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February 2010:
Teaser Tuesday: Swim to Me: 02/09/10
I'm up to my 5th week in participating in the Teaser Tuesday meme. For my teaser I'm picking Swim to Me by Betsy Carter.
The rules come from MizB of Should Be Reading.
- Grab your current read
- Open to a random page
- Share two (2) "teaser" sentences from somewhere on that page
- BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn't give too much away! You don't want to ruin the book for others!)
- Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!
My current read is Swim to Me by Betsy Carter (2007). It is set at the Weeki Wachee Springs in Florida.
The Summery from GoodReads
At two, Delores's mother dropped her into the shallow end of a lake, trusting instinct would teach her daughter to swim. From then on, the water is where Delores Walker feels most at home. Now, nearly seventeen, she's boarding a Greyhound bus leaving the Bronx for sunny Weeki Wachee Springs, a tacky roadside attraction in the shadow of Walt Disney's new Florida phenomenon.
With a hundred silver dollars left behind by her runaway dad, Delores is chasing her dream of being a mermaid with a group of other aquatic hopefuls—girls just as awkward and uncertain out of water as they are beautiful and graceful in it. And in this make-believe world of sequined tails and amphibious fantasy, Delores will learn some very real lessons about growing up and surviving in a world where everyone sometimes feels like a fish out of water.
The Teaser:
"You'll see," said Delores as she turned on the faucet. Her mother undressed in the bedroom, then tiptoed naked into the bathroom. As she slid into the warm bath, she sighed: "Ahh, my feet." (p. 44)
books | teaser tuesdays
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Henry the Sailor Cat: 02/08/10
Harriet loves cats. Whenever I'm at the library or I'm buying books for her, I'm looking for books about cats. Among my recent library finds was Henry the Sailor Cat by Mary Calhoun. It's the sixth book in a series of picture books featuring an adventurous Siamese cat.
Henry stows away on the sailboat while the Man is teaching the Boy how to sail. Henry is discovered too late to return to shore and is allowed to stay above deck as long as he doesn't get in the way. The cat spends the day learning along side the Boy. Later they will both need to put their new skills to the ultimate test.
I have known cats to love water and cats certainly have been on ships. I can't say I've ever known a water loving Siamese but that's besides the point. Henry's actions on the ship are plausible, albeit a bit extraordinary at times, and the pages are sumptuously illustrated.
Books in the series:
- Cross-Country Cat 1979
- Audubon Cat, 1981
- Hot-Air Henry 1981
- High-Wire Henry 1991
- Henry the Sailor Cat 1994
- Henry the Christmas Cat 2002
Other posts and reviews:
books | Mary Calhoun | childrens | 1994
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Devil to Pay: Chapter Seven: 02/07/10
The pieces are almost in place. Eric and Sapsis have reached the Hookshire. Eric is there to see Susan. Sapsis is there to seek guidance. She wants to do something useful to help the Shadow Kenams come home. They accept her offer but the help they ask for is well beyond what she can do by herself.
For Susan Eric's arrival signals a change in her life. She firmly believes her life is on a new path. Although she'll someday be Duchess of Hook and through her station be expected to interact with Alfred when's king, she thinks these will be momentary inconveniences.
But the Everything has a different pattern in mind for everyone as it brings the Children of Alsiekipsie home.
Writing and Mapping
When writing its easy to get caught up in the fun and to start throwing around place names willynilly. It's just as easy to forget where these places are relative to each other. To keep thing straight I started mapping my world last year. The map is still a work in progress.
At the state level, especially for Capital State, I want to include major highways. At a global level, I want to figure out the time zones. Right now I have 26 areas marked out but they don't follow any of the geopolitical boundaries as the time zones on Earth do. To make Albion a little different from Earth, I've added two extra hours meaning that midnight and noon fall at 13 o'clock.
You'll also notice that most of Greater Albion is south of the Equator. When I was first rolling around plot ideas in my head I was in Australia as an exchange student. So much of fiction and science fiction I've read has a very northern hemisphere approach regardless of where their story is set. Being a northern hemisphere person I have to admit it's hard to instantly remember what season it should be. Now of course, Greater Albion isn't Earth and won't have the same degree of tilt to its access so the southern hemisphere thing is just a starting point — a reminder to think about the details.
Below is a small detail from the much larger map I'm working on. Not every place on the map has been mentioned in the chapters I've posted but they will be. The red line is route of the bullet train that connects most of the northern cities to Kings City.
Devil to Pay blog posts
Read the installments
Zombie Queen of Newbury High: 02/07/10
I pre-ordered Zombie Queen of Newbury High in the fall of 2008 at the same time I ordered You Had Me at Halo. I was (and still am) a subscriber to Amanda Ashby's blog and bought both books together on the basis of her posts. Although I read You Had Me at Halo in the summer it took me until December to review it. Likewise I didn't actually read Zombie Queen of Newbury High until my New Year's holiday.
Mia's blissfully happy. She's dating her own special love god, Rob the high school football quarterback. She envisions the perfect prom where Rob takes her and she has the perfect dress. All that comes crashing down when Samantha, aka miss popularity, begins to make a move on the love god.
Love God isn't Mia's term for Rob, I'm borrowing it from the Georgia Nicholson series because the set up is the same until Mia learns that magic is real and the wrong magic can turn people into zombies. Worse yet, she's been tricked into to performing just such a spell and if she can't reverse it, her classmates will all become zombies through a four step transformative process.
So often the zombie stories focus so much on the upcoming total annihilation of humanity as the undead feast on brains and turn their victims that the reason behind the zombie outbreak is never explained nor is any thought on the mechanism for spreading the infestation beyond the ensemble cast given. It's just taken as fact that all the world will become zombied if the heroes can't stop them. Shaun of the Dead thinks through containment and now Zombie Queen of Newberry High answers how zombies are created and gives some thought to why the world hasn't fallen prey to hordes of zombies yet.
All of this happens in the setting of a typical American high school with the prototypical characters played up for laughs. The dialogue and descriptions aren't as over the top as in Louise Rennison's Georgia Nicholson series but it's still goofy, lighthearted and fun with enough underlying pathos of a Mia knowing that if she doesn't succeed in undoing the spell the authorities will have to kill all her friends before they can spread the disease beyond the high school.
Next year her third book is coming out, Fairy Bad Day. I'm looking forward to it.
Other posts and reviews:
- Amanda Ashby (Author's blog; book trailer)
- The Book Spot
- Chicklish
- Christina Philips
- The Epic Rat
- Fish Muffins of Doom
- Karin's Book Nook
- Kiss the Book
- The Ninja Librarian
- Persnickety Snark
- Page Turners Blog
- Stop Drop and Read
- Teresa Wilde's Demon of the Week Blog
- Tiny Little Reading Room
- Wondrous Reads
books | Amanda Ashby | fantasy | 2009
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Mailbox Monday: February 08, 2010: 02/07/10
Mailbox Monday is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came into their house last week (checked out library books don't count, eBooks & audio books do). Warning: Mailbox Monday can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and humongous wish lists.
Last week I didn't have a single book in my mailbox. I expected this week would be another no show for me but then a package arrived on Saturday from my mother. These are books she found for Harriet and Sean for Valentine's Day. The kids were so excited to get books that they opened their packages early.
Harriet got The Secret Night World of Cats by Helen Landalf and illustrated by Mark Rimland. The book is signed by the illustrator. Amanda, a little girl who looks a lot like Harriet, goes on a night time adventure to find her missing cat, Tabby. Her search introduces her to the secret lives of cats.
The illustrator is a high functioning autistic. Before I read his biography on the back flap (another reason why I'm a flapper) I wondered if he had collaborated with children. There's a childlike quality to how he executes the illustrations.
Sean got Life-Size Dragons by John Grant and Fred Gambino. It has fantastic illustrations. It's a mixture of fantasy and biology. The last chapter includes lessons on actual dragon like animals.
I will be reviewing both books on my blog as time permits.
All work © 1997-2010 Sarah Sammis
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