FernFolio » magic

Marshmallow Magic and the Wild Rose Rouge by Karen McCombie

fernfolio — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 20:20:54 +0000

After a year in Balgownie, a small town in the highlands, soon-to-be thirteen-year old Laurel “Lemmie” Ferguson is still haunted by what happened in Edinburgh before she and her parents moved away. Ridiculed for her highly artistic approach to dressing, and her unusual, exuberant and sometimes clumsy behaviour, by the time Laurel left her private girls school in the Scottish capital, she had been turned on by her best friends, accused of lying and jealousy, sent to see a child psychologist, and tried to run away from home.
But life has definitely improved. With the help of her terrific older sister, Rose Rouge, an art student in Edinburgh, Lemmie has learned marshmallow magic, an elaborate series of sign readings and good-luck spells designed by Rose Rouge to help Lemmie stay calm and face each day with confidence. Though her sister isn’t able to visit often, Rose’s unexpected flying visits always seem to coincide with when Lemmie needs her most.
Lemmie has also made two wonderful friends since coming to Balgownie, Morven, a gangly and kind-hearted farm girl, and Jade Song, tiny, brilliant, knowing and wise. Though they are as different from each other as chalk and cheese, the two girls are loyal and supportive, and Lemmie has shared with them many of the secrets of Rose Rouge’s marshmallow magic. Though her other classmates at Balgownie Academy do occasionally comment on Lemmie’s clothes or joke about her clumsiness, she feels that they are laughing with and not at.
Then one afternoon, while she is standing on a sidewalk with Morven and Jade, Lemmie happens to catch a glimpse of a face in a passing car. Shaken almost to the point of physical illness, Lemmie brushes off the concern of her friends, and rushes home to work a little marshmallow magic. But another sighting confirms her worst fears, that the girl who made her life unbearable in Edinburgh has come to Balgownie. Lemmie starts sleepwalking again, sparking her parents’ worry, and soon there are messages from school indicating that her behaviour at school has changed. Will she once again find herself attacked and friendless, or, with Rose Rouge’s help, will Lemmie manage to confront her fears and safeguard the life she has build for herself in Balgownie?
Karen McCombie’s Marshmallow Magic and the Wild Rose Rouge introduces three very likeable and engaging characters in Lemmie and her friends, Morven and Jade, and perceptively examines the subjects of friendship, bullying, and individuality. Everyone needs friends like Morven and Jade. Everyone needs a teacher like Ms. McIver. And everyone sometimes needs an older sister like Rose Rouge.
FernFolio Editor

The Sea of Trolls by Nancy Farmer

fernfolio — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 12:28:19 +0000

Raised by a god-fearing, and embittered father, and a mother who has quietly stopped practising her women’s magic because of her husband’s disapproval, Jack has been accustomed to sorrow and disappointment, and to working hard from dawn to dusk tending the sheep and the crops, gathering firewood, hauling water, and carrying food to the village Bard. Though he works cheerfully, his parents’ love and attention is focused on his five-year old sister, Lucy, with her golden hair, pretty face and insistent manner. Captivated, Jack’s father has invented stories about the little girl, telling her she is actually a lost princess whose real parents live in a beautiful castle.
When the village Bard chooses Jack as his apprentice, the boy moves into the old man’s cottage, where he begins to learn about music and magic, and discovers the joy and power of the natural world. At first, he relishes his new life, quickly developing a deep affection for the wise and caring old man who endeavours to teach him, and delighting in his fledgling magic skills.
Then one night Jack is awakened by the Bard who is caught in the grips of a nightmare, one visited upon him by an enemy from across the sea. Recognising the impending danger, the Bard explains to his apprentice that years before, when he was Bard to King Hrothgar, he helped a hero named Beowulf defeat the monster Grendel. That monster’s sister Frith, queen to King Ivar the Boneless, who is half-troll and therefore possesses a dangerous amount of magic herself, has sworn to find the Bard and kill him. A shape-shifter, Frith has ridden the nightmare over the sea from Ivar’s hall in the North in search of the Bard, and now that she has found him, only chaos and destruction can follow.
Too soon, ships are spotted off the coast, and the Bard identifies the raiders as Berserkers, who drink a strange potion and become something other than entirely human. Alerted by the Bard, the villagers abandon their cottages and hide in the forest, while the old man and Jack remain to summon a thick fog, hoping to confuse the raiders. Jack’s sister, Lucy, long used to getting her way, refuses to stay in the forest and return to the village, where she is captured by the berserkers. Torn between his duty toward the Bard, and his affection for his sister, Jack allows himself to be seized by the raiders, hoping that he will somehow be able to protect and free the little girl.
Jack and Lucy are taken north to the lands of Ivar the Boneless and Queen Frith, where Jack become slave and bard to Olaf, the giant of a man who captured him, while his golden-haired little sister is given to the queen. After hearing the poem sung by Jack in Olaf’s honour, and greedy for her own glory, Queen Frith demands that the boy sing a poem for her. Terrified, Jack begins to sing, drawing on magic to help him, but things go awry and somehow Jack undoes the spell that makes Frith appear beautiful, and causes all of her long, red-gold hair to fall out.
Furious, Queen Frith vows to kill Jack, until she is reminded that he is the only one who can undo the effects of his magic. When it becomes apparent that, as an apprentice bard, Jack does not know how to restore the queen’s beauty or her hair, the half-troll issues an ultimatum. Jack will go on a quest into Jotsunheim, the land of the trolls, to find Mimir’s Well and drink the song-mead which it contains, . He will then return to Ivar’s hall and undo his magic in time for the harvest festival or Lucy will be sacrificed to the goddess Freya.
So Jack sets off with Olaf and Thorgil, a bad-tempered and hot-blooded shield maiden, to brave the many dangers of Jotsunheim. Along the way, they will be almost overcome by the sweet and deadly perfume of a meadow full of giant flowers, attacked by a troll-bear, and have to do battle with a nest of dragonlets. On that journey, Jack will learn a great deal about himself and others, both human and non-human alike, and he will come to understand that, as the Bard once told him, “the world’s a frightening place, full of glory and wonder and danger.”
Set against the backdrop of the 800s, when Viking raiders pillaged Saxon villages along England’s coast, and drawing upon medieval and Norse legends, The Sea of Trolls is a complex and richly-detailed adventure with strong and believable characters. It is written by three-time Newbery prize winner Nancy Farmer, whose other books include A Girl Named Disaster.
FernFolio Editor

Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay

fernfolio — Sat, 09 May 2009 00:20:21 +0000

Fifteen-year old Ned Marriner wanders the deserted chapels and aisles of the ancient cathedral at Aix-en-Provence, passing the time while his famous photographer father sets up his photo shoot outside. Though he is glad to be out of school two months early, and enjoys watching his father and his team of assistants plan the pictures for a coffee table book of Provence, one of France’s most beautiful and storied regions, he is too worried by his mother’s work with Médicins-Sans-Frontières to get involved.
Instead, Ned reads the signs posted throughout the cathedral’s interior that indicate that parts of this building are over a thousand years old, and that beneath it lie the ruins of a Roman arena. He is surprised to see a girl of about his age enter the cathedral from a side door, and learns that the girl, Kate Wenger, is an American exchange student who has found the door from the cloister unlocked. As they talk together, Ned and Kate hear a scraping noise and watch as a strange scarred man climbs out of a hole in the cathedral floor. When they challenge the stranger, he reveals that, though he has killed children before, he has no wish to kill them. So begins Ned’s and Kate’s strange adventure with three individuals, two men and a beautiful and elusive woman, whose story of love and revenge has spanned over twenty-five hundred years.
Ned’s meeting with the scarred man in Saint-Sauveur Cathedral awakens in him an unexpected gift, the ability to sense forces that remain unseen by most mortals. Drawn into a deadly game between two ancient rivals who have repeatedly returned to Provence over the centuries to fight for a woman they both love, Ned needs Kate’s encyclopaedic knowledge of Provence’s history to try and sort out what is going on. When Melanie, his father’s bright and funny assistant, disappears on Beltane, the night that, for the ancient Celts, marked the beginning of summer, Ned and Kate find themselves in a desperate race against time to rescue the young assistant before she is lost forever.
Set in Provence, a region steeped in thousands of years of history, Ysabel pulls back some of its many layers, and draws the reader into a story that is both never and constantly changing. Ned, caught between the present and the shadowy past, between the rational science of his practical mother and a new and unnerving gift of second sight, finds himself thrown from the certainty and reassurance of childhood into unsettling adulthood. A story that will be sure to capture the imaginations of young adult readers!
FernFolio Editor

Such a Prince by Dan Bar-el and John Manders

fernfolio — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 23:12:37 +0000

The Once Upon a TIMES reports that Princess Vera is deathly ill, and that her father, the King, is frantic. Fortunately, Libby Gaberchik, fairy and healer, knows just what is wrong with the dear girl. Love. The princess is starved for it.
So Libby tells the king that Vera must eat three perfect peaches and marry within a week of eating them. Soon young men from all over have flocked to the castle, each bearing three peaches, but none of them are perfect peaches.
In a small cottage lives a poor widow with her three sons, Sheldon, Harvey and Marvin. Sheldon, the eldest, picks the three best peaches in their orchard and tries his luck with Princess Vera, but reckons without Libby Gaberchik, whom he meets in the forest that surrounds the castle. Sheldon’s rudeness proves to be his downfall, and he returns home in shame. Harvey fairs no better, so, finally, the youngest, Marvin, takes his chance.
Unlike his older brothers, Marvin is skinny and kind to a fault. When he meets Libby Gaberchik in the forest, he passes her test with flying colours and earns her quiet help in his quest to win Princess Vera’s hand in marriage, and bring his poor old mother to live with them in the castle.
Marvin is going to need all the help that Libby can give him, for the King fancies someone more polished and important than Marvin for his only child, and is prepared to do anything he can to prevent a marriage between them!
Told from Libby’s perspective, this fairy tale of Princess Vera and her kindly but rather hapless suitor, Marvin, is warmly engaging and fun. A terrific story about two young people, and the charmingly plain-speaking and unassuming fairy who steps in to help them. Lovely illustrations by John Manders!
FernFolio Editor

The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke

fernfolio — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 17:58:02 +0000

Following the death of their mother, fifteen-year old Prosper takes his five-year old brother, Bo, and sneaks onto a train bound for Venice, a place neither boy has ever visited but that looms large in both their imaginations because of their mother’s stories. He is desperate to get them far from Germany and their aunt Esther Hartlieb, who is determined to adopt the angelic-looking Bo, but who is not interested in his teenaged brother.
Once in Venice, the boys are taken in by a gang of street kids who live in an abandoned cinema, and survive by picking the pockets of wealthy tourists and with the help and support of the mysterious Thief Lord. The Thief Lord, no more than a teenager himself, calls himself Scipio and supplies them with money and goods, some of the profits of his thefts from the great palazzos of Venice. Scipio doesn’t live with the others in the cinema but arrives, masked and cloaked in a black cape, to pay them visits there at odd hours of the night, bringing money and food and books and clothes.
Prosper and Bo rapidly grow accustomed to their new lives with Ricco, Mosca, and Hornet, and come to love Venice, an ancient city of maze-like streets and canals built on a series of islands in the Adriatic off the northeast coast of Italy. Though Prosper worries about his friends’ illegal activities and constantly lives in fear of being found by aunt Esther, Bo revels in the freedom and adventure of their new lives.
Then one day, Prosper bumps into a man with a walrus moustache, a man who takes a good look at him, and then seems to follow when he and the boys start making their way back to the cinema for the evening. The man, a detective named Victor Getz, has been hired by Prosper and Bo’s aunt Esther to find Bo so that she can take him back to Germany. Prosper and his friends lose the stranger, but the boy’s suspicions grow when he sees the man standing at the water taxi dock, as their boat puts out into the Grand Canal. Fearing the worst, Prosper disguises himself and Bo, and gets Ricco and the others to help him keep Bo from view, yet Victor proves more than a match for a handful of ragtag street kids and their elusive teenaged protector.
Burdened with providing for and protecting his friends, as well as growing personal troubles of his own, Scipio needs a lot of money. When he and his gang are offered a fortune by an elderly Conte to steal a broken wing made of wood from a private house in Venice, Scipio accepts the strange request but, before the theft can be carried out, an unexpected revelation rocks the Thief Lord’s gang and threatens the safety of every one of the kids living in the Stella cinema. The burglary doesn’t go according to plan. Caught by Ida Spavento, the woman who owns the house, and the wooden wing, pursued by Victor Getz, and his client, Esther Hartlieb, and hunted by the local police, the gang must pull together all of their resources to save themselves and their friends.
Written by the wonderful Cornelia Funke, The Thief Lord is a magical tale that explores the themes of family and friendship, poverty and wealth, and childhood and old age against the richly detailed backdrop of Venice, one of the proudest and most beautiful cities in the world.
FernFolio Editor

Beware, Pirates! by Frieda Wishinsky

fernfolio — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 00:01:18 +0000

Emily Bing is happy to meet Matt Martinez, the boy who walks up her front walk to say hello soon after she and her family move into her Great-Aunt Miranda’s old house. Matt wants to know if the house is haunted, which it isn’t, but it does contain an odd little room at the top of a tower that is filled with strange objects, including an old wooden sled. The sled, a Canadian Flyer, is a gift to Emily from her great-aunt and bears a maple leaf on which some mysterious words appear, like a magic spell, to carry Matt and Emily away on an adventure to Canada’s Far North and the second voyage to Canada by one of European’s most famous explorers.
Matt and Emily find themselves aboard the explorer’s sailing ship where they meet sailors who act more like pirates and its rather ill-tempered captain, Martin Frobisher. Believed to be stowaways, the kids are put to work scrubbing the decks before they catch sight of an Innu boy paddling a small boat near the sailing vessel. Soon they have clambered down a rope into young Minik’s umiak, and learn that the boy is looking for his friend, Irniq, who has been kidnapped by Frobisher and his men.
Written by Frieda Wishinsky, Beware, Pirates! is the first of the Canadian Flyer Adventures, stories about Matt and Emily’s adventures through this country’s past aboard the magical wooden sled. These books will appeal to readers from grades 2 to 5, and offer a lot of information about Canada’s history.
FernFolio Editor

The Third Eye by Mahtab Narsimhan

fernfolio — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 02:00:04 +0000

While the other people in their village celebrate Diwali, the festival of lights, Tara and her seven-year old brother Suraj sit watching from the front step of the family hut, mourning the anniversary of their mother’s disappearance. One year earlier, the kind and beautiful Parvati had crept to Tara before dawn and told her that she had to go away for a while. When they awake, hours later, Tara and Suraj and their father, Shiv, discover that not only has Parvati gone, but her father, Parbala, the village’s powerful healer, has disappeared as well.
The year that follows is a very difficult one for the two children. Not only must they cope with the loss of their mother and grandfather, but with the unexpected remarriage of their father to Kali, a unpleasant woman whose doting love of her spoilt daughter, Layla, is in stark contrast to her cruelty toward Tara and Suraj. With their formerly loving and affectionate father suddenly cold and remote, and Kali treating them like servants in their own home, Tara watches with growing alarm as her younger brother grows thin and sad. She begins to think that she must take Suraj and set off into the forest that surround the village in search of their missing mother and grandfather.
However a new danger lurks. The villagers have begun to whisper that the forest is inhabited by Vetalas, the undead, who prey upon those who venture there alone. As men start disappearing and fear mounts in the village, a stranger appears, claiming that he can save them from the Vetalas. Zarku, as he calls himself, possesses a third eye, in the middle of his forehead, that allows him to see into the hearts and minds of all he meets. Though several of the villagers voice their concern about his arrival, Zarku is rapidly appointed as the village’s new healer. Yet Tara senses that he is evil and realizes that finding her mother and grandfather may be the only way to save the village.
Tara’s desperate quest takes her into the forest and then up into the mountains, where she meets Lord Yama, the God of Death, and must undertake a harrowing voyage underground to find the fountain from which flows the Water of Life.
Part adventure, part fairy tale, The Third Eye is a marvellous story about one young girl’s discovery that true strength lies within and that, with a pure heart, all is possible.
The Third Eye won the 2009 Silver Birch prize for fiction.
FernFolio editor

Woodenface by Gus Grinfell

fernfolio — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 23:29:43 +0000

The daughter of a Yorkshire weaver, Meg Lumb has learned to wash and dye and spin wool, and help her mother with her younger brother, but from her father she has also learned to carve wood. She creeps away to the churchyard during quiet moments to play with Dilly-Lal and Drum-a-Drum, two peg dolls she has fashioned, undisturbed by the presence of the ghosts that haunt the graves there. In her pocket she also carries Bolly-Bolly, a strange little face that she has carved out of a knot of wood that she found sawn from an ancient hawthorne tree. Bolly-Bolly has the ability to speak to Meg, and to show her visions of the places and people around her.
From Bolly-Bolly, Meg learns that Patience Sutcliffe, the daughter of the village cloth merchant, lies in her bed chamber seemingly possessed by evil spirits. When confronted by Reverend Eastwood, the puritanical minister, Patience names Meg as her tormentor, and the young girl realizes that she is accused of witchcraft.
Afraid for her life, Meg flees her village for Halifax, a nearby town, and the centre of Yorkshire’s woollen trade, hoping to find her father who has travelled there to sell his cloth. Instead, she finds that her father has been falsely accused of theft and thrown in the local jail to await trail. She meets Ned, a travelling puppeteer, and Simon, apprentice to a charlatan apothecary, both of whom are working at the Halifax fair.
Desperate to find a way to help her father, Meg confides her problems to Ned and Simon, and discovers in them two kindred souls, eager to help her save her father and escape the clutches of Mr. Sutcliffe, father to Patience, and of Reverend Eastwood. But matters become increasingly complicated when if becomes clear that Meg’s father is the victim of a conspiracy, and that Meg’s talent for carving wood border dangerously upon magical.
Set during the Interregnum, when Oliver Cromwell’s Puritans ruled England, Woodenface is a wonderful adventure that draws upon the English tradition on the Greenman and celebrates the magic that exists in all living things.
FernFolio Editor

Sarah and the Magic Science Project by Hazel Hutchins

fernfolio — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 12:32:05 +0000

When Sarah and her best friend Ben observe the rotten Derek Henshaw getting turned into a frog right in the middle of the cornerstore while trying to shoplift, Sarah figures she has found a great topic for her science project. “Magic: Fact or Fiction,” she announces to Mr. Wyanth, the science teacher, who is a great believer in the scientific method and who despairs of Sarah ever carrying out a project that includes observations, hypothesis, experiment and conclusion.
But Anastasia Morningstar, the young woman who works in that cornerstore and who seems to have turned Derek Henshaw into a frog, defies scientific study or explanation. Anna is more than willing to help Sarah with her project, but somehow magic doesn’t work around Mr. Wynath. And Anna has her own troubles; her boss at the cornerstore has let her go after complaints of harassment from Derek’s father, and the beautiful butterfly on her porch seems to be dying.
This is a lovely story about magic and the power of the imagination.
FernFolio Editor