Super Mario

Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America by Jeff Ryan. We're getting all non-fiction up in here with a history of Nintendo. Now, if there's a type of non-fiction of which I'm particularly enamoured, it's corporate and industry histories. And video games and nerd culture are very much of interested to me. So this was an obvious fit. Super Mario is a history of Nintendo with a heavy focus on the Mario franchise. It's pretty well researched. The writing style was a lot more casual than I'm used to in this sort of book; my benchmark for this type of book is the studiously end-noted The Emperors of Chocolate. Still, it's readable, mostly a fast read (the final chapter bogged down a good bit), and very entertaining. Well worth pairing this with the recently reviewed Ready Player One.

Thirteenth Child

I've greatly enjoyed Patricia Wrede's other forays into historical fantasy, so when I saw that she'd written such a book in the setting of the American West, I was all over it. The frontier setting is a favorite of mine when I can find books that handle daily life out west rather than cowboys and gunfighters. And Thirteenth Child has that in spades. It's the tale of Eff Rothmer, the thirteenth child in a family of magicians. Everyone knows that a thirteenth child is terrible bad luck, and so Eff and her family are relieved when Eff's father gets a position teaching magic at a university out west, just east of the Great Barrier, a magical barrier that keeps dangerous magical wildlife out of civilized settlements. As Eff grows up, she learns more about magic, the skills that make her special, and her place in the world around her.

This book interests me in how much time it covers. We meet Eff when she's five and her family moves out west, and the book details the years until she's eighteen. It's got a rambling pace and is very slice of life. Eff's a good narrator and an interesting character, and the supporting cast is likewise. This alternate America fascinated me, with its differently derived names and altered flow of historical events. The integration of magic is done well; it's treated realistically, as a skill anyone might learn and which is used practically for little things like housekeeping. Overall, I highly recommend this for anyone with an interest in either fantasy or historical fiction. You'll find yourself pleased on both accounts.

A Wind in the Door

A Wind in the Door is even weirder than A Wrinkle in Time. I mean, we can dig space travel and other planets, sure, that's sci-fi, even if how it's framed is rather unconventional. But A Wind in the Door is an even more fantastic Fantastic Voyage. Young Charles Wallace, beloved younger brother of Meg Murry, is sick, a strange disease afflicting him on a cellular level. But that doesn't concern him as much as the dragons he saw in the vegetable garden. When he, Meg, and their friend Calvin go to investigate, they find that the dragons are actually a cherubim, and with his help and the help of a Teacher, they must travel inside Charles Wallace's mitochondria and use a form of telepathy to defeat the Echthroi, the force of nothingness who want to wipe out all goodness and existence in the universe.

Yeah.

For all that, it's an enjoyable follow-up to A Wrinkle in Time, returning to the same beloved characters, especially stubborn and dramatic Meg. There are some weird concepts, but the writing eases you into them, and you never feel like L'Engle is condescending to you. The book makes sense, but it's really something you experience, just letting yourself be wrapped along in the joy of the triumph of good and love.

Forest Born

Forest Born is a satisfactory wrap-up to the Books of Bayern. Once again we have a protagonist related to those who have come before, although, unlike Razo and Enna, Rin didn't make an appearance in any of the previous books. As her own character, I don't quite like her as much as the other three, but I really enjoy seeing her perspective, almost an outsider's perspective, on Isi, Enna, Dasha, and the others. Plus, Rin's inner conflict makes a lot more sense once you get to the last third or so of the book. I like that this book wraps up both the Tiran conflicts and comes full circle to plot threads from the first book. Also, showing that no gift is black and white, only evil or only good, is a nice, balanced touch. And Rin doesn't get a love interest, which I like, because we already have three couples, and, anyway, some folks aren't ready for love, whether because of their age or because they've got personal issues to sort out. Once again we see Shannon Hale at her most descriptive and evocative, and there's plenty of danger and action. I stayed hooked because at a couple points I had no idea how Rin and the others could possibly get out of their predicament. Anyway, this was a satisfying read and good closure for the series.

River Secrets - 7/35

River Secrets is the third book of Bayern, following Shannon Hale's Enna Burning and The Goose Girl. This one is interesting because its protagonist, Razo, differs from the leads in the other two books both by being a boy and by not having elemental powers. Indeed, it's his insecurity about how ordinary he is that forms a backbone for his development in the story.

The plot is basically this: after the war with Tira, Bayern has to send an ambassador to the southern kingdom, and with the ambassador are some troops, including Razo, Finn, and, as the ambassador's lady in waiting, Enna. Bayern wants peace, but Tira's assembly may yet vote for war, so currying favor with the public is important. But that won't be easy when someone with fire speaking is burning Tirans and trying to frame Bayern. Meanwhile, Razo meets the charming Lady Dasha, who seems to be hiding something. Nothing's as it seems in this city of rivers and secrets, including Razo, who learns a lot about who he is and the man he is becoming.

This is a fun book. Isi is a doormat for most of her book and continues to be calm and reserved. Enna embodies her element; she's always animated but can be a little prickly too. Razo is just an all-around fun guy. It's not hard to see why he's able to make friends with both kitchen staff and royalty. I have to say, I really enjoy the friendship between him and Enna. No romance, just care for each other. They balance each other well. Dasha's pretty cool too, but I think her better development comes later. One thing I especially like about these books is how even when the main character changes the others are still there, still important, still have their own agendas and motivations. And this doesn't change in the fourth book, either, the review of which will be coming before long.

Ready Player One - 6/35

Ready Player One is referred to as sci-fi, which isn't surprising as it takes place in the future and inside a video game. But there's at least as much reason to consider it a fantasy novel, in more than one way. The novel is a pretty standard quest in its structure. In the future, the OASIS virtual reality MMO is so popular that it's supplanted the real world for much of humanity, including uber 80s geek Wade Watts. Wade's obsession with a decade long before his own stems from a contest put forth by OASIS' creator James Halliday. Halliday, who grew up in the 1980s, made his will into a contest. Whoever could find the hidden Easter egg embedded deep within OASIS would get his fortune. And the clues are all related to 1980s pop culture. (Maybe it's bitterness due to having been born only two years before that decade ended, but the 1980s fanboying didn't quite strike a chord with me. But it is important to the book that the focus be on the 80s, and it's quite cleverly done.) Anyway, to get to the Easter egg, egg hunters (known as gunters) must find three keys and solve puzzles behind three gates. It's so very RPG. Obviously Wade finds one of the keys, and before he knows it he's in the spotlight and in the race for the egg. Along the way he gains allies and finds romance, all the while opposing the dastardly IOI corporation.

Besides being modeled after a basic fantasy quest, the book is also nerd wish fulfillment fantasy. It's what every teen/twenty-something male nerd wants: adventure, validation for devoting his life to meaningless trivia and skills, the love of a woman, money, power, etc. But while I recognize this, I also commend Ernest Cline for writing in Wade a truly likeable protagonist and a very well-rounded supporting cast. Plus, the OASIS is freaking cool. And this book has the most realistic portrayal of the whole "save the world in an online game" setup I've ever seen. It's hard to have tension and suspense when it's avatars at stake, not human lives, but since OASIS is such an integral part of the world and having your avatar killed loses you everything, including levels and items, and since the conflict is brought into the real world as well, the dramatic stakes are satisfactorily high.

A Wrinkle in Time - 5/35

A Wrinkle in Time is weird. For starters, how do you even classify it? Coming of age novel? Yeah, there's a good bit of that. Meg Murry is one flawed character, and I love her for it, always have since I first read the book back in grade school, and her character development is great. Quite realistic, since she'll learn something and then forget it or be too impatient to put that lesson into practice and end up having to overcome that fault yet again. Who among us hasn't experienced that? This girl is incredibly flawed. She's awkward, a bit of a delinquent, a bit of a drama queen, but she's utterly endearing at the same time. Determined and pessimistic in equal measures, impatient, loyal, smart, dense, just a really human mix of traits. So really, a good bit of the book is about her growing as a person. But this is not a coming of age novel. So maybe it's science fiction. Tesseracts, dimensions, traveling through space to alien planets. All hallmarks of sci-fi. But, well, maybe I haven't been reading the right science fiction, because literary allusions and Christian imagery don't seem very scientific. Mrs. Who, Mrs. Whatsit, and Mrs. Which may technically be aliens, but they're never presented in that light, seeming to be more beings of magic and faith than anything. Really, the religious themes running through L'Engle's books makes a good case for Christian fiction. But again, to pigeonhole the book into that genre is to ignore all of the other wonderful elements.

This is a book that breaks the mold. It combines genres in a joyous journey across time and space on a quest for something as simple as one girl's father and something as heavy as the fight of good against evil. It's a children's book that does not talk down to children, explaining the more complex concepts in the narrative but not spoonfeeding them to the reader. And plenty of the literary allusions and name-drops I didn't even get until I was an adult. (To me, Ariel was always a mermaid; what middleschooler knows The Tempest?)

A Wrinkle in Time is always a joy to read, a return to a warm world of knowledge and family and the triumph of good over evil, even if the world seems cold and petty at times, even if it's hard to fight the good fight.