About two or three months ago, the library in Littleport reopened. We took Arya along, and I renewed my library card and picked up a couple of books; or I tried to. Actually, what happened was that my card had been unused for so long they wanted to see my passport. I was busy, so I said I'd come back, leaving the books with them.
A month later they emailed to say that the books which were sitting on their shelf were overdue.
When I popped in, they didn't care about my passport, gave me my new card and checked the books out for two months, since they're closed again now for roof repairs.
The first of the two books was The Throne of Fire, second volume in the Kane Chronicles, by Rick 'Percy Jackson' Riordan. Despite the slightly feeble film effort, I remain an adamant fan of Percy Jackson and of Riordan's writing. In the Kane Chronicles he does for Egyptian mythology pretty much what he did for Greek and Roman myth in his other books, but with a twist. Carter Kane and his sister Sadie aren't the children of gods, but magicians of the House of Life, an ancient order dating back to Dynastic Egypt. They are capable of great feats of magic on their own, but against the teachings of the House they study the path of the Gods, a magical practice which allows them to call on the power of the Gods directly, and which their parents and their uncle believe to be necessary to save the world from Apophis, the ultimate expression of evil and chaos.
The Throne of Fire gives Carter and Sadie a bit of a power downgrade (in the first book, The Red Pyramid they channeled the power of Horus and Isis directly, but by this point have decided this is too dangerous. They also, however, have students, and crushes, which alternately help and hinder as the siblings set out to raise the Sun God Ra from his sleep of millions of years (that's a technical Egyptian term, not a literal length of time).
I personally find the Kanes a little more stock than Percy Jackson, as characters, although it might just be a result of Riordan's attempts to express Sadie's British habits to a US teen audience. I do enjoy his narrative mechanism of having Carter and Sadie narrate separate and occasionally overlapping segments. The stories themselves are good and the mythology, as in the Percy Jackson books, both well researched and interestingly interpreted. The nods to the Olympian series - Egyptian magicians, for reasons unspecified, avoid New York, the home of the Olympian Gods - are a nice touch, although with Norse Gods dropping into Boston next year, it's a wonder there is any room for humans on the East Coast.
Scrivener's Moon, the latest entry in Philip Reeve's Fever Crumb series, which are in turn a prequel to the Mortal Engines Quartet, is about as bleak as its pedigree would suggest, mixing black humour and sly nods to the world that once was with dramatic and brutal action sequences. It introduces mammoths to the world of Mortal Engines, and also features a rarity in children's literature as Fever Crumb begins to question her sexuality.
It's a cracking, if rather bloody, adventure story, and while much of it is bleak and the outcome of the climactic battle not in doubt (such is the nature of prequels), the final scenes are actually some of the most hopeful in the sequence, outside of the epilogue to A Darkling Plain. I would still recommend Reeve's Larklight trilogy as a better starting point for younger readers, but this is solid fare for teenage adventure fans.
A month later they emailed to say that the books which were sitting on their shelf were overdue.
When I popped in, they didn't care about my passport, gave me my new card and checked the books out for two months, since they're closed again now for roof repairs.
The Throne of Fire gives Carter and Sadie a bit of a power downgrade (in the first book, The Red Pyramid they channeled the power of Horus and Isis directly, but by this point have decided this is too dangerous. They also, however, have students, and crushes, which alternately help and hinder as the siblings set out to raise the Sun God Ra from his sleep of millions of years (that's a technical Egyptian term, not a literal length of time).
I personally find the Kanes a little more stock than Percy Jackson, as characters, although it might just be a result of Riordan's attempts to express Sadie's British habits to a US teen audience. I do enjoy his narrative mechanism of having Carter and Sadie narrate separate and occasionally overlapping segments. The stories themselves are good and the mythology, as in the Percy Jackson books, both well researched and interestingly interpreted. The nods to the Olympian series - Egyptian magicians, for reasons unspecified, avoid New York, the home of the Olympian Gods - are a nice touch, although with Norse Gods dropping into Boston next year, it's a wonder there is any room for humans on the East Coast.
Scrivener's Moon, the latest entry in Philip Reeve's Fever Crumb series, which are in turn a prequel to the Mortal Engines Quartet, is about as bleak as its pedigree would suggest, mixing black humour and sly nods to the world that once was with dramatic and brutal action sequences. It introduces mammoths to the world of Mortal Engines, and also features a rarity in children's literature as Fever Crumb begins to question her sexuality.It's a cracking, if rather bloody, adventure story, and while much of it is bleak and the outcome of the climactic battle not in doubt (such is the nature of prequels), the final scenes are actually some of the most hopeful in the sequence, outside of the epilogue to A Darkling Plain. I would still recommend Reeve's Larklight trilogy as a better starting point for younger readers, but this is solid fare for teenage adventure fans.
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