The Sunday Post (#19) and Showcase Sunday (#5)

The Sunday Post is a weekly meme hosted by Kimba the Caffeinated Book Reviewer, and Showcase Sunday is hosted by Books, Biscuits and Tea and inspired by Pop Culture Junkie and the Story Siren. They're a chance to share news, a post to recap the past week on your blog, highlight our newest books and see what everyone else received for review, borrowed from libraries, or bought.

Book stuff this week on Girl!Reporter
Review - The Land of Stories: The Enchantress Returns by Chris Colfer
My week in books (#5) - a gift for book lovers, the ups and downs of being a crime writer by David Jackson and 15 books banned for absurd reasons
Review - All Our Yesterdays by Cristin Terrill

Books I added to my shelves

I went to visit my friend who works for Bloomsbury this week, and got a few books and some lovely promotional stuff.

I've not heard of Alyxandra Harvey before, but I needed something to carry the books my friend gave me, so grabbed the bag and the little purse-thing. I also got a gorgeous Bloomsbury Picture Books tote, and a couple of Stravaganza bookmarks, since I'm always using scraps of paper and receipts as bookmarks.

Book wise, I picked up After Eden by Helen Douglas, Someone by Alice McDermott and When Mr Dog Bites by Brian Conaghan. These are all uncorrected proofs, so not the real covers at all.













And finally from my trip to Bloomsbury I picked up The Selfish Crocodile, a children's book in both English and Arabic.

For review, I got one book from Penguin, and it's a beauty:

 What have you been up to this week?

My week in books (#5)

My week in books is a feature where I share things I've found interesting from the past week that concern books, literature and all things book blogging.

First up, I posted last week about getting Chris Colfer's The Land of Stories: The Enchantress Returns (which I reviewed here) and there was lots of love for the gorgeous cover and the spine. Well, the guy who illustrated the cover, and did the drawings inside, was the wonderful Brandon Dorman. You can see more of his lovely illustrations on his official website here.

Some lists (because you know I love lists):

• Buzzfeed did 15 books banned for the most absurd reasons. There's some unexpected ones in there, and my jaw dropped at the reasons giving for banning these novels at various times. 
• Also on Buzzfeed, a contributed post by Harper Collins on 16 bookstores you have to see before you die. My goodness, some of these book shops are amazing. If you know of any that aren't in the list, let me know in the comments.
• Talking of bookshops, The Guardian has an interactive directory here of independent book shops across Britain, and you can add any that are missing. 
• The Guardian is also liveblogging from the Edingburgh international book festival, so if you can't get there yourself you can keep up with what's going on here.
• Ginger over at GReads! did a list of sweet summertime back to school reads which you can find here. 

It can be difficult to buy presents for book loving friends, since they may already own too many (is there such a thing?) books, but I saw something else that is perfect for bookworms. The Literary Gift Company is selling this gorgeous literary map of Britain, which is just stunning.

Pan Macmillan this week featured a piece by one of their authors, David Jackson, on the ups and downs of being a crime writer. It's amusing and honest, and you can find it here.

I'm currently reading All Our Yesterdays by Cristin Terrill and can already tell I'm going to have a book hangover after I've finished, a concept that's defined in lovely fashion here.

And finally, although not strictly a book thing but it does involve characters from literature as well as other mediums, Sophia McDougall wrote a great piece for the New Statesman here about why she hates Strong Female Characters. It's not what you think, note the caps.

Let me know if you've come across anything you want to share.

Book review: The Land of Stories - The Enchantress Returns by Chris Colfer

Sometimes I'd like to get sucked into a fairytale world, where I get to wear pretty dresses and run around the woods singing.

Although I'm not quite sure it would be like that, especially if the fairytale world I was getting sucked into was the one created by Chris Colfer in his The Land of Stories series.

The sequel to The Land of Stories: The Wishing Spell, The Enchantress Returns continues the story of twins Conner and Alex, who in the first novel fell through a book in to the fairytale kingdom, had some adventures, battled some villains, rescued some people and came back into the real world.

A little older now, the twins find themselves falling back into the book, this time to help battle the evil Enchantress, the stuff of Sleeping Beauty's nightmares.

Unlike in the first book, there's a lot more 'real life' stuff in The Enchantress Returns, and it generally works well. Alex and Conner, while dealing with the aftermath of their adventures in the Land of Stories, also have to deal with feelings of abandonment because their grandmother (the Fairy Godmother) has not contacted them in an age, and with all the feelings that come when their mother starts dating someone new. I thought this stuff helped balance out the fairytale elements, although perhaps the real world was explored a little too much (more on that in a bit).

Colfer has an absorbing writing style, and I found myself immersed in the fairytale world he created within the space of a few sentences. I knew I'd be in for a good read as I scanned the final lines of the prologue:

There was no denying it now; the kingdom’s greatest fear had come true.

“The Enchantress,” Sleeping Beauty whispered to herself. “She’s back.”

Unfortunately, Colfer suffers a little of the J.K. Rowling circa Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix here - he's got an editor who didn't use their red pen when they should have done. The Enchantress Returns clocks in at 517 pages, and I'd say at least 100 of those are unnecessary.

Colfer's writing isn't bad, by any means (he's actually a very engaging writer), but I felt the book could have moved a lot faster. After that prologue, it takes around 120 pages for the twins to actually get back to the Land of Stories (although we see glimpses of it in the narrative), which was far too long in my opinion. What comes before this is a lot of setting up, some of which, while sweet and amusing, wasn't relevant to the plot of the novel. And let's be honest, while I want a well-rounded tale, what I really wanted when I read this book was to head into the Land of Stories with Alex and Conner as quickly as possible.

Once in the Land of Stories though, the book ramps up and when the twins finally set off on their adventure proper - a balloon ride across the kingdoms to assemble the Wand of Wanderment to defeat the Enchantress - then it's a rollicking ride all the way to the end.

And the end. Goodness, the end. My heart broke, and then didn't know whether to fix itself or keep breaking. The ending of The Enchantress Returns is just painfully perfect, or perfectly painful, and Colfer knows just how to suck every bit of emotion out of you. It reminded me very much of the way a popular fantasy series ended - I'd tell you which but then you might guess how The Enchantress Returns ends.

On the way to that heartrending ending was a whole load of fun, and some genuinely scary parts. While many favourite, and not-so-favourite, fairytale characters star in The Enchantress Returns, the focus is on four we met in The Wishing Spell but didn't spend masses of time with - Froggy, Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks and Jack (as in and the Beanstalk). I like this concentration, and it meant we got to know the characters really well. My favourite was Red, who may be annoying and dim and self-centred, but who I felt had a heart of gold and was really underappreciated by Goldilocks in particular. Sure, she may not be brave and clever, but she played her part in helping forge the Wand of Wonderment, and she has a good soul. While I liked Goldilocks, I didn't like her constant mocking of Red (although Red was hardly kind towards Goldilocks all the time either!).

Colfer makes good use of characters from the first novel - Trollbella is a laugh and the relationship between twins Alex and Conner has grown and is very sweet, as is their relationship with their mum - and introduces some great new ones. Among them are Rumpelstiltskin (not in the book much but who plays a crucial role every time he appears), Mother Goose (hilarious), and the Snow Queen, the Sea Witch and the Enchantress (the first two are really scary and the latter is a whole other layer of evil).

It's not only Colfer who needs to get credit for The Enchantress Returns - the book is beautifully illustrated by Brandon Dorman. The cover is gorgeous (an earlier post of mine mentioning this book saw major love given to the cover and spine), as is the map on the inside covers, but it's the black and white pencil drawings at the start of each chapter that are the real winners. Every time I started a chapter I'd stop after a few sentences and go and stare at the picture at the top of the chapter again.

The Land of Stories: The Enchantress Returns is an absorbing read. I can forgive its faults because it's a really, really good tale that is generally very well told. Immerse yourself in a familiar yet not familiar fairytale land, and remember to have tissues handy for that ending.

How I got this book: Bought

Reading challenge book 12: The Land of Stories - The Wishing Spell by Chris Colfer

Book 12 in my challenge to read one book (I haven't read before) a fortnight in 2012 is The Land of Stories - The Wishing Spell by Chris Colfer.

Yes, this book is written by the same Chris Colfer who plays Kurt in Glee. That's the reason I bought it, but the reason I kept reading it was because it's actually quite good.

The Land of Stories - The Wishing Spell follows twins Conner and Alex Bailey as they fall into a fairytale book and find themselves in the land of fairytales, where all their favourite, and not so favourite, characters are actually real. To get back to their world, they must gather all the elements to make the wishing spell, which will grant them anything they wish.

Alex and Conner are likeable characters - Alex is a goody two shoes who is completely endearing because she genuinely cares, and Conner is a typical almost-teenage boy, getting into trouble but with a heart of gold under it all. 

It's the fairytale characters, though, who held my attention. Colfer's take on popular characters such as Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks was interesting, and gave well known and loved, or hated, characters a new edge. I particularly liked that some characters had unexpected personality traits, and that those I thought would have likeable alternative stories actually turned out to be a bit annoying, and vice versa.

Colfer has said in interviews he came up with the idea for The Land of Stories when he was eight, and it shows. There's clearly a child's imagination at work here, and since children's imaginations offer more freedom than an adult's, that means the world in the book is wonderfully created, and took me back to my childhood, where anything was possible.

Much as I loved the story, I do feel the writing could have been better. Colfer wrote The Land of Stories in between other projects (including filming Glee, going on tour, and writing and filming his first feature-length film) and I think it shows a little. Some of the story feels a little rushed, while other bits feel a little basic and undeveloped.

There's also the way that chapters don't always seem to flow. Rather, The Land of Stories reads more like a screenplay at times, which would make sense since Colfer spends his day reading television scripts and previously wrote a screenplay. Both of those require a little less detail than a book, as there comes a point when it's the director and actors' responsibility to fill in the gaps. However, a book does require a little more, and sometimes the space in between chapters seemed to have something missing.

In addition, Alex and Conner often fall into and out of trouble too easily. They spend a chapter fighting a baddie, and then suddenly in the next chapter they're walking down a path in a forest having escaped. The book is clearly episodic, and I would have liked some more narrative flow.

Still, Colfer does have a way with words, and weaves some beautiful lines. Among my favourite is one right at the beginning:

But what the world fails to realise is that a villain is just a victim whose story hasn't been told.

Colfer is clearly a very talented writer, and as he is writing a sequel to this book, I hope his editor is a little stricter with him, so the second book reads more like a book than a play.

One thing that deserves a mention is the illustrations in the book, done by Brandon Dorman. They're stunning, and I only wish the British version of the book included the map of The Land of Stories that is apparently in the American print.

The Land of Stories is a children's book in one sense - it's about fairytales, its protagonists are children, it's a story of good versus bad (or not). But Colfer's fan base, largely teenage girls and older women, means that there are probably more older people reading this book than children. And the thing is, this book really works for that audience. As said earlier, The Land of Stories takes me back to childhood, taps into the parts of my imagination I let gather dust as I grew up. That's the sign of a good book, one that takes you out of your world and into someone else's. I definitely found myself in Alex and Conner's world, and it's not a bad place to be.