You Should Read This: More Notable Young Adult and Middle Grade Speculative Fiction of 2013

There are some books I go back to over and over again, and this is one of them, because I love the main character so much. Hannah Mole is engaging, delightful, and incredibly sympathetic. I originally found this book because it was a Virago Modern Classic (I found a TON of great reading through Virago, many of which will appear in weeks, months, and hopefully years to come), and it is, unfortunately, out of print nowadays. I sincerely hope it’s reissued sometime.

What: Miss Mole is a novel that won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1930. It is set in Radstowe and is, in many ways, a small town novel of manners.

Who: Read this if you love absorbing fiction that deals with small things: not wars or aliens or other monumental matters, but rather cases of crewel yarn gone astray or a pilfered mattress. Read this for characters that come alive and are exemplary of characters who are lovable while still shown with all their flaws.

When: Read this when you want an engrossing read, but also when you want to see the interior life and thoughts of a character conveyed in the most engaging way possible.

Why: Read it because Miss Mole is a heroine outside the norm, because she doesn’t care (or does she) what society says, and because she faces the consequences of past actions with bravery and good spirits.

Where and how: Read this on a rainy day, when you want a love story that is gentle and understated, on a day when you hear the characters’ murmuring in the sound of the falling rain.

John Bellairs wrote a host of children’s books, including one of my favorites, The House with a Clock in Its Walls, and a single adult novel, The Face in the Frost. I wish the ratio had been in the opposite direction, because The Face in the Frost just has such an engaging world and characters that I would have loved more of it. Much, much more. It’s a woefully slim little book, and I will not claim that it has the world’s most satisfying ending, but it delights me in so many ways.

Much of the book’s richness lies in the banter between the two old friends (there’s only one place it falls flat, and it says something about the quality of the texture elsewhere that the flat spot drives me a little nuts every time I read it), who are both skilled and eccentric wizards. The friendship is a longtime one, built of mutual affection, exasperation, and shared experience. Pieces of this book are a buddy roadtrip, taken through a series of small kingdoms, some only town-sized, and the supernatural menace is one that is genuinely haunting.

I’ve read other books by Bellairs, but with the exception of The House with a Clock in its Walls (which has lovely Edmund Gorey illustrations as a bonus), I find that his children’s literature falls flat for me, though I know it’s well-loved by many middle-graders. For me, it lacks the menace that both Face in the Frost and Clock in Its Walls hold.

I used part of the first paragraph for the description of Prospero’s house for our clan housing on Dark Castle MUD, (back in the innocent days of the early Net when the majority of us had no idea what copyright meant); for all I know (and hope) it’s still there, but I somehow doubt it. Here it is, for your delectation:

Several centuries (or so) ago, in a country whose name doesn’t matter, there wa a tall, skinny, straggly-bearded old wizard named Prospero, and not the one you are thinking of, either. He lived in a huge, ridiculous, doodad-covered, trash-filled two-story horror of a house that stumbled, staggered, and dribbled right up to the edge of a great shadowy forest of elms and oaks and maples. It was a house whose gutter spouts were worked in the shape of whistling sphinxes and screaming bearded faces; a house whose white wooden porch was decorated with carved bears, monkeys, toads, and fat women in togas holding sheaves of grain; a house whose steep gray-slate roof was capped with a glass-enclosed, twisty-copper-columned observatory. On the artichoke dome of the observatory was a weather-vane shaped like a dancing hippopotamus; as the wind changed, it blew through the nostril’s of the hippo’s hollow head, making a whiny snarfling sound that fortunately could not be heard unless you were up on the roof fixing slates.