Book Review - The Lost Gate by Orson Scott Card

The Lost Gate by Orson Scott Card
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I guess I'm a sucker for the worlds of Orson Scott Card (or maybe just a sucker for the very excellent narrators that tell me his tales), and the combination real/fantasy world of The Lost Gate is no exception.

Danny North lives in a world where the adults bear names like Thor and Loki. Civilization is split into factions of "families," and each faction bears a name which ties it to its history, like "The Greeks" or "The Norths" (who bear Norse heritage). Almost everyone in Danny's world has personal magic, whether it is the ability to possess a bird and bid it do your will or to encourage the plants to grow just a little bigger. But Danny has none of these magical abilities. He is drekka.

Eventually Danny runs away from his family to join the druthers, the non-magical everyday folk who used to worship the families as gods. He plans to live among them, but he has a secret of his own, bigger than his past.

The Lost Gate is a wonderful blend of fantasy and mythology, and is reminiscent of Rick Riordan's Greek (Percy Jackson and the Olympians) and Egyptian (The Kane Chronicles) series, and Michael Scott's The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel.

The characters have depth and capture your sympathies. You really care what happens to this boy, and whether or not he ever makes it to the promised land of Westil.

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Book Review - The Death of Joan of Arc by Michael Scott

The Death of Joan of Arc by Michael Scott

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This quick and dirty short story fills in one of the more intriguing gaps from The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel. It tells the story of how Scáthach, The Shadow, saves her dear friend Joan of Arc from death by pyre (though everyone thinks she was truly burned at the stake. It's short and sweet, a little morsel to tide you over until the final book in the series is released.


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Book Review - Throne of Fire by Rick Riordan

Throne of Fire by Rick Riordan

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This series is just so much fun. Tons of great info about Egyptology, treatment of minor gods and goddesses along with the major ones, and strong male and female lead characters who work best in cooperation with each other. Having just read the first 39 clues book (also a brother-sister duo), I found this to be far more engaging and well-written. I'm definitely looking forward to the conclusion of this series!

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Year in Books

I read 48 books this year, not including children's books. This is pretty impressive to me, considering I spent 2 semesters studying pre-calculus, among other subjects.

• 15 of those books were read on my nook, which spent only 2-3 months in commission (my jumpy toddler broke it... twice).  
• Only 2 of last year's books were what I would call "classics," though even those are modern classics (Slaughterhouse Five and Contact). I think this year's list will be much smaller, since I'm trying to tackle some real classics like Homer's Odyssey and Iliad, possibly Virgil's Aenid, and some other heavy stuff. We'll see, I may tire of it and switch back to my good old standby, YA.
• 28 books I read last year were YA. 
• 11 were re-reads, and I'll probably do that again this year with a few books. There are just some books you have to read every couple of years, you know?  
• Only 6 of 48 books were NOT part of a larger series, though some of the series (serieses? How the hell do you pluralize that word?) have only one book thus far.
• Nook stuff I already own & would like to read this year:
• The Odyssey (currently reading)
• The Iliad
• Dracula
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra
• Relativity: The Special and General Theory
• How Children Learn
• Raising Freethinkers
• Anna Karenina

I plan to purchase and read Zenschooling, and I just found out that the second in Rick Riordan's Kane Chronicles series is coming out in May. I'll be buying and reading that in one day, I'm sure.

Last year, I sorted through the NYT's "must read books of the last year" and added a bunch.... which I never read. I think I'll be lucky to make it through the list I already have while studying Calculus and recovering from birth, but do you have any suggestions for me? Take a look at my to-read shelf (this includes all the books I want to read with the kids, so it's long) and tell me if anything jumps out that should go to the top of the list!

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I've been reading Homer's Odyssey, and am fascinated on many levels. One is the style. A couple of years ago, I started a self-study Old Testament course (which I never finished, because I fail at not having deadlines), and one of the first discussions was the context in which it was written. The Odyssey had a similar introduction, explaining the oral nature of Homer's time, how the oral story would have been passed down through generations, changing each time to fit the bard's audience, and ultimately would have come to be put into print. As I read, I hear so many stylistic similarities to the Bible, in terms of repeated phrases, two alternate versions of the same story-within-a-story told a few paragraphs apart, and so forth. It's obvious that these tales were composed (at least in written form) in a similar timeframe, and it is just really interesting to me how differently they are now perceived, one being viewed as pure mythology and the other as absolute truth.

Book Review - The Red Pyramid by Rick Riordan

The Red Pyramid by Rick Riordan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I had high hopes for this book after reading the Percy Jackson series. I love mythology of all sorts, and the idea of a new series dealing with Egyptian mythology (Percy Jackson was Greek) was awesome.

I was not disappointed. After a quick and dirty start, the book lags a bit in the first couple chapters but picks up again before too long. I would have read it much more quickly if I wasn't swamped with summer school, and as it was, I often read when I should have been doing homework!

The characters are likeable and for teenagers, probably relatable. The story is told in the context of a transcribed audio tape (!), and the asides at the beginning of the chapters get tiring, but it's a minor nitpick.

There is a definite conclusion to this book, while still giving you a taste of the larger story arc that is to come - I like that. No real cliffhanger, but the promise of more.

I found myself often wondering how much of the story was made up and how much was based on true mythological scholarship. That's cleared up in the notes at the end, stating that the idea of Nomes, magicians, and so forth were really prevalent in Ancient Egypt, and the mythological aspect of the book is as true as one could expect.

These series' are great primers for mythological education. It's a fun and exciting way for kids to get their Mythological literacy on.

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