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psocopteraLike a River Glorious, Rae Carson, second in the trilogy that started with Walk on Earth a Stranger in which a girl who can sense gold dresses as a boy and plays Oregon Trail. I liked this one less well than the first one: [spoiler cut]
it suffers from the passive protagonist problem where the main character spends a long time kidnapped and unable to do much, and when shit finally goes down she's sort of on the edge of it, and the book keeps hammering us with "and her problems are much less bad than all these other people", which is, like, good awareness from a social justice angle! Gold Rush totally worse for indigenous people and Chinese immigrants than white protag! but, I dunno, sort of undermines its own narrative a bit. Anyways, I'll surely read the third one.
Frogkisser!, Garth Nix. Enjoyable, super-readable middle-grade fantasy, nice twists on fairy-tale tropes. Reminded me a great deal of Patricia C. Wrede's Enchanted Forest books which is an excellent thing for there to be more of in the world. I'm hoping I can get Junie to read it although it's got "kisser" in the title so she's reluctant.
it suffers from the passive protagonist problem where the main character spends a long time kidnapped and unable to do much, and when shit finally goes down she's sort of on the edge of it, and the book keeps hammering us with "and her problems are much less bad than all these other people", which is, like, good awareness from a social justice angle! Gold Rush totally worse for indigenous people and Chinese immigrants than white protag! but, I dunno, sort of undermines its own narrative a bit. Anyways, I'll surely read the third one.
Frogkisser!, Garth Nix. Enjoyable, super-readable middle-grade fantasy, nice twists on fairy-tale tropes. Reminded me a great deal of Patricia C. Wrede's Enchanted Forest books which is an excellent thing for there to be more of in the world. I'm hoping I can get Junie to read it although it's got "kisser" in the title so she's reluctant.
