Nancy Pearl really built up my expectations for Whales on Stilts. It was cute, but it didn’t meet my expectations. The characters were supposed to have that 1950s-style two-dimensionality, or maybe even one-dimensionality, but they weren’t quite clever enough to sustain it for a whole book. I think Whales on Stilts would have made a great short story. I’m actually considering returning it, which is extremely unusual for me.
The Golem’s Eye is book two in the Bartimaeus trilogy, following the Amulet of Samarkand. It’s a good second book in the trilogy, not quite as much fun as the first book, but continuing to develop the characters and the larger themes of the first book. I love the wry wit of the Djinni, Bartimaeus, and the long-term political discourse of the series. It’s a nice pro-democracy, anti-facist children’s book and it isn’t too preachy on those themes. Plus the way that magic is handled in the book’s world seems entirely plausible — people who can harness it have most of the power and exploit it for themselves. This is in sharp contrast to the world of Harry Potter, where magicians and magical society just want to be left alone, hidden from the rest of the muggle world. I wish I had enough self-control to stop myself from buying it in hardcover, but I don’t regret buying it in general.
The best book of the bunch is Waifs and Strays, by Charles de Lint. It’s a collection of stories with teenage main characters, set in a number of de Lint’s locales, including my personal favorite, Newford.
The best story in the book is the one new story for this collection, "Sisters." It features Apples and Cassie, the main characters from "There’s No Such Thing," an earlier story in which older sister Appoline (Apples) rescues Cassie from being sexually assaulted by a teenage male babysitter, and because Apples is actually a vampire, she feeds on the perp and then kills him. Cassie doesn’t know that Apples is a vampire, but in Sister’s she figures out that something is strange and wrong with Apples…and eventually, she learns the truth. I don’t want to give anything away, but these characters are a must read for Buffy fans, and the story includes some lighthearted references to the series.
