Dear TBR<\/h2>\n
HEA. HFN. The fairy tale staple of “happily ever after” is a rather limited construct in kidlit novels, as one has to ask, what does “ever after” mean when you’re thirteen or sixteen or even eighteen? Does a YA or MG novel really support a forever sort of bliss? Probably not – but in my continuing quest to read All The Tween Love Stories, and so support my editor’s goal of me actually writing one, I occasionally ask the question…<\/p>\n
WE COULD BE MAGIC,<\/b> Melissa Meyer and Joelle Murray<\/p>\n
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Tabitha, like many other girls in her universe or ours, grew up on a steady diet of “princess” – in books, games, and movies via a franchise called Somerland created by a fictional author named Winda Somers. From a very early age, Tabi knew the movies word-for-word, had her own understanding of the villains and heroines, and believed with all her pure heart that love conquered everything… thus her parents’ divorce crushed her little heart. She didn’t understand and couldn’t accept the end of everything she’d understood, so in an attempt to help heal her broken heart, her father takes her on a Daddy-and-Me trip to Somerland… where she finds her next goal: she’s going to return to Somerland as a princess in her own right someday. Fast forward to high school, and Tabi’s finally old enough to make her case to the interviewers, telling the story of how her broken heart was mended as a small child, asking her favorite prince and princess pair to please love each other forever – unlike her own parents. She gets the job, and is overwhelmingly excited to turn up for orientation, eager and bubbly and still a believer in the magic of the stories of princesses and villains and heroes that shaped her heart when she was young. But right away, it’s clear that there are actors… and then there’s The Story. For some kids, taking part in The Story is just a summer job, not a chance to be the magic that helps some child get through a rough moment in childhood. And as it turns out, The Story is not even Tabi’s job – she gets relegated to the nacho stand, completely unready for all the dance steps, all the work, all the sweating in character costumes that is part of the work they do to make magic. After working long enough to land an audition, Tabi realizes she was unprepared for reality, and needs to do a lot more work to make her dream happen. Somerland isn’t a walk in the park for the workers – and not all of the people who are inhabiting the princess costumes at the park aren’t like she’d expected. Not everyone is bubbling over with the joy of just being there – and some of them are wondering if Tabi, curvy and short – has a place there when the royalty they’re all trying out for are svelte and slim and tall. But what keeps Tabi from feeling completely discouraged is her new friend, James, who believes in her, and the magic that brought her there. And, as James shows Tabi the real park, and encourages her to trust in her own magic, she solidifies her belief that royalty comes in all shapes, hues, and sizes, and that we are the magic in The Story – always.<\/p>\n
YES, YOUR SERPENTINE EXCELLENCY<\/b>, Kate Stradling<\/p>\n
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Joanna Marlow is… humiliated. The man who she was dating with has turned out to be a thief – and a gambler. He’s stolen her heirloom glowstone brooch, and so now she’s following him to the gambling house where he’s going to use it as an entry stake, in hopes of nipping in and stealing back her heirloom without having to have an ugly confrontation – where he’d be sure to try and lie his way out of things. Joanna is not a fond of chaos, of discomfort, and most of all, not a fan of confrontation. Courting has turned out to be – for the last time – humiliating and uncomfortable. She’s done. She’s resigning herself to spinsterhood and her cats. Unfortunately, there’s a complication – Joanna’s nearly caught and skips into what she thinks is an empty room in the gaming house – which instead houses a dragon. Who decides to follow her home.<\/p>\n
Joanna neither wants nor needs a dragon. Additionally, this is a talking dragon, who somehow finds her house halfway across town and just lets itself into her living room, which has wards and blessings on all the doors and windows. Since Joanna lives on Marlow Hill with her entire, nosy, bossy family – who are all far too interested in maintaining the boundaries of their closed neighborhood – she knows he has to go. Magical beings are all conscripted into military service or the church in this kingdom, and skips have historically been conscripted by the crown to be assassins. Joanna’s family is protective of her – the only one of them to serve the church for five years – and they keep their neighborhood tightly regulated for a reason – to keep chaos and danger away from them, their elderly, and their children. Unfortunately, a dragon brings its own chaos – first in the form of the master of the gaming house from which he came, next from a series of gullible young heiresses who believe he’s a soothsayer and pay dearly for his “advice,” and finally from a high-powered mage carrying a deadly spell from one of the magical mob Families in the kingdom to take “her” dragon back. Joanna’s life… which was meant to be that of a quiet spinster working her courier job and taking care of her cats – has taken a decided turn for the chaotic… and that chaos seems to go through all the magical Families in the kingdom, and perhaps right on up into the King’s court. Nothing that Joanna thought is as it seems – herself, her family, and least of all, the dragon…<\/p>\n
THE LAST HOPE SCHOOL FOR MAGICAL DELINQUENTS<\/b>, Nicki Pau Preto<\/p>\n
Lavina Lucas – Vin, to herself, since she has no real friends – has spent the last several years being a magical disaster. Somehow, no matter which school for budding magicians she’s sent to, everything goes wrong there. It’s never what she wants, but it’s always what she gets. Smoke. Explosions. Floods. Broken furniture. Broken bones. Disasters, major or minor, sooner or later find her hauled to the principal’s office, and then before the school board. With grim faces, she’s told that she’s an aberration – a danger to others – and absolutely not allowed to stay a moment longer. When Vin’s latest expulsion finds on the steps of The Last Hope school, Vin is… resigned. She is the magical delinquent they’ve named her, and there’s no hope – this placement isn’t going to go well either. Soon the kids will be gossiping about her and trying to bully her like they always do, and soon her magic will explode out of her, destroy glass and pipes and benches and desks and —<\/p>\n
Somehow, though, The Last Hope is different. First, the Headmistress is… kind of amazing. She listens, and Vin is slowly beginning to believe that she might be an adult who actually tries to understand her. Vin is assigned fellow students to help her get settled. Gilly, Theo, and his sister, Araminta, are …nice to her. Oddly nice. Sure, there are still some hiccoughs – chaos seems to follow Vin regardless of her wishes – but with her new friends, things get settled, reversed, and …solved. Life becomes bearable – then more than bearable. Attending school with friends is a fragile treasure that Vin wants desperately to protect, so when she discovers that the school is facing a true threat from the so-called Free Mages, she throws herself at the threat bodily. When you’ve found a place to call home, it’s life or death to protect it. (This is the first of three books, so I’m being a LOT more vague with the plot, so as to avoid spoilers.) <\/p>\n
Three vastly different magical books, but a similar unifying theme – happily ever after arrived at through having a place to belong, owning one’s literal or metaphorical magic and being allowed to simply be<\/i>. This the type of happiness of which most tweens and teens – and people of any age – can dream. What I think is the best part, though, is that each of these books, in their own way, model how to create a HEA for someone else. #goals<\/p>\n
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Fresh onto the TBR<\/u>:<\/p>\n Until the next book, \ud83d\udcd6<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Still A Constant Reader<\/p>\n <\/font><\/p>\n <\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dear TBR HEA. HFN. The fairy tale staple of “happily ever after” is a rather limited construct in kidlit novels, as one has to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10756,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[123,117,112,122,118,115,128,116],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-actually-adult","category-adult-teen-crossover","category-dear-tbr","category-graphically-inclined","category-mighty-middle-grade","category-reviews","category-romancing-","category-speculative-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10755"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10755\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10773,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10755\/revisions\/10773"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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