The Little Giant of Aberdeen County

by Tiffany Baker

{ 2009 | Grand Central Publishing | 341 pgs }

To start off, isn’t that a great cover? I had this book on my list before I saw the cover, but surely I was just the tiniest bit influenced by the art.

Truly has a pituitary gland problem that makes her grow at an alarming rate, to alarming sizes – from her birth as a 12+ pound baby to a gargantuan woman. She narrates the story (from a semi-omniscient point-of-view [is semi-omniscient a real term?]), spending the first half describing her relationship with her dainty, delicate sister Serena Jane, and later describing her life once Serena Jane marries the town doctor. There are a number of themes in the plot, and I confess not all were to my liking, but the book as a whole was extremely captivating. For a story with little action, it was definitely a page-turner.

The Princess and the Hound

by Mette Ivie Harrison

{ 2007 | HarperTeen | 416 pgs }

I apologize for not writing reviews until now – a downside, for me, is that I don’t have as good a memory of the books as I would have earlier…

Harrison’s book The Princess and the Hound was not at all what I expected. It isn’t told by the princess: she isn’t introduced until a fair bit into the book. Instead, the narrator is the prince who is betrothed to the princess. Yes, surprisingly, the storyteller in a vaguely romantic medieval fantasy novel is male, written by a female author. And it was good storytelling! I suppose the most basic premise of the book is that this kingdom has forbidden communication between humans and animals – in the past, there were some who practiced “animal magic,” but those days are gone (in part because of a wicked king who…well, I won’t give it away). And not only are they gone, they’re lost in legend. So you can imagine the trouble it would bring if the current king married a woman who could – and did – speak to animals.

And then we add in the storyline of the princess, Beatrice, and her hound. Beatrice is notoriously cold, her only relationship being a deep friendship with her hound. I’ll just say that I was rather thrown off by Harrison’s plot; she set everything up so that I could easily predict what was coming next – and then I turned out to be wrong. It was brilliant. Harrison included extremely subtle hints and foreshadowing for both the obvious and the surprise plots, which meant things still made sense even after I was caught off guard.

I might say that the book had too many loose ends tied up too neatly, but here my memory fails me. It could have been the opposite, that I had lingering questions left unanswered. If it is the latter, Harrison has followed this book with The Princess and the Bear (2009). I plan to read it.

Defining Twilight

by Brian Leaf

{ 2009 | Cliffs Notes | 192 pgs }

I was kindly sent a copy of this book by the author for review. It’s a workbook that helps students learn vocabulary for the SAT and ACT by using words found in Twilight by Stephenie Meyers. Having both read Twilight and tutored a student preparing for the major standardized tests, I felt like I was in a good position to evaluate Leaf’s book.

The book contains 40 groups of vocabulary words, and for each group, students are asked to look up the words in their handy copy of Twilight and guess a definition based on context. Then the definitions are provided; students begin a series of drills: choosing synonyms, making analogies, and completing sentences.

While I liked the general structure of the book, there were two things I wished had been different. First, the vocabulary words are taken sequentially from Twilight, so they don’t increase in difficulty at all. Each group of words is from a 2-3 page range of text in the book. Second, there are only 8 drills for each group, which means not all words will have a practice exercise. (I could add a third complaint – that students must have a copy of Twilight with them, instead of being able to read the relevant sentences in the workbook – but since Leaf’s book is not specifically authorized by Meyers, I can understand why it was done this way.)

Overall, I think Defining Twilight would be a fun exercise for a Twilight fan preparing for college entrance exams, but only as a supplement to a more in-depth study aid.