are yours.” pg 123 ebook. Goosebumps!

I liked the author’s description of what a ghost is: “You’re a ghost. You need answers. You need closure. You need them like the living need air to breathe. You think it’s just you, but from what I’ve seen, most of us die without getting either. And maybe that’s all a ghost is, in the end. Regret, grown legs, gone walking.” pg 155, ebook.

My favorite parts of the book are Kornher-Stace’s varied descriptions of the worlds through which Wasp travels with the ghosts. They are beautiful, desolate, bizarre, and, sometimes, scary:“They tromped through the snowfield for ages. They passed things that, to Wasp’s eye, might have been waypoints. A wind-shredded orange plastic tent. A cave hung with icicles that were mottled gray with ash. A distant huddle of dark birds circling and alighting on an unseen mass. A tiny pond, perfectly round, frozen into a mirror upon which no snow settled. The metal skeleton of something that had fallen from the sky and smashed there, its nose plowed deep into the earth. They walked on.” pg 172, ebook.

If you enjoyed Archivist Wasp and are looking for young adult read-alikes, you may want to try Fray by Joss Whedon (a graphic novel) or Revenge of the Witch (The Last Apprentice/Wardstone Chronicles, #1) by Joseph Delaney. If you’re looking for an adult read-alike, try The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawking.

Thanks for reading!

When Crocs Fly by Stephan Pastis

When Crocs Fly by Stephan Pastis

My search for reading material that my daughter will enjoy continues.  I happened to stumble across When Crocs Fly by Stephan Pastis in the ‘Read Now’ section of NetGalley and gave it a read through.

When Crocs Fly combines the sarcastic put downs and delivery of Garfield with the physical humor of Looney Toons. The jokes are mainly puns, misunderstandings, or a combination of both. The longest scenes are only two pages, so Pastis never really writes a story- it is more a collection of vignettes, which could be perfect for readers with shorter attention spans.

But, if your child is reading this, make sure that they have strong language skills. Whenever the crocs speak, their voice is written phonetically, which could be problematic for beginner readers. I think it’s the equivalent of trying to read cursive handwriting… just different enough to cause a problem.

Some beloved characters from other comics make very brief cameos in this. I won’t say which ones because that would ruin the fun!

Though I didn’t have any laugh out loud moments in this one, my favorite page was ‘The Trophy from the Ping Pong League’ (pg 85) where it’s labeled as ‘Best Participation by Someone in our League who can Breathe and has Participated.’ When Crocs Fly has clever ways of skewering reality, but I’m afraid that the more subtle jokes will go over the kiddie’s heads and I don’t think that adults would really enjoy this one. It’s clearly aiming for a younger set.

I’d recommend it for ages 10+, personally, but it really depends on the maturity level of the child reading it. Big thanks to Netgalley for the free digital copy and thank you for reading!

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

All the Birds in the Sky is about science vs nature, the end of the world, and love- in no particular order. Laurence and Patricia have two of the roughest childhoods that I’ve read so far this year. Their parents are duds, their school administrators are awful, and their peers are bullies and sadists. Somehow, despite these tragic beginnings, Laurence and Patricia manage to rise above and become something more, something extraordinary. And, together, they just might manage to save the world.

My favorite part of this book was the beginning- the development of the characters and the introduction to the extraordinary world of Laurence and Patricia. In this world, animals can talk! Here’s the “Parliament of Birds”:“Various other birds piped up, saying, “Point of order!” and a fidgety crow was listing important areas of Parliamentary procedure. One of them was so insistent that the eagle was forced to yield the branch to the Honorable Gentleman from Wide Oak- who then forgot what he was going to say.” pg 19 Politicians are politicians, no matter their species.

I loved Laurence’s internal dialogue: “Hey, Larry Fairy,” Brad Chomner said at school, “think fast.” Which was one of those phrases that never made sense to Laurence: People who told you to “think fast” were always those who thought much more slowly than you did. And they only said it when they were about to do something to contribute to the collective mental inertia.” pg 23

I also connected with Patricia. She’s imperfect, ruminative, and totally relatable: “Patricia felt jittery about throwing her first ever dinner party, because part of her clung to the fantasy of being someone who gathered cool people around her. A doyenne, someone who held witty salons. She cleaned the apartment for hours, made a playlist, and baked bread and bundt cake. … Patricia’s bread filled the marigold kitchenette with a yeasty warmth, and she took a deep breath. She was a grown-up. She had this.” pg 165 I’ve said that exact thing to myself when I’m stressed or trying to do something outside of my comfort zone. “I’m a grown-up. I have this.” Wish I was better at convincing myself of the truth of it. 🙂

Laurence contemplating reality: “I wonder how many other things in our world are just the shadows of things in other places,” Laurence said, forming the thought as he spoke. “I mean, we always suspected that gravity was so weak in our world because most of it was in another dimension. But what else? Light? Time? Some of our emotions? I mean, the longer I live, the more I feel like the stuff I see and feel is like a tracing of the outline of the real stuff that’s beyond our perceptions.” pg 186 I feel like that sometimes too.

Anders writes some very touching passages about love and being in love:“… Laurence watched her the whole way back up the block, wondering if she would look back at him over her shoulder, or turn to wave one last time. She didn’t. His heart skidded like a dirt bike on black ice as he watched her disappear. pg 213 You can really feel the emotions sliding around his chest, can’t you? I can.

I did not like some of Anders transitions in All the Birds in the Sky, particularly the jarring leap of time between the childhoods and then adulthoods of Laurence and Patricia. I also thought that Anders relied on synchronicity a bit too much to bring the two main characters together and keep the story rolling. But, life is strange and full of unexplainable moments. And, to be fair, I’m complaining about synchronicity in a world where magic and time travel are real and animals can talk. Maybe I need to check my own perception of reality…

If you enjoyed this book, maybe you should try The Many Selves of Katherine North by Emma Geen or A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness.

Thanks for reading!

Welcome to The Help Desk! Book reviews and musings on life by Heidi Wiechert.

Welcome to The Help Desk! Book reviews and musings on life by Heidi Wiechert.

Hello world!  My name is Heidi and I’m a public librarian.  I work at a desk with a huge help sign over it.  Hence, the name of this blog.

I’m going to record my book reviews here.  I may also write some job related posts too, but nothing too serious or scholarly.

I love to read fiction, non-fiction, fantasy, memoirs, historical fiction, business books, and metaphysical or New Age books.  Frankly, if it’s been written, I’d probably read it and, most likely, love it.

I utilize Goodreads and, if you’re on there too, I’d love to connect.  See you there: https://www.goodreads.com/HeidiWiechert

Thanks for reading!