Next!

Finished The Swan Kingdom by Zoe Marriott. It was entertaining. It's a retelling/revision/based on Hans Christian Andersen's "The Wild Swans". I don't know that story to compare it to Marriott's version, but on it's own, I think The Swan Kingdom is well told. Alexandra gets her strength from the land, just as her mother has, as well as the women in her family for many previous generations. Her three older brothers, David, Hugh, and Robin, dote on their younger sister and are as protective as older brothers generally are. David is the future King of the Kingdom, Hugh is the brave soldier and protector, and Robin is the noted scholar, but no one pays much attention to Alexandra. She feels she is plain and slightly awkward and only feels at ease in the gardens with her mother. When Branwen is attacked by a creature and dies, Alexa and her brothers must learn to cope without her. Their father the King is consumed by the desire to find and kill the creature that Alexa described that killed her mother. Instead of returning with the creature, he returns with Zella, a beautiful young woman who has mysteriously besotted the King. Alexa and her brothers know that there is some strange magic going on and in a strange, unintended battle, her brothers disappear and Alexa only wakes four days later, shipped off to live with an aunt she never knew. Discouraged, she finds solace with Gabriel, a young man she sneaks out of her new home to meet with every night while he visits the seaside village. She waits for her brothers to return and when a visitor shows up at her aunt's, it is not the visitor she expects. Alexa must put her beloved homeland to rights and give back to the earth the power she receives from it. A good read; Alexa grows from 15 to 16 in the book and is great for any fairy-tale re-telling fan like myself. Nothing content wise to make it objectionable to readers as young as 11.
I've begun Lirael, the book that follows Sabriel. I'm about 70 pages in and in a big chunky book like this, that's not very far. I do enjoy that Lirael works in the Great Library and I'm curious to find out what kinds of things other than books are in the library.
While I read, I remain your,
Savage Librarian.