When I asked my “What We’re Reading” colleagues at LJ/School Library Journal/Junior Library Guild about horsey books (my film club was set to watch the 1979 classic The Black Stallion, based on the 1941 book by Walter Farley), I figured maybe one respondent would go whole hog (or horse). That’s exactly what happened. While Kiera Parrott is reading about racial divides and poverty, Maria Wang is celebrating Garth Nix, Mahnaz Dar touches on ants but no equines, Amanda Mastrull is reveling in long YA, and I take the opportunity to chatter about C.S. Lewis, Lisa Peet comes through like a champ, practically building a collection development piece around horse titles. Ride on, WWR people, ride on!
Mahnaz Dar, Assistant Managing Editor, LJS
I was fairly immersed in literature this weekend. I finished up Rabia Choudry’s Adnan’s Story (St. Martin’s). It was a gripping race to finish it—but it may not have been the best choice for late-night reading. With tons of details about corpse lividity and rigor mortis, as well as possible police corruption, this one gave me more than a few shivers before I was done. I still can’t stop thinking about it, and I’m planning to seek out the podcast Undisclosed (much of what Choudry, and others, discovered and broadcast in that podcast is cited and mentioned in this title), because I just can’t get enough.
I also gobbled up Shaun David Hutchinson’s We Are the Ants (Simon Pulse: S. & S.). This is an amazingly strange YA tale about Henry, a teen who’s abducted by aliens on the regular. (He’s so used to it that he keeps a change of clothes outside his house—the extraterrestrials return him in his boxer shorts, and this gives him easy access to clothes.) They eventually tell the boy that he can save the world, simply by pressing a button, and that he has 144 days in which to decide. Seems like an easy choice, right? Not for Henry, who’s not exactly emotionally stable. It’s nothing short of bizarre, yet it’s beautiful, too, and it’s one I know I won’t be able to stop thinking about for a long time to come.
Liz French, Senior Editor, LJ Reviews
As a child, I read about horses a lot more than I ever rode them—an allergy to hay acquired when I was nine might’ve added to that imbalance, but I have to admit I was always more of a reader than a rider. Among my favorite horse books were Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty and C.S. Lewis’s “Narnia” book, The Horse and His Boy. I recall a battered phonograph player, big and blocky and swirled in aqua and white, upon which I played an LP of Black Beauty read by June Lockhart. Wore that sucker out, I did. And I liked the smart-alecky Bree, the talking horse (squee! Talking horse!) hero of The Horse and His Boy. A lot of Lewis’s allegories referring to Christians, Moses, etc., were lost on me at the time, but even little ole me figured out pretty quickly that Aslan = Christ figure and duly reported this amazing finding to my younger siblings and cousins.
Amanda Mastrull, Assistant Editor, LJ Reviews
This week, I’m reading Morgan Matson’s new (can I still call a May book “new?”) YA novel The Unexpected Everything (S. & S.). I loved her previous title, Since You’ve Been Gone, and was really excited to see this one in the office (the perks of having a shared LJ/SLJ book room, where both adult and children’s/YA materials circulate). I was talking with some colleagues recently about how great it is when an author whose work you love writes a long book, and I referenced The Unexpected Everything (it’s over 500 pages), which doesn’t disappoint. It’s about Andie, whose father, a senator, is caught up in a scandal, the fallout from which leads to her losing her place in a summer program at Johns Hopkins. Her father, meanwhile, cannot work during the ensuing investigation, so the two are spending their days together for the first time in years. With all the good internships and jobs already taken, Andie ends up walking dogs, when she meets Clark. He’s cute and sweet and gets along with her friends and makes her rethink her policy against long-term dating. I’m pretty much just rooting for them entirely, even as I write this. The title is apt as well—Andie is a planner, but with her summer plans going awry (though, she begins to realize, perhaps not in a bad way) she’s forced to live in the moment. It’s sweet and fun and while I know I should be reading the books that I might want to nominate for LJ‘s annual Best Books list, or even books that my colleagues have already nominated, I’m enjoying this one too much to pick up anything else.
Kiera Parrott, Reviews Director, LJS
I just started reading Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (Crown). I’ve been hearing great things about this book for months—and it’s well worth the hype. Desmond brings us into the lives of eight different families living in poverty in Milwaukee. There’s a single mom with two kids, a disabled single dad who also functions as a father figure to the entire neighborhood of young boys, and a heroin addict. They are all living paycheck to paycheck, struggling to avoid being put out on the street or back in shelters. There’s white and black, young and old. Desmond also tells the tales of two of the landlords—who sometimes live almost as close to the edge as their impoverished tenants. It’s an exploration of one of the greatest issues facing Americans today—the housing crisis. Desmond looks at welfare policy, unemployment, the shift away from manufacturing in big cities, and the rise of a bearish rental market amid stagnant wages and benefits. Mind-numbing statistics are humanized and personalized.
Lisa Peet, Associate Editor, News & Features, LJ
I guess it’s not a big surprise that this animal-loving adult was an animal-loving child. Any and all animals, but dogs and horses were my true loves. My parents were good enough to give me riding lessons all through grade school, and I had all the other requisite trappings of a horsey little kid: the shelf of Breyer figurines, posters with Wesley Dennis’s beautiful horse paintings (which I worked from over and over until I learned how to draw horses), and of course the shelves full of horse books. Marguerite Henry’s “King of the Wind” series, definitely, Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, and a bunch of unmemorable paperbacks about English girls at boarding schools, but I especially loved the Henry books: Misty of Chincoteague; King of the Wind; Stormy, Misty’s Foal; Brighty of the Grand Canyon (OK, he was a burro, but he was still great), and more. All of them illustrated by Dennis in sturdy hardcovers that stood up to all my rereading.
I don’t seek out horse books in the same way anymore, but I don’t shy away from them either (heh), though my taste has gotten a bit grittier. A few standouts from recent years: Willy Vlautin’s Lean on Pete (Harper Perennial), basically a boy-and-his-horse story but truly charming and notably nonsaccharine; Jaimy Gordon’s Lord of Misrule (Vintage), a great noirish racetrack tale in the Elmore Leonard tradition, but leaning in a cockeyed way toward the literary (it won the 2010 National Book Award); and last year’s Marvel and a Wonder (Akashic), by Joe Meno, a novel not so much about the animal at its center—which is a good thing because the poor beast doesn’t fare very well—but a great contemporary Western that’s deliciously dark and full of unpleasant characters. I loved it, for whatever grim reason that lurks in my soul (and it’s got a fantastic cover), though I’d say it’s probably not for the faint of heart.
Maria Wang, Editorial Assistant, JLG
With the mid-October release of Garth Nix’s Goldenhand (HarperCollins), the latest entry in the “Old Kingdom” series, I’ve finally come around to reading the author’s “Abhorsen Chronicles.” I spent the weekend repeatedly kicking myself for not beginning sooner after realizing the indisputable genius of Nix. The first “Abhorsen” book, Sabriel, introduces us to a fictional world set in early 20th-century England in which two countries are divided by a wall and the way of life. To the north lies the Old Kingdom, governed by the opposing forces of Free magic and Charter magic, while to the south in Ancelstierre chain mail and swords are cast aside in favor of more progressive advancements in warfare such as firearms. We follow the quest of Sabriel, a young girl who’s searching for her missing father the Abhorsen, a necromancer charged with the duties of binding the dead and preventing them from crossing the nine gates to the living world. With the help of Mogget, a free magic creature trapped in the body of a white cat, and Touchstone, a haunted boy who spent the last 200 years as the wooden figurehead of a boat, Sabriel wields a sword and a bandolier of seven bells against a rather formidable and yet strangely familiar foe. There were moments when I literally couldn’t take how happy this book was making me feel, and I had to pause to breathe and appreciate this world, the magic, the characters, the human interactions, and the dreadful tension Nix manages to build. I am currently ripping through Lirael, the second book in the series, in which Sabriel and Touchstone make a comeback after a 14-year time-skip, and a new brilliant young protagonist is introduced.
