Newbery Book Reviews: The Dark is Rising

“When the Dark comes rising six shall turn it back;
Three from the circle, three from the track;
Wood, bronze, iron; Water, fire, stone;
Five will return and one go alone.

Iron for the birthday; bronze carried long;
Wood from the burning; stone out of song;
Fire in the candle ring; water from the thaw;
Six signs the circle and the grail gone before.

Fire on the mountain shall find the harp of gold
Played to wake the sleepers, oldest of old.
Power from the Green Witch, lost beneath the sea.
All shall find the Light at last, silver on the tree.” 

The start of Christmas season is the perfect time to introduce The Dark is Rising Sequence by Susan Cooper, seeing how 'The Dark is Rising' takes place over the 12 Days of Christmas as Will Stanton learns his true powers and has to fulfill a prophecy to save the world.  It sounds really more cliche than it actually is (unless you mean the travesty of a movie they made from the book which is about as cliche as it deserves to be).  The full 5 book set consists of 'Over Sea, Under Stone' (Jane, Simon, and Bartley find the Grail and part of a prophecy), 'The Dark is Rising' (Will discovers his true powers), 'Greenwitch' (Power of the greenwitch, lost beneath the sea), 'The Grey King' (Will meets a strange pale boy with even stranger parentage), and 'Silver on the Tree' (finding the light at last and saving the world to boot).

The Dark is Rising

Instructions

A Hogwarts Craft Fair

Kana here.  If you've been wondering about the radio silence for November, the answer is 'The human spent the entire time prepping for massive craft fair on 12/10.'  It's going to be a Harry Potter/magical/wizard themed craft fair, and the lot of us (me, Lily, Sam, and Nellie) have been wrangled into doing a mock up of the craft display.  So we know just how much random bits and pieces we have.

As for houses, well, I'm the only Ravenclaw in the entire lot of the 7 of us at Jinjia Mixed Goods.  Lily is so very obviously a Slytherin (as evidenced by her flat-out obsession with potions).  Sam is very much a Gryffindor, and Nellie is a Hufflepuff.

We've got enough things for four stalls in all.  I'm running the Flourish and Blotts book store, complete with textbooks and extra copies of the Quibbler.  Lily is (what else) running the apothecary.  Sam's got the shop with the wands and amulets and other small trinkets, and Nellie has the Honeydukes Sweet Shop in a cart.  The food and the wands are all made from polymer clay.

Cookies, ribbon candy, macarons, and cauldron cakes (bubbling, even)

A crate of chocolate frogs peeking out from the bottom shelf of the cart and a basket of tiny peppermint candy.

Wands, more wands, amulets, and bracelets at the magical trinkets shop

A pared-down potions display because we may have lost patience at the 300 little bottles.

(The full potions shop is here.)

Quibblers, 'Quiddtich Through The Ages', and 'Fantastic Beasts'

Newbery Book Reviews: The Giver

Kana here.  We have, over the course of the year, built up a quite the library.  And as it turns out, we haven't actually shown off most of our books yet.  Over the summer, the human found a few stashes of digitized books, and we got ourselves a rather modern library (or rather, late 90s vintage, courtesy of the human's nostalgia).

This week's book collection is the Giver Quartet by Lois Lowry (she of 'Number the Stars', which the human remembers reading way back in 4th grade).

The internet can provide much better summaries (and book reports) than we can, but suffice to say, 'The Giver' is a good introduction of dystopia for those too young for Orwell's '1984'.  Jonas's world seems to work so well.  And then you learn over the course of the book just how things work.

'Gathering Blue' and 'Messenger' expand the world, and the cliffhanger ending to 'The Giver' is finally explained.  The weird magic and how certain people have certain gifts is never explained.  Deus ex machina it is.

The last book, 'Son', came out in 2012 and feels like it's meant for the generation who grew up reading 'The Giver' in elementary school.  The description of C-section and post-partum depression makes much more sense to the generation who'd be of child-rearing age about now.

And now, as always, your chance to expand your library (think of it as the winter reading special):

The Giver

Instructions

Weekend Baking

Kana here.  Trying out some new furniture in our lovely apartment.  Instead of the craft/study, we've set up a nice little living room and parlor instead.  We'll need to hold a garage sale soon for all the little things we keep accumulating.  The cat is back, along with its friend, the lynx hiding under the windowseat.  It's also been here for nearly forever.

Doing homework

Nothing like a windowseat for reading

A new stash of Jane Austen novels

The human went on a book-making binge a little bit ago in between making tons of stuff for the Harry Potter craft show in December, and as usual, the photography fell behind the crafting.  We now have 5 Jane Austen novels in our collection (Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Mansfield Park, and Northanger Abbey).  No, the human hasn't read all of them.  They're on her list.

Get off the table, cat.

Time to try out the new cookbook.

Meanwhile, someone let Lily in the kitchen again.  And Cauthrien and Anora are helping.  This does not bode well.  Namely because Lily thinks cooking is just like potions-making (and sadly, she's not too far off) and doesn't quite care about the difference between potion ingredients and baking ingredients.

Berries, eggs, and what else do we need?

I'll get the milk and butter.

Maybe we made too many cupcakes?

The cookies are not for you, cat.

Halloween Alchemy

Kana here.  It's time for more hilarity with me and Lily!

So the human's be frantically prepping for a Harry Potter themed craft fair in December (which means the human sized bookshelves now have doll-sized chocolate frogs and pumpkin pasties and wands everywhere.  And potions.  And potion ingredients.  Enough that we finally set up a little alchemy and potions show of our own.  We've got a workstation, a desk for doing all the paperwork that comes with running a shop, and lots and lots of shelves for potions.

Total number of individual little bottles in our shop:  about 300

It all started with this little shelf the human found on the side of the street for free.  It's supposed to be a wall display cabinet, and it has nice iron scrollwork on the door and sides.  And it's perfect for the massive number of potion ingredients.

Lily, being Lily, did not label anything.  So only she knows what everything is, and what goes with anything else without being a hazard.  Thank you, Lily.

We also got a new rather large mortar and pestle set (it's the Outlander Megamini kit from Amazon).  Pretty sure the human thought it was going to be smaller than it is.  We us it anyways.

More potions.  And bottles of sparkly fairy dust.  And racks of ingredients.  All the potions can be worn as charms.  We should make more.  Or rather, Lily and the human should.  I'm just going to watch the hilarity.  The last time they made potions, they stripped the finish off the new kitchen counters.  Oops.

The cabinet of completed potions.  Also unlabeled.  Just...uh...don't touch anything?  Some of the ones on the bottom might be poisonous.  (No, I don't know which book Lily is using to brew these.  Neither does anyone else.)

We also got new portraits taken in the shop, and I think these are our favorites so far.  We'll start our potions business after I make Lily label everything.  I swear.

School Supplies: book report reading

Lily here.  Nothing says fall and school quite like required reading and book reports.  And an awful lot of those required books seem to be Newbery award winners.  We have, over the course of the year, acquire our set of the human's favorites from when she was a rather small human.  (Or, in some cases, a medium or mostly grown human).

Theses are the set of historical fiction/slice of life books, because in some cases ('Miracles on Maple Hill' and 'Thimble Summer') the books were contemporary fiction when they were published.

The human has a special fondness for books by Lois Lenski (partly because they were impossible to find in libraries).  She's best know for her two Newbery books these days, but her portfolio includes the books on regional American in 1940s, which gives a very different sense of life in the US since they cover things like prairie schools, sharecroppers, and migrant workers.  Usually not covered in history class, at least not from a 'here's how they would have lived' perspective.

If you haven't read any of these before (and I don't think 'Thimble Summer' or 'Miracles on Maple Hill' are among the more popular Newberys these days, you should find a copy and do so.
In 'Thimble Summer' a girl living on a farm during the Great Depression finds a silver thimble while swimming in a nearby creek and wishes on it that life might be better.  The book covers her life and how it changes for the rest of the summer.  In 'Miracles on Maple Hill', a girl and her family move to maple farm in hopes that the quiet environment will help with her father's PTSD.

And finally, 'Charlotte's Web'.  Complete with illustrations.  We're sharing this with you so you don't have to pay the absurd Ebay prices for it.

Get your copy of 'Charlotte's Web' here.

Instructions

The Science Library

A science classroom/laboratory

Kana here.  By now you must be wondering what we did with all those science books.

Lily generally behaved like a normal person and used the books for her research projects.  Even if she does complain on a daily basis that there's not enough magical theory in science books.

Shep and I, on the other hand, only have so much patience.  There's the obligatory science fair projects, to be sure.  And making fancy models...

But we have so many of these books...

Lily:  Guys, whatever you're planning, stop it.

And that is what we do with 101 science books.  Dominos.

As an aside, the human's husband walked in while this was being set up.  He stared at us and walked back out without saying anything.

You have to admit, it's pretty impressive.

Utter chaos

Not even caused by the furry menace this time.