Rachel Kovaciny's Blog, page 31

"The Light of Western Stars" by Zane Grey (again)

Yup, this is now officially a favorite western novel for me.
Now, the funny thing is, the first time I read this book, I got really mad at the ending because I seem to have missed one very key sentence toward the end.  (SPOILERS in the rest of this paragraph only.)  And I still think that a showdown between Gene Stewart and Don Carlos is called for, and I'm mad that we didn't get one.  BUT.  Grey does tell us that Don Carlos got captured and thrown in jail.  He's not left on the loose, waiting to...

"Mandy" by Julie Andrews Edwards

I read this aloud to my kids this summer, and I was surprised to discover I only remembered about a third of it, even though I thought I had read it over and over when I was a kid myself.  I think that I actually just reread my favorite parts over and over back then, which were all the parts where Mandy is planting a garden and cleaning the cottage.  I remember those parts vividly, but there were huge parts of the book that weren't familiar at all.
Mandy is a ten-year-old orphan who lives in a sm...

"The Black Swan" by Rafael Sabatini

I adore the 1942 movie The Black Swan , which is supposedly based on this book.  I'd heard that the book is quite different from the movie, so I've avoided reading it for years because I was afraid that I was going to be disappointed by it.  
Well, that was silly.  The book is ENTIRELY different from the movie, except that it involves Captain Henry Morgan, Tom Leach, and another pirate who pretends a lady is his wife in order to keep her safe.  Those are literally the only similarities.  Which was...

"Ophelia" by Lisa Klein

I read this book about ten years ago, and I really enjoyed it then, so I was excited when it got made into a movie a few years later.  I very much like the movie as well, so I'm glad I had a chance to reread the book.  It's just as good as I remembered!  Such an intriguing take on Hamlet, not only because it's told through Ophelia's eyes instead, but because Lisa Klein weaves aspects of a couple other Shakespeare plays into it too.
In Ophelia, we get to see the title character growing up alongsid...

Top Ten Tuesday: What Would Belle Read?

This week's Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl is a freebie!  That means we get to choose our own topic, which is always fun.

A friend recently sent me a reel on Instagram listing books that one bookstagrammer thought Belle from Beauty and the Beast would enjoy.  I didn't know any of the books they listed, so I decided to do my own list, based on these lyrics from her song at the beginning of the movie:

Oh, isn't this amazing? It's my favorite part because -- you'll see --
Here's where she ...

"Sense and Sensibility" (Manga Classics) by Jane Austen (original story), Stacy King (story adaptation), and Po Tse (art)

This is my favorite of the Jane Austen books from Manga Classics.  They didn't let the actual point of the book slide the way they did with Emma , and they didn't have anyone calling anyone else by an anachronistically incorrect name the way they did in Pride and Prejudice .  The artwork was awesome, and the storytelling was spot on.
I really loved how they used hairstyles to highlight the personality differences between Elinor and Marianne.  Marianne has loose, flowing, sometimes untamed hair, whi...

"What Katy Did at School" by Susan Coolidge

I liked this book even better than its predecessor, What Katy Did !  In this story, Katy and Clover Carr attend a boarding school for young ladies rather far away from their home and family.  The experience deepens their sisterly bond, but also allows them to branch out and form new friendships independent of each other.
The girls have quite a few small adventures at school, sometimes of their own making and sometimes instigated by their new friends.  Katy also gets into some rather serious troubl...

"Pride and Prejudice" (Manga Classics) by Jane Austen (original story), Crystal S. Chan (story adaptation), and Po Tse (art)

Like the Manga Classics version of Emma, this book updates a lot of the language from the original book, presumably to make it more understandable and accessible to kids these days.  I don't have an issue with that.  This isn't pretending to be an illustrated edition of the original book, but a manga adaptation.  However, I do have one issue with this aspect of this book:  Elizabeth Bennet constantly calls Mr. Darcy just plain "Darcy."  Aloud, in her head, to his face, all of it.  And that annoy...

"Seventh City" by Emily Hayse

Seventh City is a magical realism story based in a fictional world similar to the Pacific Northwest/Alaska back in Old West days.  It's about a native tribe and some Invaders, basically fantasy versions of Inuits and white people.  The story centers around Maki, a young teen girl whose older brother Tsanu gets captured by the Invaders.  Tsanu is her only caretaker, since their parents are gone, and Maki wants to rescue him.  Tsanu agrees to lead the Invader captain to a fabled seventh city of fa...

"Emma" (Manga Classics) by Jane Austen (original story), Crystal S. Chan (story adaptation), and Po Tse (art)

This was sweet and fluffy and fun, but I think the adapters here may have lost some of the deeper meaning contained within Austen's original.  I don't think they show Emma maturing as much here as she does there, in other words.  Actually, this has inspired me to want to reread the original, so that's pretty cool :-)
If they don't portray Emma's maturing from a judgmental and meddlesome young lady to a kinder and more contented young lady, that might partly be because the Emma here starts out fai...