WWRW

This is my first time participating in What We're Reading Wednesday, but I hope to make this more of a regular thing, since I owe such a debt of gratitude to Jessica and everyone who participates in her link-up. It is just too hard to find and pre-read enough quality books to keep up with my kids. So, thank you everyone! Here's what we read over Spring Break:

I'll start with Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow. We have become big fans of Jessica Day George in our house, so I was excited to see that she had written a novel based on the fairy tale "East of the Sun, West of the Moon."If you aren't familiar with this story, it's kind of a Scandinavian version of Beauty and the Beast and even closer to the myth of Cupid and Psyche. As adaptations go, this one is nicely fleshed out yet still stays true to the original version of the fairy tale. The heroine, a poor girl known only as the Lass, agrees to go and spend a year with a monstrous polar bear (really a prince in disguise) in an enchanted castle.

In the interest of full disclosure, there is one aspect of this book which some might find scandalous or creepy.  As in the original story, when the Lass goes to sleep in the enchanted castle, a stranger comes and gets into the other side of the bed with her. (In the somewhat edited version of the fairy tale in the anthology my kids have, the bear remains a bear and sleeps at the girl's feet.) In this version, the prince is definitely a man, At first, the Lass is horrified by this intrusion, and gets out of bed to sleep on a couch in her room. The stranger picks her up, tucks her back into her side of the bed, and goes to sleep. Since this is the only time he touches her or speaks to her, the Lass gets used to her unorthodox sleeping arrangement as time passes and even nudges the stranger when he snores. When the Lass is allowed to return to her family for a visit, she tells an older sister about her bedfellow, and upon her sisters insistence, smuggles a candle back with her to get a good look at him (just like Psyche), breaking her promise and setting the stage for her quest to redeem herself and save the prince.

My sixth grader loved this book, and even opened up her bedroom window AND turned her fan on full blast so she could chill her room to a frigid 68 degrees to help immerse herself in the story. My poor little Arizonan. 

A bonus for me was the author's afterward, where she describes her lifelong love affair with Scandanavian language. She even studied Old Norse in college so she could read the Eddas in their original form. So now I love Jessica Day George even more. There is a glossary in the back with all of the Norwegian and Old Norse words used with a  pronunciation guide, which the word nerd in me got all excited about. 

We have really enjoyed Shannon Hale's books, too, and I myself am partial to a good sci-fi story, so I had high hopes for Dangerous. There is a lot to love about the teen-aged heroine, Maisie Danger Brown. She's home-schooled, smart, and driven. She gets along great with her parents and her nerdy best friend Luther. She has her sights set on becoming an astronaut and she doesn't let the fact that she was born missing an arm below the elbow or the rude comments mocking her disability get her down. She wins a contest that sends her to Astronaut camp, where an whirlwind adventure featuring aliens, nano-robots, and super-powers commences.
Despite the fact that this novel was not Hale's strongest writing, it would be a really fun story for my middle schooler if not for the romance. During the course of trying to save the world, Maisie spends a few weeks shacking up with her shady love interest and there is a scene where he (unsuccessfully) tries to get her to sleep with him, even assuring her that he is packing protection. So...not for my 6th grader.

This experience has taught me two important lessons.
1. I can't really trust any contemporary authors to have the same level of appropriateness throughout their body of work.
2. My library's system of separating Teen lit from Children's is totally crazy. Dangerous was classified as Children's literature, yet The Goose Girl and Hale's other Bayern books are all "Teen." I don't understand...

My third grader read All of a Kind Family. I'm sure many of you are familiar with this gem about a Jewish family living in New York City during the beginning of the 20th century. It's a family favorite, but we have never tried any of the sequels. I hope to try them out soon.

Back to fairy tales, my kindergartner is currently obsessed with Mercer Mayer's picture book version of East of the Sun, West of the Moon, which we borrowed from the library to compare it to the other retellings. Mayer's prince is disguised as a frog, not a bear, and it looks like his story takes place in Russia, not Scandinavia, but it is beautifully told and even more beautifully illustrated:

I spy icons! 

So lovely

That's it for now. Only three more weeks until school gets out and we have more time for reading and blogging. Linking back to Housewifespice for more recommendations!