Title: What-the-Dickens: The Story of a Rogue Tooth Fairy
Author: Gregory Maguire
Publish Date: 2007

So I loved Wicked, Maguire's cynical Wizard of Oz AU; I think it's brilliant in its intricate sideways look at Baum's universe. I liked Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, his retelling of Cinderella, reasonably well. But I didn't find What-the-Dickens more than moderately amusing.

The concept is not bad. Three children and their young adult cousin, stranded without power in the course of an unspecified disaster, pass the time with the story of What-the-Dickens, a feral tooth fairy, and his search for home and purpose.

Okay, fine — but I had trouble caring about either set of characters. And I am inclined to blame this largely on Maguire's style. The man is, I'm sorry, crap at dialogue. He falls so much in love with his own flights of verbal fancy that all his characters wind up talking like each other, and like the narrator. Efforts to remedy this, like the fairy Pepper's sloppy grammar, just make them sound even more artificial.

In the Oz books, as in more traditional fairy tales, everyone talks pretty much the same anyway, and in a narrative like that it doesn't matter; the characters are generally archetypes anyway. In What-the-Dickens, which is framed squarely in a modern American setting, it jars. A lot. Ten-year-old homeschooled Dinah is just as self-consciously whimsical as her 21-year-old cousin Gage, the literally born-yesterday What-the-Dickens, and the canny old tooth fairy patriarch.

So while it's a cute story — two cute stories — I couldn't really get into it, and I'm not sure the target audience could, either. Kids don't care so much about individual voices, but they sure as hell know artificial when they hear it.

Rating: 6/10

Title: The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm
Author: Nancy Farmer
Publish Date: 1994

Batten down the hatches, Abby's about to gush.

The setting is Zimbabwe in the 22nd century. Tendai and his siblings, the children of the influential General Matsika, live a sheltered life just outside Harare — until they sneak out into the city, and are promptly kidnapped. When military might fails to locate them, their parents enlist outside help from the Ear, the Eye and the Arm Detective Agency, consisting of the elephant-eared Ear, the eagle-eyed Eye, and the gangling Arm. Wacky yet suspenseful hijinks ensue.

And oh, my God, how do I love this book? Enumeration follows:

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Title: Turning the Storm
Author: Naomi Kritzer
Publish Date: 2003

I think most of the problem is that Turning The Storm is both the second and third books of a trilogy. It feels rushed. It's trying to wrap up all the plot threads from Fires Of The Faithful, plus the new ones it's introduced, and it's just not long enough for all of them to be resolved in anything like a satisfying manner.

Eliana, the heroine, is a young music student who's fled her conservatory after the Fedeli, the clergy who hold most of the power in her country, murder one of her friends and the closely allied Circle of Mages kidnap her roommate, Mira, with whom she may or may not be falling in love. She travels south, eventually reaching the prison camp of Ravenna, where she helps the banned Redentore sect engineer an uprising and finds herself at the head of their rebel army.

That's all in the first book. You'd think that was enough to be going on with, right?

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Title: Beast
Author: Donna Jo Napoli
Publish Date: 2000

There are a lot of retellings of "Beauty and the Beast" out there, some more original than others, but almost all of them from Beauty's POV. Beast is, I think, the first book I've read to take the other perspective. That alone bumps it up above the "meh" rating I'd probably give it otherwise.

Orasmyn, Prince of Persia, is a pretty nice guy. He's an observant Muslim, who takes his religious and secular duties seriously. He likes roses, sweets, and poetry, and is kind of a wuss when it comes to blood; in unrelated news, strangely enough, he isn't married yet. As the story opens he's preparing to take part in the Feast of Sacrifices.

Long story short, he screws up the sacrifice in such a way that nobody notices — except a spirit called a pari, or fairy. You see where this is going: courtesy of the pissed-off pari, Orasmyn becomes a lion.

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Title: The Dragon Queen
Author: Alice Borchardt
Publish Date: 2001

"A writer with vision and scope", says the cover.

This becomes less encouraging when you realize that it's quoting Anne Rice.

Still less when you flip to the back and discover that Anne Rice is the author's sister. Explains it all, really.

I wanted to like this. It has a halfway interesting concept — after Queen of Camelot I'm a bit skeptical of warrior!Guinevere stories, but I'm not totally turned off the idea yet — and, let's face it, a pretty cover. Oh, but inside.

Inside we start off with a two-page "Prologue" which is actually a monologue. I assume it's supposed to be Guinevere speaking, rambling on about how books are evil, and Christianity is oppressive, and oh for the good old pagan days of free love and skinny dipping. Didn't Marion Zimmer Bradley already do this to death?

It concludes:

I am myself a creature of the dance, the imitation of the movements embraced by the dialogue between earth and sky. The dance of power, the steps I trod on the edge of a mountain so long ago.

Read that over again. "The imitation of the movements embraced by the dialogue". Would someone like to tell me what that even means?

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