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Tag Archives: E. J. Beaton
Friday Reads, Out of My Heart, by Sharon M. Draper
A year after the events in the March 2010 title, Out of My Mind, we join Melody during summer vacation. She wants to go to camp and has researched camps that are designed to provide experiences for children with disabilities. The Green Glades Therapeutic Recreational Camp – here comes Melody! Her experiences are believable, her apprehension as well as eagerness to go and to participate. The reader learns more about Melody and her feelings, hopes, and readiness for adventure.
For the first time in her life, Melody has friends, though it takes just a little while for her campmates to gel into true friends. Her parents, especially her mother, are reassured that each camper will have a camp counselor assigned to them all day (and night) every day. Melody was thinking she didn’t want to be monitored all the time, like her younger sister, she is 12 after all.
But then, during the week she is at camp, Melody faces several new situations. She is scared to get into the pool – what if she sinks? Trinity, her counselor, is there for her. They go for a ride around the lake on a pontoon boat – what if it takes on water? No problem, Trinity is there. But horses, they are huge, and how can Melody ride one? The camp has it all worked out and Trinity rides with her.
Some of the best things about this book are all the wonderful new experiences for Melody, the safety of the camp, and her new friends. Also, there are no mean girls or bullies. It may seem like a week of unbelievable opportunities – but there are camps like this around the country. Readers who wanted to know what happened next for Melody, after the first book, will be surprised and happy for Melody’s first camp experience.
Draper, Sharon M. Out of My Heart. Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2021. ISBN 978-1-6659-0216-8.
Posted in Books & Reading, Youth Services
Tagged E. J. Beaton, Friday Reads, High Fantasy
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Friday Reads, The Councillor, by E. J. Beaton
The Councillor, by E.J. Beaton, is high fantasy, with a Machiavellian twist, whose author’s first book was poetry. It adds to the flavor and fits the pageantry of this political fantasy. The world building is interesting—a lot is accepted as normal, such as men and women both being soldiers, business leaders, politicians, artisans. And Lysande, herself, the Palace Scholar, is a woman in service to the Queen of Elier, who is called the Steel Queen. The Queen herself picked Lysande out of an orphanage to become the Palace Scholar. And raised and befriended her from that point on. She also receives an envelope, making her the Councillor, on the death of the queen, to pick the next heir to the throne. A duty that leaves her very uneasy.
Not only are men and women equals, it even seems, in an understated way, women are expected to be the leaders. Lysande herself, as well as the queen, are taller than the commander of the castle force. The majority of the rulers of the nation had been queens, no few of them warriors. Primogeniture doesn’t seem to be the usual way of naming a successor. Sexuality is more fluid, attraction and romance is not confined to heterosexual conventions. And, all of this is in the background.
I very much enjoyed this fictional debut. So much of the world building is just part of the story. Lysande was in an orphanage as well as many other children, due to a long war freeing the populace from the threat of the “White Queen”, a magically endowed contender for the throne. Magic users are known as elementals, and are magically in power of an element, such as earth, fire, water. At one time in the distant past, the Elementals were the rulers of the country, until they were cast down. Leaving the populace very anti-magic, to the point of executing anyone suspected of being an Elemental. A point of the law Lysande has often debated with the queen.
Lysande is an interesting, flawed character, herself. She never seems to think it unusual that the queen should take so much interest in her although as the Royal Scholar, she is still a commoner. The nobility, here called silver bloods, certainly never let her forget her humble beginnings. She even keeps her lover, a friend from the orphanage, a secret, from everyone in the castle. Partially in compensation for her perceived shortcomings, she takes a magical drug, made of the scales of a chimera, an extinct magical beast. However, all her study of history of the reigns, wars, and kingdoms of the realm serve her well in dealing with the four city rulers who come to be considered for the throne.
The story is not a simple sword & sorcery, but a political, renaissance type tale, mostly told from a complex character’s viewpoint about the difficulty in deciding who should reign over the realm. There is even a sequel that I hope follows up on some of the dangling threads left at the end, and I am definitely looking forward to it.
The Councillor, by E. J. Beaton, DAW Books, Inc., 2021, ISBN978-0-7564-1699-7
