Book Review: Children of the King

After I read Nightingale's Nest I was wondering if I should go ahead and review a MG book on my blog, even if it was really good, but after I read this book and it was also MG and excellent I felt like I had to. All of these great books make me sad that MG really got big when I was already in high school, just a few years earlier and I wouldn't have felt like I needed to start reading questionable adult science-fiction in middle school! (I would also like to note that I think this is a very pretty cover but I'm sure everyone knows I'm a sucker for illustrated covers)

The Children of the King by Sonya Hartnett

Book Review: Eyes Like Stars

I'd come across this book before (which geeze, if I remember correctly was at a Borders so that must have been years ago) and even read the first few pages but it just didn't grab me. Honestly I don't remember why I did pick it up from the library this summer, especially given how many other books I already had to read but in retrospect it wasn't a bad decision at all.


Eyes Like Stars by Lisa Mantchev

Summary: At the Theatre Illuminate the stage really is the world for all it's players who come from every play imaginable, except for the human Bertie who is neither part of the cast or crew of this theater yet has lived there all her life anyway. She's on the verge of being thrown out while trying to discover her own past but it appears that neither of those things will be easy to do. 

The Good: While it did take a little while to hook me this is an enjoyable group and a nice entry in the growing sub-genre of "stories about characters from other stories, name up for discussion". I think what took me a little while to get into the story was Bertie's personality but either I got used to her or she simply wasn't as grating a little way in and she was certainly clever enough to deal with everything thrown her way and I like a smart main character. This volume also neatly covered what it set out to do, have Bertie choose if she wants to remain at the theater or not and learn some about her past but left plenty of things for the future books and I would like to read them to see where else this story goes.  

The Bad: I had to suspend my disbeilf for the whole idea of a magical book that contains every play in what seems to be otherwise a non-magical world but one thing that continues to bug is well, how the book didn't seem to have every play in the world in there but rather only the ones it's average young adult reader would know. All the book needs is either a few cameos from plays that aren't from a European writer or even a mention that it only has plays that were originally written in English to satisfy me, something I suspect won't come up in the future volumes but still bugs me none the less.


Not a perfect book, it also felt messy in a few places, but a good one overall and I would like to read the other two books, just not any time soon since I already have too many books to read before the end of the year. 

Webcomic Review Month 2012: Namesake

Another shorter entry but honestly since school is going to really start picking up now (some of my friends like to call this part of the spring semester "Seven Week Hell"which speaks for itself) so that's probably for the best. And I am glad that I have a little more time to talk about today's title since it's one of my favorite webcomics out there. Sure I like all of the ones that I've talked about so far but there are some that I'll find and wonder why I didn't find this gorgeous thing earlier (I don't follow many non-anime reviewers and simply haven't found a ton of people who talk webcomics) and plot how to convert all my friends to my new-found love.

 Namesake by Megan Lavey-Heaton and Isabelle Melançon

In this story stories aren't just the words on a piece of paper but actual other worlds which sometimes need someone to come along and help play out the story again to keep everything moving smoothly. Those people are called Namesakes and Emma Crewe is one of them, despite the fact that there has never been a namesake called Emma, the organizations that monitor namesakes never predicted this and that she is now stuck in a version of Oz long after Dorothy came and went*. So while she has to navigate through this strange new landscape, without any knowledge of namesakes and the like, her sister Elaine is stuck on Earth and discovering that she might have some special talents as well.

This comic has the wonderful combination of a really neat, interesting plot and lovely artwork to back it up which, while not necessarily for a good webcomic, definitely helps. The art isn't full color but spot color with only certain elements in a scene having color which certainly gives the comic an interesting feel and a very distinct visual style. I do feel like the comic might be trying to balance too many different plot lines at once, there are actually four distinct groups of people with connected plots and the two that I didn't mention in the summary really don't get quite enough page time. In fact, Elaine's developments also have been pushed to the side to focus more on Emma, who is the main character and has the most going on, and the fact is that we the readers still don't know that much about what happened in the first chapter to start the story and it's clear that there is an even larger plot connected to that which is going on in the background. The story is interesting and engaging enough that normally when reading the comic I don't even think about that but it is frustrating to be speculating about the story and then realize just how much we're still missing at this point. Despite that I do really love what the story has done so far and, based on all of that, I'm confident that when everything does come together it will be amazing and make the story even better yet.

*I believe they are following L. Frank Baum's Oz canon through the sixth book or so and then veering off so the Oz here is quite different from that in the Hollywood movie.