the mg sci fi/fantasy round-ups are on hold till the end of March

What with organizing Kidlitcon (coming up the week after next!) and finishing home renovations before Kidlitcon company comes to stay with me, I have no time for the Sunday round-ups. But I do have lots of reviews planed for the next few weeks, and I'll be back rounding up at the end of March!

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The Wind Eye, by Robert Westall, for Timeslip Tuesday

This week's Timeslip Tuesday book is an older English one-- The Wind Eye , by Robert Westall (upper MG/YA 1976, still in print). Westall's work ranges from picture books to adult, often exploring how the past hits the present in dark and mysterious ways. Which is what happens in The Wind Eye.... It begins when a family, comprising a mother and her teenaged son married to a father with two daughters (one a young teen and one a little girl), setting off to the northeast coast of England to stay in the old house the father has just inherited. They are not a happy family. The kids get along fine, but the parents are not getting on well at all. And then the past and the present collide. St. Cuthbert still is a real person to the people of this part of the Northumberland coast, and he becomes so to the kids as well when they find a boat that travels back to his time, taking them out to the island that was his retreat from the world. Along the way, there's...

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Conjured

by Sarah Beth Durst Eve is a girl placed in a special witness protection program that concentrates on people like her who can do magic. They protect her and other strong magic-weilders from a mysterious serial killer who has been targeting people like them. However, Eve cannot use her magic without blacking out and having visions of the Magician and the Storyteller, and she has no memory of her life before the witness protection, except for a few flashes here and there. Often, when she blacks out, she'll lose days, weeks, or even months of her memories. All she knows is that she is very important to the people trying to catch the serial killer, and they need her to remember her past. The plot developed slowly, but not in a bad way. It took a while to figure out what was going on, but figuring it out was interesting. The memory loss was done pretty well, and the characters were consistent and distinct. Three of the characters - Aiden, Topher, and...

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The Dragon Thief, by Zetta Elliott

In Dragons in a Bag (link to my review), Zetta Elliott introduced a young boy named Jaxon, who was given a job to do by a magical old woman, Ma. He had to return three baby dragons to the world of magic. It didn't go as planned, not that Jaxon knew enough about what was going on to really "plan" anything, but he did his best. It wasn't enough. One of the babies was stolen by Kavita, the little sister of his best friend, Vik. The Dragon Thief (Random House, Oct 22 1019) picks up the story right where we left it. Jaxon is worried about Ma, who has fallen into a strange sleep, and he's desperate to get the baby dragon to the magical world. Kavita is worried about the baby dragon, which grows at an alarming rate when it gets fed. When she realizes she can't keep it safe, her old aunty who lives with her family decides to help her get it home. So on the one hand we have Jaxon and Vik, racing to find Kavita while figuring out how they ca...

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