Tag Archives: Carrollton Public Library

The Truth about Triangles

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Obviously, I read to my kids all the time. Just as obviously, I do not review the hundreds of picture books and board books, nor still the dozens of chapter books that I have read. But once, almost exactly a year ago, I read Malcolm a real book, and that time has come around once more.

This time, he chose The Truth about Triangles. I wasn’t at the library when he picked it, so I don’t know if it was on one of the monthly themed displays or how he found it, but I assume he liked the picture of the pizza slice on the cover. The last one was probably 50ish pages shorter but aged identically, 12 going on 13. That said, it was a noticeably younger book than the one I’ve read this past month. And I have to say, I don’t know if Malcolm was entirely ready for this one?

In part I say this because he took quite a while to get into the groove, consistently wanting me to read something else.[1] But mostly I say it because this 12 year old is dealing with much older situations than the last batch were. Luca Salvatore has to contend with a junior high crush on the new kid in school, and with his parents’ eroding marriage, and with their eroding family pizza business, and with his overblown sense of responsibility to resolve these issues by himself and without affecting his best friendship.

Luckily, he’s a really good pizza maker, and he has an idea about getting on a reality show and winning over his celebrity crush who hosts the show, as a method of solving nearly all of these problems. But will he be able to keep everyone together and solve all of their many problems, even with such a great plan up his sleeve?

Kid book that nobody who sees this will read so: mostly, yeah. If you accept the premise that he was always going to get on the show, the book shines for dealing with the other problems in mostly thoughtful and realistic ways. Luca has to learn how to not solve everyone’s problems and just be a kid, but since pizza is his passion, he’s allowed to nevertheless solve the biggest one that way. Everything in his personal life is solved through a judicious helping of telling the truth instead of lying about how he’s fine in order to keep other people from feeling more stressed out. And the divorce…. isn’t fixed. He learns that, no, that’s not how life works. Kids cannot fix adult relationship problems, nor be responsible for them.

And so on the one hand, that was a lot of stress for Malcolm to wade through, and I get why he was so unwilling to listen to the earlier parts of the book where it’s all a quagmire of tween angst. But I’m glad to have him be matter of factly exposed to gay kids, and the idea that some parents don’t make it and the kids are not and cannot be responsible for that, and hell, even the idea that sometimes with enough passion and perseverance, problems can be magically solved. It doesn’t happen much, but it doesn’t happen never, y’know? But mostly the prior things more than that last one.

Oh, and also: the triangle as slice of pizza but also as visual metaphor for many, many three-sided relationships? It comes up a lot. Which makes it the most literary book I’ve ever read to a child. Hooray!

[1] I’m not a monster, after the first few chapters I offered for him to not finish reading it and take it back to the library. But he always vociferously refused, and he did basically devour the second half.

Nona the Ninth

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It is my understanding that Tamsyn Muir wanted to name this book Nona, rather than Nona the Ninth, but her editor and/or publisher told her she couldn’t if she expected people to find the book and continue reading the series. The compromise position they reached was Nona the Ninth, and to my regret, this is not something I can reflect in the post name. So just be aware I would have if I could have.

Nona was much easier to read than Harrow, but I find that it is much harder to describe without spoilers. Part of that is because it is the third book in a nominally four book series, of course. Part of it is because Tamsyn Muir never met a plotline (or a character development) she couldn’t obfuscate inside out and backward[1].

So let’s see. If Gideon is a book written from the perspective of the Nine Houses, and Harrow is a book written from the perspective of The Emperor and his Divine Saints, then Nona is a book written from the perspective of the citizenry of the Empire that exist outside the Houses[2]. Nona and her friends (and the citizenry that surround them) live in a city on a planet under siege. Under siege by the [let’s say] terrorist organization Blood of Eden, under siege by the Empire, under siege by the glowing blue light in the sky. Within five days (as heavily implied by the early text of the book), everything is going to go straight to hell, and Nona (and her friends, let us not forget) must balance the razorwire to make it through those five days. Also, not for nothing, that’s when Nona’s birthday is!

Before I go, I will introduce you to Nona, by telling you that her primary concerns are her job at school, and her upcoming birthday, and dogs, and absolutely none of the dangers that surround her. (And her friends.)

[1] To be clear, this is a compliment. I think a grudging one, and that is probably what makes it not be clear, but a compliment nonetheless.
[2] Which is already sort of a spoiler for the series, because as far as I could tell reading Gideon, the Nine Houses were the entirety of the Empire; I had no idea a separate citizenry existed!

Phoebe and Her Unicorn

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I have been making much of the fact that I’m basically reading nothing, or at a snail’s pace, or what have you. This is not entirely accurate, as a) I read rather a lot of comics (currently summer 1987, Marvel time) and b) I read rather a lot of kid books, mostly to the boy.[1] So many, in fact, that if I tried to write reviews for all of them, I would frankly have little or no leisure time left for anything else. Plus, kidbook reviews really don’t fit the aesthetic of Shards of Delirium, so I’d also need a new site (easy) and a new writing style (erm, less easy) to make it happen, and long story short, I opted not to go that way.

Plus also, imagine if I included a review per reread? Yeesh.

The difference, then, with Phoebe and Her Unicorn is that I did not read it to anyone but myself, egged on by Peter S. Beagle’s[2] effusive introduction. This is one of those comic strip collections, so my categorization may be off I suppose? Also, I have no idea where the comic strip exists. Newspapers? A website? Couldn’t tell you, unless maybe if I did research. A little girl is skipping rocks, and hits a unicorn in the nose, knocking her out of her narcissistic contemplation of her own reflection. For this favor, the unicorn offers to grant a wish, and the wish that comes out is for the unicorn to be the little girl’s best friend. Is it Calvin and Hobbes but for girls? Yeah, maybe, but is that fine? Yes, yes it is.

The book is endearing, sweet, and occasionally quite funny. I do not regret the 40 minutes or so I spent reading this first collection, and if more of them appear, I’ll probably read those too.

[1] I have really complicated feelings about how we started reading to the girl a lot later than to the boy, such that she has a hard time sitting still for it, which makes it hard to read to her, especially when someone else is competing for attention. Complicated feelings, also, about how this is an obvious self-perpetuating cycle. That is the number one thing I would change about how we have parented up to this point, if I could.
[2] The Last Unicorn guy

Harrow the Ninth

I have been reading one book for the entire summer. I just… what even is this? And it did not help that I found Harrow the Ninth extremely difficult to read. If I had not come off the high of Gideon, I might have just quit a few chapters in. But then again, it’s the act of reading the first book that made this one so distasteful to me. It’s hard to explain without spoilers.

I mean, everything about this book is hard to explain without spoilers. In the first book, the necromantic flowers of the Nine Houses, and the cavaliers who defend them, are called to the God-Emperor’s home to become the new round of Lyctors, his hands who help him, I don’t know, run the empire or something? This has not happened in 10,000 years, so it’s kind of a big deal. But then they start <spoiler>ing.

This book picks up with the newly graduated(?) Lyctors, learning what it is exactly that the Emperor needs them for, and how to deal with their new jobs as well as the endless aeons of immortality that await them. Simple as far as it goes, except… yeah, legitimately anything I said by way of explanation would be a spoiler of the book’s central conceit. I compared the prior book to Rendezvous with Rama, and I stand by that. Half the joy of both books so far is in the act of discovery under an almost entirely alien set of circumstances; well, “joy” for the reader, I’m not sure that word plausibly applies for the characters, but still, the similarity is real.

Still though, I simply must get this off my chest, and so the rest goes under the spoiler-cut line. But I’ll say this one other thing: half the book is written in second-person. This is awkward and difficult to get used to, far moreso than I’d ever have guessed. A good friend, lost to me for seven years, used to joke about making a second-person shooter video game, and while the untenability of that is obvious… second-person narration is nearly as off-putting. The only difference between this and the game concept is, you can eventually get used to it in print. Or maybe I’m wrong, and you could eventually get used to having to turn around constantly to affect whatever is coming up behind you, or to walking backwards through the places you’re meant to go. I guess the mind can acclimate to anything, given sufficient time and cause.

Oh, actual last thing: I sort of think that saying whether I liked the book or not would still count as a spoiler, for reasons that would probably be obvious to you if you loved the first book and were only a few chapters into this one. But I will say that I have every intention of reading the next book.

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Gideon the Ninth

On paper[1], Gideon the Ninth seems tailor-made for me to love it. It’s like someone took Rendezvous with Rama, decades of D&D necromancer jokes, and a modern snarky television teenager, and threw them all in a blender, then poured the puree into a puzzle box that is, if probably not solvable for any given reader, at least has a satisfying solution.

And I want to be clear that even though the first few chapters were a slow, uphill start, it turns out I really did enjoy every single one of those elements, disparately and in conjunction. Nevertheless, I have big, complicated feelings about this book, which are impossible to get into without massive story-destroying spoilers. And so, a cut!

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