Book Review: Revenge of the Witch

Title: The Last Apprentice: Revenge of the Witch
Author: Joseph Delaney
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Publication Year: 2005
Read: March 2015
Where It Came From: Library
Genre: Middle-grade-to-YA-historical-fantasy-horror
Rating: 4 Boggart Pits

I can trace my interest in these books back many years, based almost entirely on the eye-catching art. The covers for this series are creepy, atmospheric, and striking (and, as I discovered when I read this one, the art continues on the inside, too!). When I saw that it was being made into a movie with the awesome Ben Barnes (a.k.a. Prince Caspian, a.k.a. Dunstan Thorn), I finally decided I had better read the book, since the general chatter I’ve heard about the books didn’t seem to quite match up with the almost goofy quest-fantasy look of the movie trailer. I mean, I’ve heard these books are SCARY, and the movie looks anything but.

The story begins with our narrator, twelve-year-old Thomas Ward, getting sent off to try out to be the apprentice to the local Spook, or the person who roams about the countryside taking care of unwanted supernatural phenomena and creatures, such as boggarts, witches, ghouls, and the like. Thomas is the seventh son of a seventh son, making him uniquely qualified for this job. His Mam believes he is in fact even more uniquely qualified than that, but never quite explains why, which is a strong thread of mystery running through the story. The story follows Tom through his trial period (spoiler alert: he gets the job), and through the early days of his apprenticeship with the Spook. He meets a pointy-shoed local girl named Alice, and eventually ends up inadvertently releasing a big, bad witch called Mother Malkin into the world. He then tries to counteract the bad she does and has to figure out a way to recapture her to save both himself and his family.

The story is very well-written. It is a quick read, but there is a lot of complexity beneath the surface. Tom’s voice shines brightly—he is an honest, straightforward narrator. He is a good person to his core, but we see his struggles as he tries to make the right decisions, and, when he doesn’t, try to fix things. All of the main characters are similarly complex. The Spook, for instance, has a fraught relationship with his brother, a past occupation that comes to light, and qualms about burning witches (too cruel, he says), that show he is more than his gruff, beastie-hunting exterior. Tom’s Mam, too, is wonderfully complex and mysterious—she loves her son, but not in a soft way, and I look forward to finding out more about her in future books. And then there is Alice—torn between her family and wanting to maybe not be like them. She is a particularly compelling character because of her seeming powerlessness in her situation, and her struggle to make choices to gain power in her own life. I was initially a little turned off by the number of “evil” women in the story (the witches), but complex and layered characters like Alice and Mam mitigated that.

As for the creepy factor, this was another book where I found myself thinking, okay, this is a little creepy, but not actually frightening! as I was reading, but then my phone would buzz or someone would come in my room to talk to me and I’d jump about 5 feet in the air. So…not nightmare-inducing, but a little scarier than I initially gave it credit for!

I enjoyed this one, and look forward to reading the rest of the series and delving deeper into these characters. Also, I forgot to mention that there is a passive-aggressive boggart housekeeper—what could be better than that? (Also also, I hemmed and hawed and then included “historical” in the genre tags, because it could easily be a fantasy world, but there was mention of people reading Greek and Latin. So I guess it must be this world, or a version of it, after all?)

The Haul: VNSA Book Sale, Part the Second

Ah, used books. Having already gleefully shown off my myriad discoveries in the Children’s Books section of Ye Olde VNSA Book Sale, it may surprise you to find out that that wasn’t even half of my overall take. Or maybe not. You may know me, and know I have a book problem.

A very big problem indeed.

After a thorough combing of the kids' section, I headed a couple tables over to the science fiction and fantasy area, where I scrounged up most of the contents of that there box. I think some old-school SFF geek must’ve cleaned out their stash this year, because there was a lot of really cool stuff—WAY more than I remember from my brief perusal of the section last year. Among all the books and authors I was unfamiliar with, I found quite a few keepers, such as this lovely collection of Douglas Adams books:

Already Missing 2013: Susan's Top 10

At Alyssa’s urging, I am spending some time today to order my list of favorite books from the reading I did last year. Back at the beginning of December, Alyssa and I were both playing around with our favorite books lists, and I had a slight advantage going in because I had been assiduously keeping track of my least favorite books of the year (and out of a sense of guilt for the immeasurable fun of rating my ARGH reads, I had started a list of favorite books as well). But it turned out that my guilt was disproportionate! I had 11 books on my Worst-Reads list (and one of them was a little exaggerated to make it there), and a full 18 on my Best-Reads list. Eighteen!! To choose only ten seemed unfair to the other eight that had been scrawled on my scrap of paper. As I looked at the paper, I realized I hadn’t even remembered to put some other well-enjoyed books I’d read this year on it. It really was a better year for my reading than the existence of a “Worst Books of 2013 Reading” list suggests.

Yet, Alyssa and a seeming majority of the book blogosphere seem to have been able to accomplish this feat of winnowing books down to a top-ten list, so it is obviously not impossible. And with that spirit, I shall set about making my list. Because I am having particular trouble deciding on the top-top spots, I am going to deviate from Alyssa’s formatting and do my list count-down style.

S’s Best Books of 2013

10. Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline

Kicking it off at #10 is Alyssa’s recommended Ready Player One. I, having some distrust of fiction audiobooks, picked up a paperback in February after hearing something that sounded like The Westing Game. So, recommended by Alyssa and bearing at least casual similarity to a beloved work of children’s literature? It was an easy choice to read, but had a lot to live up to based on that. AND IT DID!! I loved it! I like only a handful of things about 80s pop culture, and because I truly despise 80s fashion, I don’t even bother to watch classic Brat Pack movies. Yet the book completely worked for me, and based on the number of times it stops to explain every 80s reference it makes, it should work for anyone.

This is one of those books that is so secure in what it’s doing that it takes a little time afterwards to figure out why it worked so well. The narrative voice of Wade, a teen competing in a virtual reality scavenger hunt of 80s pop culture, is completely compelling, combining authority about his videogame skills and insecurity about his personal relationships. To an extent the book is dystopian, but in a much more realistic way than the popular depictions of overreaching government programs. Here, poverty in the United States has caused an increase in crime, spurring many to retreat to a cyber-reality so they don’t need to go outside, and discouraging them from believing that political elections provide any means of breaking the cycle of poverty and crime. So solid main character, solid setting . . . AND the scavenger hunt, mental puzzle cleverness promised by Westing Game comparison.

And this is only the beginning of my year’s top-ten.

9. Paper Towns, by John Green

Paper Towns is similar to Ready Player One in that it is also narrated by a smart teenage boy. But while Wade was focused on solving the steps of a game (albeit a game with immense monetary value), Paper Towns’ Quentin is navigating the much more complicated world of teenage identity, and trying to solve the mystery of his dream girl neighbor, who has taken him on a crazy night’s adventure before running away from home in the last weeks before high school graduation.

The book is a suspenseful page-turner, but John Green does a clever job layering the book by interpreting Whitman poetry and having characters respond to key symbols differently. What makes it truly deserving of a spot here is that our book club conversation had a LOT to talk about after finishing the book.

8. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by Simon Armitage

I read “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” in my Survey of Early English Literature, and I liked it well enough at the time. But after reading Alyssa’s review of the audiobook of Simon Armitage’s translation, I decided to visit it again. I am so glad I did!

If you missed it last spring, now is actually the BEST time to pick up a copy because the small epic poem takes place in winter. The cold landscape evoked in Gawain’s travels, contrasted with the warmth of sitting in a castle resting during the holidays, feels particularly close to me after a day spent shoveling and then nestled with a book. Thematically the poem is also close to us right now because it is about realizing your shortcomings and strengths, and resolving to be a better person as the new year begins.

And, as Alyssa has said, the language (particularly when listened to on the audiobook) is beautiful.

7. Code Name Verity, by Elizabeth Wein

Another wonderful read that our book club had this year. Code Name Verity does so many things exceptionally well that I could spend a lot of space repeating what Alyssa and I already said about it in October. I think what I love the most about it in retrospect is how much Elizabeth Wein successfully manipulates my sense of hope throughout the story. There are some stories that you assume will not end happily: Shakespeare warns us right away that Romeo and Juliet are going to kill themselves, Jodi Piccoult and Nicholas Sparks have built publishing empires on tissue boxes emptied on their books. There are some stories that you know will end happily: genre romances, anything by P.G. Wodehouse. And then there is Code Name Verity, which opens in medias res with the announcement that one main character is dead and the other is being held prisoner. But did you SEE THE DEATH HAPPEN? it tempts you to ask. Where is the rescue mission? It’s very disorienting not to know whether the plotline is heading towards a happy or tragic resolution, and it takes a ton of skill for Wein to make parts of the book very funny even while the tension is high.

6. The Summer Prince, by Alaya Dawn Johnson

I read The Summer Prince back in April, and my first impression was that the concept was brilliant and the writing artful. In the months since then, my admiration for this book has not waned, and instead has become stronger. I think it’s so well done that it vied for my top spots on this list. The only thing holding me back is that when I went to write just why it was so worthy of the second place spot, most of what I was saying wasn’t about my emotional response. Nevertheless this is my pick for the 2014 Printz Award.

5. The Swerve, by Stephen Greenblatt

Ecce! Coming in at #5 is my only nonfiction work on the final list. It’s the fascinating story of the transmission of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura from ancient days to the early modern age. I listened to this one in March while snowshoeing behind my old university buildings, so part of my reaction could be nostalgia for college learning and friends, but just thinking about the story of the book is enough to make me quiver a little now.

Lucretius is arguably the only genius of Latin literature, and his lengthy poem about the nature of things is one of the only remaining texts we have of Epicurean philosophy, which (among other things) proposes that living wisely for the absence of pain is the greatest end. Even though I know I should have read this poem (nay, translated it) by now, I never have because philosophy tends to confuse or bore me. Or when I wake up after a quick nap from being bored, I am confused about where I am in the text.

But Greenblatt’s premise is spine-tingling: he claims that the rediscovery of Lucretius’s writing is what sparked the humanism of the Renaissance, and that the event of the rediscovery was far from assured. Unlike the works of Homer, which existed in many Medieval libraries across Europe, De Rerum Natura was found in only one manuscript. Greenblatt tells the story of its Renaissance discoverer, as well as the story of the disappearance of Epicurean philosophy in the late Roman Empire, in such a way that I caught my breath a few times, and felt tears at others.

Read it. Listen to it. Tromp through some snowy woods on a sunny day, taste something delicious, and brush your finger along some dusty old books on your bookshelf as you contemplate what life means, and how your idea of that is related to the survival of one manuscript copied and recopied by monks for a thousand years.

4. Fangirl, by Rainbow Rowell

The way that Alyssa cried over Code Name Verity, I blubbered over Fangirl. It seems a little weird to write them both in the same sentence (and to compare the tears that flowed over each) because they are very different books. But I LOVE Cath as a character, and I adore Rainbow Rowell for validating the world of fanfiction even as Cath’s struggles are mostly to find that the world outside of her fandom is a good place to live. Whereas Eleanor & Park focuses on a romance in the 80s terminally complicated by Eleanor’s danger in her home, Fangirl is about the very modern world of Internet fandoms, and its romance is endangered by Cath’s anxieties. I think that Cath’s story may have the broader appeal, and that Rowell’s writing style fits Cath better, so I am hoping that everyone tries this one in the coming year. Particularly if you have trouble with transitions in life.

3. The Scorpio Races, by Maggie Stiefvater

Three entries on my general loved-it list this year are Maggie Stiefvater books. After not particularly loving the Shiver trilogy (maybe because I’m not a big fan of wolves in snow?), I wasn’t sure I wanted to read the new Raven Cycle. Then I read a few pages, which turned into the whole book, which then turned into quick consumption of The Scorpio Races, and a hunt for The Dream Thieves at the BEA. Suffice to say, I loved EACH of these Stiefvater books, but out of a sense of diversity I am only picking one of them for this list. The Scorpio Races takes far less plot explanation than the Raven Cycle, so it is my choice. Also, it is tightly written as a stand-alone novel. Puck and Sean are sensitive and brave. The Stiefvateran conflict between rich and poor is handled well. And the idea of racing by the sea on carnivorous giant horses is breathtaking.

2. A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki

If you follow us on Twitter you may remember my angst in reading this in bed back at the October/November cusp, summed up by a quote from the book: “their monstrous barbarity shines a new light on my own small suffering.” Based on my horrified tweeting you’d think that this Booker finalist was a book to be avoided, but I think my immeasurable pain for Nao, a young Japanese teenager, and her long-dead young uncle is an indication that Ruth Ozeki crafted a very strong book. My stomach turned, my palms got sweaty, and I read pages of philosophy with total interest. The ending surprised me and provoked more caps-lock on Twitter. Do yourself and me a favor by reading this and letting yourself get carried away by Nao’s confident and intimate diary of coming to peace with being uprooted to lower-middle class life in Japan from upper-middle class life in California. And then thank Ozeki for breaking up Nao’s story with the rest of the book’s focus on adults who give you some space to calm down before entering the sadistic world of secondary school, office culture, or barracks again.

1. The Song of Achilles, by Madeline Miller

As everyone is probably sick of hearing by now, I loved this book. It’s already appeared as my favorite book of the summer, and its depiction of the gods is still in my head. Unlike Homer's Thetis, whom I picture shrouded and hunched with grief, Miller's Thetis is a frightening force of nature and destruction. "Her mouth was a gash of red, like the torn-open stomach of a sacrifice, bloody and oracular. Behind it her teeth shone sharp and white as bone." "[Her] voice hissed like water poured coals." And then I keep thinking about the book, and I remember that a message of the book is that the force of the gods is not as terrifying as the emptiness of death and being forgotten. Ahhhhhh I love this book!

The Wolf Princess Comedy Hour with Alyssa and Susan

Title: The Wolf Princess
Author: Cathryn Constable
Publisher: Chicken House
Publication Date: September 24th, 2013 (in USA)
Read: November 2013
Where It Came From: ARC from publisher at Book Expo America and eARC from publisher via NetGalley*
Genre: Middle-grade-low-fantasy
Rating: 2 Volkonsky Diamonds

Though the one on the left is the cover for the US hardcover release, we much prefer the version on the right.

The Wolf Princess crossed our paths twice. The first time, Susan picked up a copy at the BEA because it was a children’s princess fantasy, and the second time, Alyssa saw it available on NetGalley and thought it looked like fun. What fun! we thought. We can read it, and then do a joint post together.

So far, so good. In fact, we did both read it, so all was well up to that point. After a wide-ranging and not entirely focused discussion of the book (listening to songs from the movie Anastasia in different languages may have been involved), Alyssa (perhaps cruelly) delegated the initial discussion synthesis and post writing to Susan.

It was here that, much like in colonial Nigeria, things started to fall apart. As in, literally half the sentences that Susan tried to write. See for yourself:

Susan Attempt 1

Susan's first attempt started strong, but was abandoned not once, but both in the middle and at the end, for reasons unknown to the discoverers of this musty digital manuscript. Exhibit A, for your examination:

Remember the magic of Anastasia? The Disney-style princess movie made after the animators left Disney? Set in a Russia of abandoned and dusty palaces, it tells the story of poor orphan Anya, who discovers that she is the lost princess Anastasia, and heir to some remaining imperial wealth. The ultimate proof that she’s a member of the family destroyed by the Russian Revolution is that she has a vague memory of a special song. The main difference between The Wolf Princess and Anastasia is that there’s a cute romance in the movie that wouldn’t fit in a story about the younger orphan, Sophie. And there are wolves in the book. The other stuff is the same, as though orphans in

There are a lot of things to recommend the book to younger readers (I’d say ten would be the ideal age for this story), and even more particularly to children fascinated by the winter wonderland of imperial Russian palaces. But to be perfectly fair, there are not that many things to recommend it to the college-and-past audience (even though it makes me feel like a crotchety spoilsport to say this).

Flowing narrative (aside from the abrupt drop-off in the middle, of course) introduces this modern-day Russian fairytale, and not unkindly begins to address our opinion of it. As the lengthiest and most coherent of the attempts, we are left to wonder what more we would have learned had this attempt been successfully completed.

Susan Attempt 2

The second attempt tried to move past the Anastasia associations, dispensed with the bull crap, and got right down to the business at hand. Was the review to be harsh? Favorable? Hard to say with so little extant. Only this fragment remains to us:

In reading The Wolf Princess it is best to forget plot details from Anastasia and just remember how beautiful the palace is during the ball scenes, because it’s a little difficult to keep

Those of us with even the mildest proclivity for completeness will find this open-ended thought frustrating as we are left to wonder, difficult to keep what?? Alas, that knowledge is not to be.

Susan Attempt 3

No one knows what Susan was drinking, eating, or otherwise consuming the night she typed this, but it appears that the enormity of the task at hand plagued her with maudlin thoughts as she strove to forge a personal connection with both a season and country to which she doesn't feel particularly inclined. She also seems to have been trying to force a segue to one of her favorite topics, the movie 1776 and her beloved John Adams. What is going on here?? If your scholarly analysis of these 3.5 sentences proves fruitful, please share your findings with us.

Considering how miserable a lot of aspects of life were in almost every past era, it’s remarkable how easy it is to look at crumbling symbols of bygone times with grief. I’m guilty of doing this a lot. I wandered through English estates in a magical fog of wishing disproportionately wealthy landowners the resources to maintain their mansions before I visited the Liverpool Slavery Museum and learned that most of that wealth came from the Atlantic slave trade (and hence it’s not lamentable that the revenue source is gone). So I completely get why

There’s really nothing else to be said about this one.

Susan Attempt 4

Despair seems to have overcome Susan during her fourth attempt, as she could only manage to sit down and narrate that action before presumably trundling off to some other, more pleasant, corner of the internet. Perhaps there is some sort of code hidden in these attempts? An anagram of a plea for help, or rescue, perhaps? Apparently the albatross lobbed at her by her callous co-blogger had simply grown too heavy to bear alone.

I sat down

But seriously folks, lest our pert and petty patter (thanks, Ann M. Martin, for that lovely turn of phrase!) lead you to believe our reaction to The Wolf Princess was entirely negative, we didn’t actually hate it. (As you may have guessed, a meeting of the Mutual Self-Admiration Society had convened right as we sat down to write this post, and Susan’s laughter as she was reading in real time while Alyssa toyed out her commentary egged A on to further heights and depths.) Here's the Goodreads blurb for the book (that's right, we're feeling lazy tonight) to bring us all up to speed on what's going on in it:

Alone in the world, Sophie dreams of being someone special, but could never have imagined this. On a school trip to Russia, Sophie and her two friends find themselves on the wrong train. They are rescued by the beautiful Princess Anna Volkonskaya, who takes them to her winter palace and mesmerizes them with stories of lost diamonds and a tragic past. But as night falls and wolves prowl, Sophie discovers more than dreams in the crumbling palace of secrets.

The most we can offer as criticism, independent of any coincidental similarity to Anastasia, is that we never got a sense of the secondary characters as being more than cliches. The main character, Sophie, is a sweet and lonely girl hoping to find a place where she feels at home, and whether she is generous or selfish, she has a constant motive. We cannot say as much about the other characters. Sophie’s boarding school roommates are Marianne (the Smart One) and Delphine (the Fashionable One), and you can probably guess how their interactions generally go. (Marianne: I wish I could be STUDYING now. Delphine: I love clothes!) The princess and her benefactor, the general, are equally limited in their character dimensions. Because they have wealth (or the appearance of wealth), they are disparaging of the third or twenty-third generation servants living in the palace (after all, servants are a separate species. And a gross one at that!). Almost a hundred years after the Russian Revolution, servants still guard houses where their families worked because servants are insanely loyal. (Genuinely insane. Snaps for you if you can figure out how they have enough money to live if the owners of the palace have been absent for fifty years.). Maybe when we were 11 we would've been able to skim over these troublesome things, but as twentysomethings we found it difficult to suspend our disbelief.

Despite our issues with characterization, Alyssa found one of the highlights of her reading experience to be the beautiful, evocative imagery of Russian winter and deteriorated imperial opulence. The pictures painted by the words are quite transporting and nearly make you feel the cold and the weight of history that Sophie and her friends in the story are experiencing. On another positive note, Susan noted that the magic in the book stems from the very tangible experience of finding oneself on a train to an unknown destination. It’s particularly charming to think that maybe one time, that train’s destination will be more wonderful than the intended one, and that a magic landscape is only a few hours away from the real world.

While we thought there was potential for this to be a really fun read based on the plot blurb, in the end we were both disappointed with it. Maybe we would've enjoyed it more when we were at the younger end of the target age group, but the things we found to be well done in the book did not counterbalance the elements that we found to be problematic. Not throw-it-at-the-wall bad, but not something we will be purchasing for the keeper shelf, either.

And on that note, dear readers, please excuse us while we go watch Anastasia.

*As ever, much as we are grateful for the copy, our review is uninfluenced by its source(s).