Chocolate Heart

The eternal temptation of Netgalley is a lifelong problem that I wrestle with, and one of the hardest things is not to scoop up middle grade books as fast as I can.  I want to read aaaaaallllllll of them with  my eight-year-old, but he is picky enough that I'm hesitant to commit to an ARC with him.

But I could not just walk by The Dragon with a Chocolate Heart, by Stephanie Burgis. It's about a dragon who gets turned into a human girl and decides to be a chocolatier.  I love that you can wrap it up with that unlikely one-liner, but that doesn't come anywhere near capturing the charm of this book.

Aventurine is a dragon who is tired of staying in the cave all day, but is too young to go out on her own.  She's not a scholar like her siblings, and her mother and grandfather are frustrated that she seems so directionless. But she is the stubborn kind of young dragon who will sneak out of the cave to prove her mettle--and run headlong into a mage with a sharp sense of self-preservation.

Trapped in a human body with no way to get home, Aventurine heads to Drachenburg, the nearest human city, to try to make her way. She does not understand humans, and her confusion and frustration with them had my son laughing. As a human, Aventurine discovers chocolate and realizes that she knows exactly what she wants to do with her (new human) life.

Enter the cast of secondary characters, who are, I have to say, the best.  There is her first friend, Silke, who is clever and unconventional and knows the city intimately.  Marina, the cranky, stubborn chocolatier who runs a second-rate chocolate house that should be the best one in the city; Horst, who runs it with her and is somewhat less cranky and stubborn.  We get glimpses of the king and the two princesses, who are different from each other and the most well-rounded tertiary characters I might have ever seen.  We even get to know Aventurine's family over the course of the book--proud, ambitious dragons who know exactly what they think of humans.

Every character here is individual, and they get to do clever things and surprise us. You could rewrite this story from anyone's point of view, even the people who hardly appear in it, and you'd have a fine tale.  I love that Aventurine is cranky and blunt and rather dismissive of humans, but learns to value them even as she learns her own true worth.  I love how her bluster at the beginning gives way to humility and then real competence.  I love that however human she is, she is still always ready to roar.

We got such a kick out of this book, Adam and I.  It was a great readaloud, and a real pleasure.  I have one of Stephanie Burgis's adult novels on my kindle, and you can bet that's coming up in the rotation very soon.

The Things We Do For Love

You look at the post title and you think that there are a thousand books I could be reviewing.  But it's none of them--the thing I did for love was read this entire book from start to finish.  Because my six-year-old son loved it.

He didn't just love The Secret Zoo; he got it--he understood what was going on, could always recount what had already happened and connect it to what was happening now.  He liked the corny names of the zoo places, he didn't mind the fact that most of the middle is nonsensical filler--the bad guys you perceive are not bad, there's a whole meaningless chase scene that's some sort of misunderstanding.

This is the kind of book that people mean when they say that kids deserve smart books--I mean, this is the cautionary tale part of it.  And you know, it's probably a third grade reading level or something like that.  But the language is just awkward and repetitive.  Thesaurus words are tucked in where their connotations are not quite right.  It's not explicitly wrong, but it's just not quite good. 

Also, the day is saved at the end when our hero convinces a penguin to believe in itself enough to fly.  Flying penguin saves the day.  Because physics has nothing to do with it.  (Yes, there is explicitly magic involved in the book.  But not around the animals or their abilities.  Somehow the animals are just super smart, the polar bear is not dangerous, and penguins can fly if they believe in themselves.  All apparently unrelated to magic.)

I'm groaning only because Adam's too little to know how a blog works, or to read this.  Because I know that it's possible to love books that are not great--I have read WAY too much Mercedes Lackey not to know this.  And I love him so much that I'm going to run right out and get the sequel, Secrets and Shadows, because he'll be thrilled. 

But maybe not till after we've read the first Harry Potter.