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Geeks and the Holy Grail (Camelot Code #2), by Mari Mancusi, for Timeslip Tuesday

The first book in the Camelot Code series, The Once and Future Geek , mixed time travel between the medieval world of King Arthur and our own, and it is a very entertaining book.  The second book in the series, Geeks and Holy Grail (Hyperion, October 2019), is also entertaining (though not quite as funny; King Arthur as a modern day high school student is hard to beat....). When Morgana, sworn enemy of King Arthur, attacks the druids of Avalon, Nimue, the youngest of them, takes the Holy Grail and runs with it.  King Arthur is dying, and only the Grail can save him.  Desperate to keep it from falling into Morgana's hands, she stumbles into Merlin's Crystal Cave.  But instead of Merlin there to help her (he's on vacation in Los Vegas, in our time), there's only his very inexperienced apprentice, Emrys.  His attempt to hide the grail works, in a sense--as a small, flatulent dragon, it sure doesn't look much like a grail.  But it isn't much use to Arthur as a...
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The Secret

The Secret

My Beating Teenage Heart


C.K. Kelly Martin

My Beating Teenage Heart is saddled with an unfortunate cover and an even more unfortunate title. I got more strange looks when I pulled this book out of my backpack than I usually get, which I believe is mainly due to the title. In addition, the cover is a fairly uninspiring tan, black, and gray. While the color scheme fits the book, the picture needs to be more interesting.
*There will be a few spoilers in here, especially when I talk about the ending, so read at your own risk!*
My Beating Teenage Heart follows the fairly common premise of a central character who is dead and looking down on the living from whatever state of afterlife they are in. Martin breaks the mold a little bit here in how her dead girl character, Ashlyn, is tied to a living boy, Breckon, dual narrators of the novel. Now, it does take Ashlyn a little bit of time to figure out that she's dead, but chances are good that the reader will figure it out beforehand (especially given the quotes on the back cover of the galley, such as "I miss the beat of my heart."). Ashlyn doesn't know why she's stuck with Breckon for the majority of the book, so she learns about him as the reader does, a good choice by Martin. Watching the characters unfold (Ashlyn also slowly remembers her life as the book goes on) is an interesting process and gives them some dimension, especially Breckon. Breckon is reeling from the death of his younger sister Skylar, and as the reader and as Ashlyn we watch him spiral down into despair because, of course, he blames himself for what happened to her.
A few things of note:
1) This is a very, very sad book. I almost cried at the end, and I don't typically cry because of books. Martin does an amazing job of capturing the emotions of her characters, but it is almost painful to read at times.
2) The book did get a tad draggy, especially if you're not thrilled by watching someone sink into depression. There was a lot of "Breckon did this," then "Breckon did that." The emotions are what drive the book, more than the plot points do.
3) The book does trend a bit towards the melodramatic. For example: "The sound isn't music and it's not whispers. I don't have words to describe it. If teardrops, blinding sunshine and limitless knowledge combined to make a noise, it would be the one the stars hum while I float amongst them" (1). You see what I mean. Beautiful, but a tad over the top. Which brings me to...
4) The ending (and SPOILER ALERT). I don't really know how to describe the ending. On the one hand, it was really beautiful and uplifting and sad. On the other hand, it was like a typical dead-person-book ending: Ashlyn is able to see her family one last time, Breckon knows his sister forgives him, and Ashlyn moves on, no longer tied to Breckon. Somewhat sappy, but it also makes you want to cry. Or at least sniffle a bit. It would have been more interesting if Martin had gone off the beaten path a little here, but this ending is what most readers will want for Breckon and Ashlyn, even though it is cliched.

My Beating Teenage Heart is about a 3/5. Compare it to whatever spicy food you like: it's tasty, but it hurts to eat it, and you should really read it with something else to cut the spice. Preferably some sort of fluffy, very cheerful piece so that you don't find yourself crying in the middle of the day. An excellent book for this is My Most Excellent Year by Steve Kluger, which is so over-the-top happy that it will perfectly accompany My Beating Teenage Heart.

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Dead Voices, by Katherine Arden

Dead Voices , by Katherine Arden (middle grade, G.P. Putnam's Sons, August 2019), is a delightfully spooky sequel to Small Spaces , perfect for a chilling read as winter draws closer! Ollie, Coco, and Brian became close friends under somewhat trying circumstances last fall--the evil Smiling Man trying to turn them into scarecrows--and now winter has come, they're on their way to a fun weekend at a new ski lodge with Ollie's dad and Coco's mom.  They almost don't make it through the intense snowstorm, and when they arrive, they find themselves the only visitors.  The snow keeps falling, trapping them inside, and the power goes out.  And there are ghosts. The day after they arrive another visiter makes it through the snow, a young reporter for a ghost hunting magazine.  The owners of the hotel aren't sure that publicity about the hotel's previous incarnation of an orphanage with a dark, sad, history is what they want, but the young man is keen to get ghost hun...
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Premeditated

I'm going to start with the blurb from the back cover of this book, because it does a remarkable job of introducing the story in very few words: A week ago, Dinah’s cousin Claire cut her wrists. Five days ago, Dinah found Claire’s diary and discovered why. Three days ago, Dinah stopped crying and came up with a plan. Two days ago, she ditched her piercings and bleached the black dye from her hair. Yesterday, knee socks and uniform plaid became a predator’s camouflage. Today, she’ll find the boy who broke Claire. By tomorrow, he’ll wish he were dead. Claire and Dinah are cousins who are incredibly close, close enough that when Claire ends up in a coma in the hospital from a failed suicide attempt, Dinah knows where to look to find Claire's diary (or the computerized version of one, anyway). Dinah figures out what drove Claire to the point of suicide--a boy from the private school that Claire was supposed to attend that fall. Dinah enrolls at the school herself, determined to get...
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The Hippo at the End of the Hall, by Helen Cooper

If you are a fantasy fan who loves quirky small museums with collections of oddities, you will love  The Hippo at the End of the Hall , by Helen Cooper (first published in the UK in 2017, now out in the US from Candlewick, Oct 2019). Ben's invitation to the Gee Museum was delivered by bees.  He'd never heard of the place before, but despite his mother's reservations about letting him go there on his own (reservations which seem, for reasons, to be a bit much, even taking into account the fact that Ben's only ten)  he went...There, in its rooms full of taxidermidied creatures, other natural history collections, a glass bee hive, and clocks and other treasures collected by the Gee family from around the world years ago, he found magic, and the truth about his father, who died many years ago while off on an expedition of his own. Ben also found danger, one of my personal least favorite types of danger--the unscrupulous developer, in this case paired with the unscrupulous d...
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