Blue-Footed Musings

Last night I finished reading A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L’Engle.

Grade: B

A Swiftly Tilting Planet is a companion to A Wrinkle in Time and A Wind in the Door, both of which I loved. I really wanted to like this book. Some parts were good but overall it was preachy, and I got mighty sick of one character’s inane comments to her dog. Even so, I almost want to keep the book because it belongs to a series and it’s just a little paperback that hardly takes up any room.

No, I have to stick with the new rule, and the new rule is this: I will keep each book of a series up to the last book that I really like. The trouble is that the series has a fourth book, Many Waters. I feel like I ought to read it before making a final decision. (Nah. I looked it up and it doesn’t sound very appealing. I’ll just keep the two books that I love and pretend that the other two don’t exist.)

I just finished reading The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke.

Grade: A

This book grabs you and hurtles you straight into the heart of Venice, and though I never before had any desire to visit Italy, I now want very much to go. The ending is a little too tidy and hard to believe, which is why it didn’t get an A+.

Why so many failed endings, I wonder? Could it be that authors work so hard to draw the reader in at the beginning, and struggle so hard over the middle (which I have always found the hardest part to write), that they’re worn out by the end?

Yup, I finished another book: Storm Thief by Chris Wooding. I found this book on the New Fiction shelf of the library’s YA section.

Grade: B

Storm Thief is a quick and fun read. It has plenty of unique elements, but they are sometimes overshadowed by similarities to other works of fiction. There are also times when the characters’ feelings and motivations are overexplained in a way that I associate with bad romance novels.

Now here’s something really interesting: the author has had several other novels published and he’s only 30 years old! It’s strange to be reading fiction by someone younger than myself, and I wonder if knowing his age might have made me either a kinder or harsher critic.