In the past, I've been a regular reader of Bookslut's blog but not the magazine. No particular reason. I've started browsing recently since I've been reading Chasing Ray, Colleen Mondor's blog, because Colleen writes for Bookslut (among other publications).
This month Bookslut has an article called Judging a Book By Its Cover: Wizard People that deals with, well, the covers of wizard books. (I so like a title that truly matches the content of the article that follows it.) Included in the list is Jane Yolen's Wizard's Hall.
I've been hearing muttering for years about a Yolen wizard book that sounds much like another wizard book That Does Not Need To Be Named. Well, Wizard's Hall is the book in question. Heather Smith, who wrote the Bookslut article says of Wizard's Hall, "J.K. Rowling has been occasionally accused of poaching a few plot points from this book, but the Venn diagram of books about boarding schools and books about wizards has intersected many times before". I suspect that that could very well be the case.
Hey! I just remembered that years ago I made a stab at writing a wizard book. A couple of stabs, in fact. The story took place in the Dark Ages, there was no boarding school, and the wizard couldn't do magic. I guess we can see why I didn't get too far with that.
Speaking of wizards, though, I started reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows yesterday. I need to read it so I can go back to the Child Lit listserv. I figure it will probably take me as long to read all the Child Lit Harry messages as it will take me to read the book itself.
Speaking of wizard books, I have been listening to the Angie Sage books about Septimus Heap. The first book is an excellent as an audio book thanks to the narrator's performance. I loved it so much that I downloaded the second one as soon as I finished book 1.
ReplyDeleteOh noooo... a different narrator...
I am settling into the new voice because the story is so interesting but it is not the same.
I listened to both those on CD, too. And I liked the first one better than the second, also. So much time passed between listening to the first and the second that I didn't realize there was a different narrator.
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