#27 Of Mice and Magic

by David Farland

I decided to read this book based on this review from Framed. I may not have read it so soon, but it was the only book on my list that the library had on CD and available immediately. Everything else was checked out or had a waiting list. I enjoyed this book a lot. It reminded me a few times of an old favorite cartoon of mine, The Secret of Nimh. The plot is actually totally different, but there were a few parts that had similarities. It was probably just the fact that it was about mice and there was some mystery and magic involved that brought that movie to my recollection. Anyway, the book is about a boy named Ben who gets turned into a mouse by Amber. Amber is a magical mouse, and she uses the magical power Ben carries to save herself from being fed to a lizard. She simply wished that Ben knew what it felt like to be a mouse. Ben and Amber become friends and help fight an evil sorcerer together. The evil sorcerer is actually Edgar Allen Poe turned into a bat. He is constantly reciting poems as he flies or talks about evil deeds.

I really enjoyed the differences for Ben between being a human and being a mouse. There's the obvious things like size, being hunted, living in holes, but I liked the little differences that the author made up. One difference that stands out are the saying mice use. Ben told Amber that his mother always told him to "Be quiet as a mouse" and Amber says that mice can be really noisy. Her mother always told her to "Be quiet as a rock".

This is the first book in the Ravenspell series. I don't know that I will read anymore of the series, but it was fun to read one of them, but I think most 10-13 year olds would get completely engrossed in this series.

#26 Mansfield Park

by Jane Austen

Another quick Austen book. I listened to this book on my way back from visiting my family over Spring Break. It didn't take long at all to finish. It was a nice story, but somewhat predictible...but maybe that's because I've read all of Austen's books except one. I still enjoyed it, and it did have many different twists in the plot from her other books. For instance, the heroin, Fanny, is in love with Edward from the beginning (I guess Austen doesn't explicitly say she's in love, but she implies it), and Edward is actually in love with someone else. I now only have Emma to read and I'll have read all of Austen's novels...I think.

#25 Lost in a Good Book

by Jasper Fforde

This is the second book in the Thursday Next series. I enjoyed this book as much as the first. Fforde has created an alternate 1985 that is creative and interesting. I explained some of the differences in this post, so you can refer there for more detail. In this book, Thursday has just married Landon Parklane and is the public hotshot for the special ops. Spec. ops is using her "well-known among the public" status to their advantage by putting her on talk show circuit and such. The only problem is that she can't actually tell the whole story of how she entered the book Jane Eyre, how she defeated Acheron Hades, or how she changed the ending to the book.

She begins to come across some very strange circumstances of coincidence that she doesn't believe are coincidences at all. Her uncle gives her an entropy sensor that allows her to tell when the entropy in the universe is at an unusually low level and thereby when many coincidences may be likely (like being on a train with 7 women, all with the same name). She discovers that Acheron's sister is behind the drop in entropy and is trying to use this to kill her.

Meanwhile, Goliath, the big corporation that basically runs Great Britain from behind the scenes, is trying to get her to free one of their top people from the poem The Raven. She is unwilling to help, so they eradicate her husband when he was only two years old. This leaves her husband alive only in her memory, but know one else even knows who he is. Her time traveling father tries to help her stop the eradication, but fails. Her father also tells her that the world is going to end in 3 weeks (I can't remember the exact time), but he doesn't know why.

She is also recruited into the Jurisfiction department; which is a group of fictional characters, from Ms. Havesham of Great Expectations to the Cheshire Cat of Alice in Wonderland, that enforce the law within fictional books. In this department she must learn how to jump into and out of books.

She is trying to discover the reason behind the end of the world, get her husband back, avoid being killed by Acheron's sister, and get Goliath to leave her alone all at the same time...and did I mention she's pregnant with her eradicated husband's baby? Try to figure that one out. It sounds like there's a lot going on, but Fforde writing is smooth as easy to follow...much more than mine is. There is one quote that I liked so much I wrote it down (remember that I listen to my books these days, so it's hard to keep track of quotes I like).

Thursday's father took her back to a specific moment in time to try and change some menial thing that might prevent the world from ending. A motorist was going to hit a man on a bike and kill the man. The was the only instance her father could trace back to the end of the world. They first encounter the motorist after he has hit the cyclist, and the motorist is making all kinds of excuses for how this could have happened. Thursday's father says, "Male Guilt Avoidance Syndrome. It's a medically recognized condition by the year 2054." I know it's not a profound quote, but I got a good laugh out of it.