Birthday Review: Dragon and Thief, by Timothy Zahn

Today is Timothy Zahn's 68th birthday. He's perhaps best known for his Star Wars novels, but he's done a lot of pretty enjoyable SF on his own. And he's a fellow U of I grad -- a few years (8, I suppose!) before me. Here's what I wrote about the first book in a YA series that I read with enjoyment until the end.

Dragon and Thief, by Timothy Zahn

Timothy Zahn is probably best-known for his Star Wars novelizations, which seem to be fairly well-regarded among media tie-in books, and SW novelizations in particular. I haven't read them myself. He first appeared in the field with stories in Analog, one of which ("Cascade Point") won a Hugo, and with some military SF novels. I've found his writing (I've only read short fiction) fairly enjoyable -- he usually tells a decent story. I believe he has said that he has made enough money from the SW books to write what he wants nowadays.

His new book [as of 2003], advertised as the first of a series, is Dragon and Thief. This is basically a Young Adult novel. I enjoyed it quite a lot -- it is quite satisfying not too ambitious space adventure. It is, to use that most cliche of terms, a good read. There are a few nice ideas incorporated into a fairly routine plot, with a story resolved acceptably in this book, as well as the beginning of a story arc that will probably be quite sufficient for a series.

There are two main characters, announced by the title. The Dragon is an alien called Draycos (the implausible dragon-like given name (possibly handwaved away in the text but so what) is one of a few lazy things about the world-building), a "warrior-poet" of a race of symbiotic beings. These folks and their host species are fleeing a genocidally evil alien race from another arm of the Galaxy, in hopes of colonizing a likely world in our arm. The advance team, including Draycos and his host, arrives only to find that they have been betrayed -- the bad guys are waiting and kill everyone except Draycos. And Draycos, like all his species, can only survive about six hours without a host.

The Thief is Jack Morgan, a teenaged boy who has been working criminally with his Uncle Virge for some time. He wants to go straight, and be a cargo-hauler with his Uncle's ship, but already they have been framed and accused of stealing some valuable cargo. They flee to an empty world -- which not surprisingly is the world where Draycos's people ended up. And it turns out that humans, such as Jack, are an acceptable host for the dragons -- so when Jack investigates Draycos's crashed ship, he finds himself with an unwanted guest.

The neat characteristic of Draycos's people is that they can occupy other dimensions, staying in contact with our 3-d space in 2-d form, as a sort of tattoo on their host. I thought that a really cute idea, and well-handled in the book. There is another secret about Jack that Zahn hides well for a while, which I won't reveal -- partly because I guessed it myself and had fun guessing it. At any rate Draycos agrees to help Jack figure out who framed he and his Uncle, and maybe solve that problem -- but in return he wants to stay with Jack as a host for as long as possible, and he hopes Jack will help him discover who betrayed them, and find a means of countering the threat of the genocidal aliens.

The story is fast-moving and fun and at least believable enough for this sort of book, and the main characters are enjoyable to be with. The book points a moral, mainly about Jack needing to learn that cooperation with another person for a larger goal than self-advancement is a good thing -- and it does so pretty naturally and without too much preaching. I liked it as very nice light reading -- I'll read the next book in the series for sure and probably the whole thing -- and I would think it an excellent book to recommend to early teenaged readers looking for good YA SF in pretty much the Heinlein Juvenile mode.

Birthday Review: Sleeping Planet, by William R. Burkett, Jr.

Birthday Review: Sleeping Planet, by William R. Burkett, Jr.

William R. Burkett, Jr., turns 76 today. He isn't much remembered in SF this days, but his first novel, an Analog serial from the bedsheet days, is still remembered fondly in some circles. He was a journalist by main profession. He published two more SF books much later in 1998, Bloodsport and Blood Lines, books that the Science Fiction Encyclopedia describes as spoofish Space Opera about a big game hunter and his cyborg sidekick. In 2013, he self-published A Matter of Logistics 1, an expansion of a novella that John W. Campbell had rejected in 1968. (Campbell apparently had told him it needed to be expanded, and either Burkett didn't have time to do it then, or perhaps by the time he could take it further Campbell had died.) The second part of A Matter of Logistics hasn't appeared yet. Here's what I wrote about Sleeping Planet some while back:

(Cover by Kelly Freas)

One of the novels I used to hear cited every so often, in places like rec.arts.sf-written, as an underappreciated old SF book, is William R. Burkett, Jr.'s Sleeping Planet. I've seen it cited by a couple of people as an all-time favorite, and it often comes up in lists of "humorous SF". It comes up particularly often, and most appropriately, when people as for "writers like Eric Frank Russell". That last, at least, is true. Sleeping Planet reads almost like an EFR pastiche. It was serialized in Analog in the July through September 1964 issues, at about the time Russell retired. While John Campbell's main Russell replacement, in my view, was Christopher Anvil, he was always a sucker for stories of this type.

And what type is that? "Stupid Alien" stories. The sort of thing Russell did in Next of Kin, Wasp, Three to Conquer, "Nuisance Value", and other stories, and the sort of thing Anvil did in his Pandora stories. (Though to give Anvil his due, his "stupid aliens" weren't entirely cliche stupid aliens -- in some ways they really were superior to humans, and in fact they end up winning, though partly by letting the humans "join" them.) The basic idea is to either a) have aliens with what should be superior tech or numbers invade Earth, and be repulsed by human pluck or ingenuity; or b) have a few humans (or just one) be stuck on the alien planet and single-handedly outwit an entire planet of aliens. Sleeping Planet fits template a.

The story is told from three main viewpoints. James Rierson is a lawyer who is hunting in backwoods Georgia when strange things start to happen, beginning with the deer he is after just collapsing to sleep. Bradford Donovan is an ex-soldier, invalided due to his two artificial legs, who finds himself the only person who stays awake in an air-raid shelter after the alien Llarans attack. Martak Sarno is the Supreme Commander of the Llaran invasion fleet. It is Sarno who discovered the Llaran secret weapon, which he hopes will turn the tide in a decades long war. A plant on one of the Llaran colony planets secretes a poison which is harmless to Llarans but which puts Terran life to sleep, normally for just hours but Sarno's project has extended this period to months. The catch is that once exposed to this plant and put to sleep once, Terrans are immune to its effects. This means that a few humans who happen to have visited the Llaran planet in question and who encountered this plant are immune. Obviously, Rierson and Donovan are among those few.

Donovan is soon captured. But he soon gathers that Llarans are extremely superstitious, and he begins telling ghost stories and causing a loss of morale among the rank and file invaders. (This is a particularly Russell-like notion.) All this would come to nothing except that Rierson, who spends some time sniping at isolated Llaran units, overhears some of the soldiers repeating Donovan's stories, and cooperates by planting the idea that he is one of the ghosts Donovan mentions. Even that wouldn't have helped, except that Rierson eventually discovers the one group of fairly intelligent Earth inhabitants that are unaffected by the gas: robots. The story, then, involves the coordinated efforts of Rierson, Donovan, and the robots to continue to spread fear among the Llarans, finally bringing them to surrender.

I suppose it's a pleasant enough story, but it hardly seems worth special remembrance. It's second-rate imitation Russell, basically. It's not really even very funny -- which to be fair wasn't really Burkett's intention, in my view. Certainly the occasional atrocities committed by the aliens are hard to laugh at. It depends too much on implausibilities -- I suppose the first one, the unlikely effects of the "sleeping gas", are acceptable as the raison d'etre for the story, but the way the action plays out, and especially the convenient dullness of the aliens, just didn't convince me. Finally, there just wasn't enough cleverness. All the above shortcomings could have been overcome simply by a sufficient quantity of clever or silly or just plain adventurous happenings, but there really isn't enough here. A very minor work.

Birthday Review: Stories of Chris Willrich

Birthday Review: Stories of Chris Willrich

Chris Willrich turns 52 today. He's a neat writer of both fantasy and SF, probably better known for his Persimmon and Bone fantasies (several short stories and three novels), but his SF has been very nice too. Here's a collection of my Locus reviews of his work:

Locus, July 2002

I also liked Chris Willrich's atmospheric fantasy "King Rainjoy's Tears" (F&SF, July), in which the poet Persimmon Gaunt and her lover, the thief Imago Bone, must find the exiled, personified, title objects, lest the compassion-deprived King force his country into war.

Locus, May 2003

Chris Willrich's "Count to One" (Asimov's, May) quite intriguingly considers the relationship of an AI and a human. Kwatee was developed to understand the Earth's climate well enough to recommend a course of action to save Earth from either runaway greenhouse effect or a new ice age. He "lives" mostly in a simulation of Earth, taking on a persona resembling an American Indian god. Now he faces danger from "wolves", viruses of some sort that have been attacking him. But he is also in love, with a woman who enters his simulation virtually. And he needs to make a decision -- what ecological changes are best? And best for whom? Humans? Earth? Life in general? Kwatee? A very thoughtful, moving, piece.

Locus, August 2006

I thought the August issue of F&SF particularly strong, one of the best issues of any magazine this year. It opens and closes with strong novelettes. Chris Willrich’s “Penultima Thule” is another Persimmon Gaunt/Imago Bone story. The poet Gaunt and her lover Bone have headed north, hoping to dispose of the deadly book they have stolen, a “cacography”. Reading it is fatal, and its influence is malignant even unread. But nearly at the northern rim of the world Bone is captured by the Stonekin, to become a victim of the “Hunger Stone”. Gaunt must free him and then flee with him to the Rim – still not knowing what will result of ridding the world of the book. It’s colorful, dourly romantic, and bleakly funny, and in the end moving and poetic.

Locus, September 2007

The pick story in the August F&SF is Chris Willrich’s “A Wizard of the Old School”. This is another story about the thieves Persimmon Gaunt and Imago Bone. But here the title character is central: Krumwheezle of the Old School. It was he who identified the baleful book which featured in the previous story “Penultima Thule”. In this story we learn more of Krumwheezle – his history at the Old School, his lost lover, his quiet life in his adopted village. And when Gaunt and Bone return, still cursed though they hope to have a child, he joins them on a quest that may cure them – and, it turns out, may cure some of his own problems, problems he hardly acknowledges. This is a story that is both a satisfying and imaginative high fantasy, and an equally satisfying, slightly sentimental, domestic tale.

Locus, January 2009

The new webzine Beneath Ceaseless Skies, devoted to, in editor Scott H. Andrews’s words, “literary adventure fantasy”, is off to a promising start. The first couple of issues of this biweekly magazine feature a strong Gaunt and Bone story from Chris Willrich, in which his continuing characters, a pair of lovers, one a thief, one a poet, are charged with returning the title object, “The Sword of Loving Kindness”, to its rightful owner – with consequences expected to be dire, yet which turn out ironically different.

Locus, June 2009

Another very pure SF story in the June Asimov's comes from Chris Willrich, better known for his sword and sorcery stories at F&SF. “Sails the Morne” is a very strange story, only slowly comprehensible – but in a good way. It evolves into a mystery, with a spaceship and its motley crew (humans and AIs, from Earth and elsewhere) transporting a valuable artifact (The Book of Kells) as well as a likewise motley group of aliens to an Exposition on the outskirts of the Solar system. Theft and murder result … it’s very entertaining, often quite funny, satisfyingly concluded.

Locus, September 2011

The new Black Gate is another monster-sized issue. (Full disclosure – I have an article in the magazine, and am a regular contributor.) As ever it’s stuffed with satisfying adventure fantasy. Notable here is how often the heroes are the unexpected:  for example Chris Willrich’s “The Lions of Karthagar”, in which two armies from opposite sides of the world converge on the peaceful city of Karthagar, beside the Ruby Waste, there to learn that peace comes at a price. Conventional enough, if well executed, except that the story is told through two aging weatherworkers, one from each camp, who find in each other something more valuable than their ambitious masters, or the utopia of Karthagar.

Locus, May-June 2012

Finally, in the May F&SF, Chris Willrich offers “Grand Tour”, in which I-Chen Fisher is a young woman, ready to take her “Grand Tour” among the stars, while her loving but perhaps a little stifling family readies to see her off, and to leave on a Wanderjahr of their own. Luckily, she meets a boy her own age with his different sort of family problems. Little enough really happens, but it's a nice glimpse of an expansive-seeming future, and a nice look at a few well-drawn characters.

Chris Willrich has another story, “The Mote Dancer and the Firelife”, at Beneath Ceaseless Skies for March 8. Oddly enough, its main character is also named I-Chen – perhaps she is meant to be a much older version of the character in “Grand Tour”? (Not that the story suggests that!) She's returned to the planet where her husband died, accompanied by his ghost, to look for resolution of sorts. The natives of this planet, called Spinies, can link into a network facilitated by ancient alien technology (“Motes”), and they feel a certain contempt for humans, who mostly can't. But I-Chen is a rare human “Mote Dancer” … The story involves the alien's habit of fighting as pairs (“Quixotes” and “Sanchos”), and the “Firelife” where their dead go – including perhaps the Spiny who killed her husband. It's neat, colorful stuff.

Birthday Review: The Narrow Land, by Jack Vance

The Narrow Land, by Jack Vance

a review by Rich Horton

(Cover by Wayne Barlowe)

The Narrow Land is an interesting collection by Jack Vance. It dates to about 1980, though first publication seems to be 1982 in a DAW edition. That is to say, it's copyright 1980, and the internal matter (with which Contento and the ISFDB agree) says that the first publication was in 1982 by DAW.  The edition I have is a 1984 Coronet (UK) paperback. The stories, however, date to much earlier: one from 1967, one from 1963, and the others to 1956 and earlier still. So it's a bit odd: almost a collection of odds and ends and leftovers, you would think. But actually it has some very good stuff, and some quite significant stuff.

Perhaps most interesting is Vance's very first published story, "The World-Thinker", from the Summer 1945 Thrilling Wonder Stories. This is a striking story, quite Vancean (much more so than lots of early Vance, such as the weaker Magnus Ridolph stories), certainly rather clumsy in some ways but still effective. More to the point, perhaps, it really shows certain of Vance's career long characteristics, particularly the odd (or perhaps not so odd) mix of hints of misogynism with the depiction of the major female character as strong and independent.

One of the '60s stories is the title piece, about the coming of age of an alien in a strange environment. (The environment, I believe, is intended to be the terminator of a tide-locked planet: hence "The Narrow Land", though that is never made explicit.) The alien, a creature called Ern, grows up among similar beings, who nonetheless are different from him -- eventually he learns the truth about his nature (which is tied up interestingly with the species' life cycle). The other later story is "Green Magic", in my opinion one of Vance's best short fantasies, about a man who after much effort learns the secret of entry to the "green" plane of magic.

(Cover by George Underwood)

The other stories include are "The Ten Books", "Chateau D'If", "Where Hesperus Falls", and "The Masquerade on Dicantropus". The latter two are very minor. "Chateau D'If" is a decent long novella, published under a different (and silly, as it is a spoiler, so I won't mention it) title in Thrilling Wonder in 1950. It's about five men who decide to answer an ad for the title business, which promises mysterious adventure -- but something more sinister is up. Not by any means great, but fun and scary. And "The Ten Books" (aka "Men of the Ten Books") is a rather Campbellian story (though it actually sold to Startling Stories) about the rediscovery of a lost Earth colony, which seems to be an Utopia, but the people of which revere the memory of Earth, and believe that Earth must be much superior to their society. (This story made one of the Bleiler/Dikty Year's Best volumes.) 

All in all, quite a good story collection, and I find it odd that stories as good (though not great) as these were uncollected by 1980.

Ace Double Reviews, 9: Monsters in Orbit, by Jack Vance/The World Between and Other Stories, by Jack Vance

On what would have been Jack Vance's 103rd birthday, here's one of his Ace Doubles -- really, this can be regarded as one big story collection.

Ace Double Reviews, 9: Monsters in Orbit, by Jack Vance/The World Between and Other Stories, by Jack Vance (#M-125, 1965, $0.45)

by Rich Horton

(Covers by ? and Jack Gaughan)

Monsters in Orbit is presented as a novel, but it is actually two novellas, both featuring the same protagonist. The novellas were published in Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1952, "Abercrombie Station" in the February issue, and "Cholwell's Chickens" in the August issue. "Abercrombie Station" is about 23,000 words long, "Cholwell's Chickens" about 18,000 words. I have not seen the original issues in which these were published, so I don't know if the Ace publication involves any revisions, but I suspect not. "Abercrombie Station" is slightly better known, as it was reprinted in the Pocket Books collection* The Best of Jack Vance in 1976. Otherwise, as far as I or Contento know, these stories have only been reprinted in this Ace Double, and in the 1990 Underwood-Miller collection Chateau D'If. (This collection includes another Thrilling Wonder novella, the title story, originally called "New Bodies for Old" in the August 1950 Thrilling Wonder; and two fairly well known stories: "The Gift of Gab", from the September 1955 Astounding, and "Rumfuddle", from a 1973 Silverberg anthology, Three Trips in Time and Space.)

The World Between and Other Stories, by contrast, is frankly presented as a collection of stories. It's a fairly good one, with four novelettes and a short story, including his Hall of Fame story "The Moon Moth", totaling some 45,000 words.

The two stories in Monsters in Orbit both feature a teen-aged girl named Jean Parlier. She was abandoned by her parents as an infant, and raised to the age of 10 by a bar owner named Joe Parlier. Then she killed Joe and a few others (it is hinted that this was in self-defense of a rape threat), and gadded about the galaxy, escaping from the odd foster home or orphanage. At 16, and beautiful (and experienced), she answers an advertisement offering $1,000,000 to seduce and marry Earl Abercrombie, the owner of the satellite habitat/resort Abercrombie Station. The trick is that Abercrombie Station, due to its microgravity, is a haven for very fat people, to the extent that extreme obesity is considered beautiful, and a very slim girl like Jean is considered odd. But Earl Abercrombie is genetically unable to put on enough weight -- hence Jean's mysterious employer assumes she will attract him. (He has also shown signs of attraction to "Earth types" before.) Jean goes up to Abercrombie Station as a servant, and soon finds that a) her wiles don't really work on Earl, and b) even her cynical self can't bear the thought of marrying him, even for $2,000,000, or $10,000,000. But she also runs across some sinister secrets involving Earl's collection of monsters, and Earl's mysteriously and conveniently dead and exiled older brothers.

Naturally Jean manages to come out ahead, but it seems that money doesn't satisfy her. She really wants parents -- so in "Cholwell's Chickens" she heads back to her home planet to try to track down her parents. In so doing she encounters a mysterious man named Cholwell who claims to be raising chickens on the same planet. Jean finds her mother, rather unsatisfactorily, and also finds herself mistaken for another woman on this planet. And she encounters Cholwell again, soon to learn the what his "chickens" really are, and eventually to learn the true and surprising identity of her real parents.

Both stories are silly in many ways, and "Abercrombie Station" is borderline offensive at points. Jean is often sympathetic, but at the same time she is a multiple murderess (albeit with some justification). I actually rather enjoyed "Cholwell's Chickens", with reservations, but I thought "Abercrombie Station" unconvincing. It is a mystery to me how it was chosen for a Best Of collection. Also, I must have read it back then -- I own the collection, bought shortly after it came out in 1976. But I don't remember it at all.

The stories in The World Between and Other Stories are:

"The World Between" (10,600 words, from the May 1953 Future, wherein it was called "Ecological Onslaught") -- a team from the Blue Star, all names starting with "B", finds a planet in between their home and the rival Kay system (yes, all names starting with "K"). They claim it and begin terraforming efforts, but the Kay people, including a beautiful spy, drop off pests to spoil all the terraforming. The "hero" (ambiguously so) finds a clever counter to this, and wins the love of the spy in the process. Minor but somewhat intriguing in its ecological themes.

"The Moon Moth" (13,900 words, from Galaxy, August 1961) -- a classic story, about Edwer Thissell, newly come to Sirene, where everyone wears masks and abides by extremely fussy rules of manners. Edwer finally takes advantage of the rigidity of Sirenese society to gain extra status.

"Brain of the Galaxy" (9200 words, from Worlds Beyond, February 1951 -- it has later been retitled "The New Prime") -- the "ruler" of the galaxy is chosen by a battle of virtual experiences in various environments. A pretty good story, actually -- one of the best of Vance's earliest pieces.

"The Devil on Salvation Bluff" (8300 words, from Fred Pohl's pioneering original anthology series Star, #3, 1954) -- colonists on a world with an eccentric orbit and multiple suns have a hard time adapting to the unpredictability.

"The Men Return" (3300 words, from the July 1957 Infinity) -- far in the future reality is slippery and arbitrary. But with sufficient will and rationality ... a neat, very different, story.

*Ballantine/Del Rey had put out a series of "Best Of" collections of authors such as Stanley Weinbaum, C. L. Moore, Lester Del Rey and many others, beginning in 1974. Pocket, apparently in response, started their own series, with entries from Vance and Poul Anderson among others.

Birthday Review: Yellow Dog, by Martin Amis

I wrote this review when the book came out in 2003. Today is Martin Amis' 70th birthday, so I'm posting it in his honor. It's not the best regarded of his novels (it might be close to the bottom), but I liked it OK, though it's certainly not my favorite Martin Amis work.

Yellow Dog, by Martin Amis

a review by Rich Horton

Martin Amis is the writing son of the late Sir Kingsley Amis, author of Lucky Jim and The Old Devils and New Maps of Hell and many other books, and one of my favorite writers. I've read quite a lot of Martin's work as well, generally though not always with enjoyment. His best known mode is quite savagely satirical, usually taking on the vulgar excesses of contemporary life, with especial interest in violence and in pornography. This is the mode of his most famous novels, such as Money, The Information, and London Fields, at any rate. Yellow Dog is his new novel, and it is very much in that same mode. Also, as with much of Martin Amis' work, it can be placed, somewhat uncertainly, in the SF genre: at any rate, it is set in an alternate present-day England, with an importantly different royal house, the last three generations of which feature such controversially named kings as John II, Richard IV, and now Henry IX. Also, a minor plot point is that a comet is heading towards Earth, predicted to miss by only a few thousand miles.

Yellow Dog interleaves several stories, all in the end revolving around pornography. The main character is Xan Meo, a "renaissance man": actor/writer/guitarist, but also the son of a gangster. Xan is nearing 50, and living a reformed life himself: he no longer drinks or smokes, he is a loving and faithful husband, and the loving father of two young daughters. He had previously been in a destructive marriage and had two sons, but after a far from amicable divorce he has changed his ways. But once a year, on the anniversary of his decision to quit, he heads to a pub and has a few drinks and a few cigarettes. This time, at the pub, he is waylaid by representatives of a crimelord and beaten severely, apparently for "naming" their boss compromisingly, though Meo has no idea how or even who. Meo's beating, and the subsequent brain damage, drastically affects his relationships with his wife and daughters, and also his careers, and he ends up thrown out of his house, with a former porn star turned producer trying to seduce him, and with a job acting (not as a "participant", though) in a porn movie.

Another key thread follows a vile journalist named Clint Smoker, who works for perhaps the worst of the London tabloids, and who despite his monetary success is an abject and humiliating failure with women. He too ends up on the set of the porn film, though as a journalist researching a story. There is also a thread about the King of England, Henry IX, and a crisis involving a secret pornographic videotape of his popular 15 year old daughter, Victoria. Finally, we end up meeting the gangster who has ordered Xan Meo to be beat up, and we learn much of his personal history, and of his financial and personal involvement with the porn industry.

(There is also a strange thread involving an airplane flying from England to the US carrying the coffin of a recently deceased, very rich, man, and also involving the threat of a crash -- I concede I never really figured out what Amis was after with this thread.)

The novel is very entertaining, full of rather savage and often vulgar wordplay, some gaspingly horrid behaviour (especially on the part of the tabloid folks), and some pretty scary things too, especially the degradation of Xan's character. The plot is somewhat intricate, and resolved cleverly and funnily. There are some details about the porn industry that I'm not sure are actually true, but have a horrible ring of possible truth to them. Except for the airplane thread, which as I said I simply didn't get, I thought it worked very well -- a strong, savage novel, not a great work, nor Amis's best, but, I though, pretty darn good.

Birthday Review: Melissa Caitlin Horton Whitman

Today is Melissa Caitlin Whitman (nee Horton)'s 30th birthday! Yay! I wasn't able to write something about James Tiptree, Jr., or Orson Scott Card, or Jorge Luis Borges, or A. S. Byatt ... but here's something about this book Melissa published in 2001, when she was in the fifth grade.

The Jungle, by Melissa Horton (Whitman) (illustrations by the author)

a review by Rich Horton

Thankfully, The Jungle is not about the meat-packing industry in Chicago at roughly the turn of the 20th Century. Instead, it's about a girl named Cara. We meet her as she wakes in a strange place, dressed in her nightgown. Soon she encounters a girl about her own age, Marta -- and she learns that they are both trapped in a book, The Jungle -- and Marta has been there, unaging, for 50 years.

Marta shows Cara how she has survived -- she has built a house from the materials found in the jungle, and learned which foods are edible, and how to hunt and cook the animals. So things go for a while until Cara meets a lion, and is surprised to find that he talks. And the lion tells them that there is a plot by the other talking animals to find the secret way out of the book and terrorize the humans in the real world. The only hope is for Marta, Cara, and their lion friend to find the porthole first -- and figure out how to close off the book from the real world ...

This is an imaginative book, with a neat central concept, reminiscent of Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next books. Given the limited word count the author was dealing with, the resolution is a bit rapid, but it's a nicely conceived piece. Quite impressive for someone not yet 12 years old!

Also, here's Melissa's dog Sammy: