Book Jeopardy! by Benjamin

On Sunday night my eight-year-old, Benjamin, made us a jeopardy game. I have got to record it, because it was adorable. The categories were his favorite fantasy book series: Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians by Brandon Sanderson, The Unbelievable FIB by Adam Shaughnessy, Harry Potter by J.K Rowling, Percy Jackson and the Olympians by RIck Riordan, and Dreamdark by Laini Taylor.

The questions were not strictly Jeopardy style, in fact they were quite the opposite. I don't think Benjamin has ever watched an episode of Jeopardy. He has taken a lot of AR quizzes though.

Here were the questions:

Dreamdark
100 Who is the main character?
200 Who is the Magruwen's champion?
300 Who is the Magruwen?
400 What dragon was the last to die?
500 Who is Magpie's favorite person and why?

Percy Jackson
100 Fill in the blank: Camp ___ ____
200 Double tragedy, lose 200
300 Who is Annabeth's mom?
400 What is the name of Percy's sword?
500 Where is Kronos's throne room?

Harry Potter
100 Name Harry's 2 best friends
200 What do dementors guard?
300 How many times has Harry faced Voldemort?
400 What kind of tart is Harry's fave?
500 What is a bezoar?

building the game

Alcatraz
100 What book does Alcatraz use 2 lies?
200 Is Bastille a Smedry?
300 What is the High Library?
400 Do 10 jumping jacks or lose 100 points.
500 What Smedry has the talent of making rude noises?

FIB
100 Tragedy, lose 100
200 Who is the trickster?
300 Special, gain 300
400 Mister Fox's looking glass has a ____
500 Daily Double: Who is Fay Longintime?

Levi and I had a great time playing the game, even though we both ended up with a negative score. I haven't read the Alcatraz or FIB series, and it's been long enough since I read the others that I was a bit rusty.

Benjamin wanted me to be sure to post the answers to the questions for you, in case you wanted to play for yourself. I'll put those in the comments.

If you're curious about any of these series, Benjamin and I are happy to answer your questions. Also, I linked to their Amazon pages above, for your convenience. If you shop through my affiliate links to Amazon I make a small commission at no extra cost to you. Did some of this money go toward purchasing the last Alcatraz book, The Dark Talent? Yes it did.

Lips Touch: Three Times

Lips Touch: Three Times by Laini Taylor, art by Jim Di Bartolo

Laini Taylor is such a wordsmith.  That's why she can write three short stories that each contain a complete world of their own.  And that's how she can manage to toss in things like swan wings and indigo veils and tiny bottles of mysterious potions.  Terribly romantic, that's what I call that.

Each story is a bit longer than the one before it.  (This is especially true of the first story, which is by default infinitely longer than the one before it.) The first deals with forbidden fruit and goblins, and contains my favorite character -- one feisty grandma.  The second is a lovely fairy tale (sans fairies) and the story of a catch 22 curse.  The third story is something of a musing on the definition of "human" and is definitely the creepiest of the three.  I didn't have any nightmares, though.

And the artwork!  Jim has really outdone himself.  I suppose it helps that he and Laini (who are married) collaborate on things all the time.  But the illustrations perfectly compliment the stories.  They come before each one and intrigue you without spoiling things at all.  And then, if you're like me, you can't help but flip back to them when you figure out just what it was the pictures were representing and portraying.

I feel duty-bound to say that there is a moderate amount of swearing in the book, and obviously kisses take place.  The book was a finalist for the National Book Award, just recently, and is on the Cybils YA Fantasy shortlist as well.  In fact, our own Ashley has read it but she is strictly forbidden from reviewing contestants until Cybils announcements on Valentine's Day.  Good luck, Lips Touch!

Rathersting Warrior Tattoos

Blackbringer is now out in paperback! Silksinger will be out this fall!


Yes, I wore these grocery shopping and to game night with friends. Yes, an awesome store clerk asked me if they were real. Yes, I told him about the books and said they were NOT. :D Fun times!

Silksinger

Okay, this one was SO good! I love Laini Taylor and her books (of which this is the second). They're so intriguing and fantastical.

In this one, we follow Whisper Silksinger on her quest to protect the Azazel. She, however, is not so gutsy as Magpie Windwitch, and so she's going to need some help. And does she ever get it! A whole crew of creatures from fairies to hobgoblins and dragonflies and even some familiar faces from the prequel, Blackbringer.

Fantastic. Once again, just the right amount of adventure and danger and *sigh* romance. And, of course, fantastic descriptions and super-diabolical villains!

I hope you all don't hate me for reviewing it so soon -- it's not coming out until September. But Blackbringer will be in paperback on May 14th! I'm planning on wearing my awesome Rathersting tattoos that day. :D

The spell of a good book

Me: "Darn it! She's too good!"
Jacob: "What?"
Me: "I said, 'Darn it! She's too good!' Laini Taylor. I have to know what happens!"

I tried to put Silksinger down several times yesterday. I finished it around 1 a.m. Review to come. Am going to take a nap.

Up and Coming

Ashley in red, Alysa in blue.

It looks like this year will be a good one for book sequels. I decided it was high time I make a list so I can keep track of when I should put all of these on hold at the library. Yeah! Woot woot! Feel free to add to it any books coming out soon that you're excited about, sequels or otherwise. Just post them in comments and we'll add them to the list!

* Fablehaven book 4, Secrets of the Dragon Sanctuary by Brandon Mull: March 24, 2009 (penultimate) Ooh, I just read the first one. It was pretty sweet.
* Percy Jackson book 5, The Last Olympian by Rick Riordan: May 5, 2009 (final in the series) Am so excited for this! Click on the label Percy Jackson Books to see all of our posts about the series and author.
* Pendragon book 10, The Soldiers of Halla by D. J. MacHale: May 12, 2009 (final in the series) Hm, I haven't read any of these. Are they good, Ashley? Ten books seems like a lotta books! In my opinion, the series could've been condensed to five, but I'm still excited for the tenth. It sounds like it's going to be a big departure from the last nine, which will be exciting. :)
* The Actor and the Housewife by Shannon Hale: June 9, 2009 (Not a sequel, but we're excited!) Oh I just get more excited every day! Today I was looking up how many pages long it's going to be and then grabbing other books off my shelf and comparing page counts to see roughly how long it's going to be. "Imagine the ball landing in your glove..." as my P.E. teachers used to say.
* The Keys to the Kingdom book 7, Lord Sunday by Garth Nix: June/July 2009 (final in the series)
* Catching Fire, sequel to The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins: September 1, 2009 I CAN'T WAIT! I'm really hoping for an ending on this one. Suzanne Collins, I promise I'll read book three, just give me a little bit of denoument!
* Books of Bayern, Forest Born by Shannon Hale: September 15, 2009 And she'll be touring back east for this one! Keep your eyes on her website for event details. She is SO much fun to see in person.

What I want to know: What will Stephenie Meyer and JK Rowling write next? Yeah! Totally. Speaking of which I still need to read The Tales of Beedle the Bard...

*Silksinger, sequel to Blackbringer by Laini Taylor: September 17, 2009 If the first one was any indication, it's gonna be good. Oh, and Blackbringer comes out in paperback May 14!
*Lips Touch, by Laini Taylor: October 1, 2009 This one is a short story collection. Awesome! But ugh! They're both so far away! Can't we have one earlier? haha.
*I, Q: The White House, sequel to I, Q: Independence Hall by Roland Smith: can't seem to find the release date, but I hope it's soon!
*The Maze Runner, by James Dashner: October 6, 2009. Also not a sequel, but looks like it is going to be good. Very cool premise.

*The Gathering Storm, by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson: November 3, 2009. Okay, how could I forget this one?! It's the beginning of the end of the sneaky books! (So named because they are very sneaky in getting you to read the next one, and they are all HUGE.)

An Interview with Laini Taylor

Laini Taylor, author of the awesome book Blackbringer, let me do an email interview with her. How cool is that? So. Here you go.

Laini, Let me start off by saying I'm thrilled to interview you. And then, let me ask you to supply me with three nouns, four adjectives, and two verbs (one present tense and the other past tense) for a little bit of mad-lib fun.

Fun! I’m a wee bit afraid to see the results, but here are the words: nouns: scar; disguise; robot adjectives: grotesque; chirpy; feverish; blue verbs: waltz; kissed

You've said on your website that "our dreams are real things…and it is our job in life to make them come true…" What are some dreams that have come true for you? How did you help make that happen?

Finishing a novel is a huge one. I’ve wanted to do it my whole life, but I was just letting years go by without doing the work that needed to be done. There’s a great quote: "What you have to do and the way to do it is incredibly simple. Whether you are willing to do it, that is another matter." -Peter F. Drucker At a certain point, it hit me hard that I would never be “a writer” unless I, um, wrote, and I would never make a living at it unless I finished things. So I reformed my habits. I started getting up early and getting straight to work at the kitchen table while it was still dark, and I taught myself a ton of tools for overcoming my many hang-ups with perfectionism. It took a couple of years, but I did it. My hang-ups still plague me every single day of my writing life, but I have learned to manage my brain to some degree, and make it do what I need it to do. (More details on that at Not For Robots.) Another dream for me was to make a living as an artist, and I've been really lucky that the Laini's Ladies line has enabled me to do that -- but there were steps I had to take, and things I had to do that were out of my comfort zone, like going to the National Stationery Show in New York to learn about licensing and to meet manufacturers. If I'd stuck with what I was comfortable with, or kept on just *wishing* something would happen, I would still be making the ladies by hand and selling them at the local craft fair. A lot of time gets wasted wishing things were easier, that we were luckier, but the only chance most of us have of getting the life we want is if we make it ourselves.

If you could create the most divine dessert, what would one or two of its certain ingredients be?

My two favorite foods in the world happen to pair up pretty well: chocolate and mangoes, so I could go with that. But then, I’m pretty much a fan of any divine dessert. . . as my dad would say, “Did I ever tell you about the worst dessert I ever had? It was great.” (I’m paraphrasing; he actually says that about pizza.)

Laini eating a mango!

What books and projects are coming next from you?

Well, Dreamdark: Silksinger and my first YA title, Lips Touch, are both coming out in 2009. Now, I am working on two novels, both YA, and the third Dreamdark book is percolating in my head and getting itself ready to be written. That makes me sound like one of those fast writers who’s tossing off books left and right, which is definitely not the case. It just means that I have a few projects in early stages, all of which I love and have high hopes for, but am still just a wee bit unsure of.

Were you born with hot pink hair, or was it more of a pale pink, and then got darker as you grew up?

Excellent question! I was actually born with thick black hair, which fell out within weeks, leaving me bald until my thirty-fifth birthday (for 35 year I wore brownish/blondish wigs), at which time I began to mysteriously grow a kind of straggling pink fluff that closely resembled flamingo down. A specialist advised me to sing to it (there’s a special Portuguese hair-growing chant for just this purpose), and I did, and the happy results are what you see today: a healthy head of bright pink hair!

What book are you reading right now?

I just read An Abundance of Katherines by John Green and Story of a Girl by Sara Zarr, both of which were amazing, and a really, really odd sci-fantasy book called This is the Way the World Ends by James Morrow, which was kind of like if Lewis Carroll wrote about nuclear war! Now I am reading the third of the Temeraire books, by Naomi Novik -- historical fantasy about battle dragons being used to fight the Napoleonic Wars. Last year when I asked after this series in the bookstore (having forgotten the author’s name), I was told by the clerk, “No, I don’t know. I don’t read that kind of book.” Agh!

What is one of your favorite pieces of trivia?

Ooh, I love weird facts. Here are a few: --There is a kind of parasite that kills a fish’s tongue and then becomes its tongue, and lives the rest of its life in the fish’s mouth, helping itself to food! -- The leading theory of the origin of the moon is that it was caused by a glancing collision between the young Earth and an object the size of Mars!!! -- Only 5 out of every billion atoms of rock in the Earth’s crust are gold. -- Mako shark embryos cannibalize their siblings in utero. Eww.

What question have you not been asked in an interview, but think you should be asked? (Both the question and the answer, if you like)

What is the most backhandsprings you ever did in a row? Fifty! For some reason, no one ever asks me about that! :-)

Excellent answers! If you asked me how many backhandsprings I had done in a row, the answer would be zero. Okay, now it's time for some mad-libbing! I have here the actual first few sentences of Laini's novel. Then... the New and Improved beginning to Blackbringer! Enjoy!

The wolf tasted the babe’s face with the tip of his tongue and pronounced her sweet, and the fox licked the back of her head to see if it was so. For the rest of her life when this child grew into a faerie with bright eyes and a laugh as loud and unladylike as a crow’s, that spot on her hair would never lie flat. And though she wouldn’t remember the night the creatures had gathered around to look at her and taste and smell her, she would call those unruly hairs her foxlick without knowing why.

The scar tasted the babe’s face with the tip of his tongue and pronounced her grotesque, and the fox licked the back of her head to see if it was so. For the rest of her disguise when this child grew into a robot with chirpy eyes and a laugh as loud and feverish as a crow’s, that spot on her hair would never lie flat. And though she wouldn’t waltz the night the creatures had kissed around to look at her and taste and smell her, she would call those blue hairs her foxlick without knowing why.

Guest Review: Blackbringer -- Laini Taylor

Woohoo! Guest review number two! For you! Today's guest reviewer is Ransom. He's a super smart dancing machine who has great taste in books. Without further ado...

Laini Taylor's Blackbringer is a fantasy epic starring tiny people with wings: fairies. With occasional furry imps, terrifying demons, and miscellaneous woodland creatures. Humans only seldom, and at a distance.

Reading Taylor's book took me back to a moment in my childhood, sometime not too long after reading Watership Down and Fellowship of
the Ring, when I thought to myself "I like books with maps in them". Blackbringer doesn't actually have a map in the inside back cover, and certainly doesn't draw as extensively on fictional languages as Tolkien or Adams, but it took me back nonetheless. Taylor's world is a pleasure to explore. A trusted friend suggests that the author may have dedicated even too much space to the metaphysics, ancient legends, and creation mythos of her world. Didn't bug me-- I ate it up. Anyhow, If one intends to save the entire world, ought not one to know something of where the world came from?

Taylor also writes the sort of characters I want to read more about. Diverse and viscerally hateable villains. Sympathetic heroes. Whom, I hesitate to add, she kills off to good effect. In the interest of minimizing spoilers I won't say too much, but it really gets me every time another one bites the dust.

Thumbs up. I await the forthcoming sequel with bated breath.

Amen! Silksinger is the sequel and it isn't out just yet. I too enjoyed this read. I found it totally gripping. Good verbs. And I loved the ending!

Also, I have a confession. As soon as I started reading Blackbringer I began kicking myself for not having read it sooner. I knew about it -- oh yes, I've been reading Laini's blog for some time now. But here's the thing: I liked her blog so much that I was scared to read her book. What if it was crap? Then I wouldn't enjoy the blog nearly as much. Well. That just tells you how silly I am. The book was fantastic, and so is the blog.

I wonder what we can do about getting a map in the book. Laini's husband did the illustrations, you know.