Forgive Me, I Meant to Do It, Gail Carson Levine

This is a book of poetry modeled after William Carlos Williams' poem called "This Is Just to Say", which is one of my favorite poems.  This book is a hoot!  The subtitle is false apology poems, and I'm going to give you a teaser of just one.

This is Just to Say
I have shortened
my nose
with your saw

because
honestly
telling lies
is so much more fun

Forgive me
I don't care
about becoming
a real boy

Know what that's referring to?  If you guessed Pinocchio, you're right.  If you got it wrong, it's only because you didn't see the picture in the book.  If you saw the drawing accompanying the poem, surely you'd have gotten it right.   Matthew Cordell illustrates the poems, and the drawings are as fun and whimsical as the poems themselves.  Many of them refer to nursery rhymes or fairy tales, but others do not.  I especially loved the Little Red Riding Hood poem and the Humpty Dumpty one.

Gail Carson Levine gives a little lesson on how to write these formulaic poems about 1/3 of the way into the book, where she also "sneaks" her introduction poem.  This would be a fun, fun book to use with a class or on your own to practice writing some false apologies.  You never know, they might come in handy sometime!! 

It was an excellent book to snuggle up with on the couch today, this rainy, ugly, SO not summer day, but it will be just as fun in the bright sunshine.  You could sit outside and read it, then write some of your own while you soak up the Vitamin D. Enjoy!

Ever - Gail Carson Levine

Know me, know I love fairy tale stories. so of course I enjoyed this tale by Gail Carson Levine, who I'm excited to get to meet in October at the Oregon School Libraries conference.

This story is told in two voices, alternating chapters - one voice is of a boy, Olus, and one is of a girl, Kezi. The boy is an immortal, Akkan god of the winds, and the girl is just a regular, although beautiful and wonderful, girl. I liked how she interwove their stories and their lives and made them seem nearly as similar as not, even though they obviously had some critical differences.

Kezi's father has unwittingly drawn a curse of death on her, and Olus is determined to find a way around it because he is madly in love with her and doesn't want to lose her. He figures the only way to save her is to turn her immortal, not an easy task. Both he and she must overcome difficult obstacles if they are to make this work, and there is a grat deal of tension to see if they can achieve what they've set out to do.

The one thing I didn't like about this novel was that Kezi simply gave up her final time with her family just in case it would be her last time with Olus. I would have liked it better if she'd shared her time between them or they'd both gone back to spend more time with her family.

A story for lovers of fairy tales romances. Available in the WOMS library.

Ella Enchanted - Gail Carson Levine

I had never read this sweet little story, but after I read the dark Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister for my book club, I was looking into other Cinderella stories, and this title popped up. Did you know Cinderella stories have been told for thousands of years? I didn't. I mean I knew they'd been around for a long time, but thousands of years??

This is a somewhat traditional Cinderella story, with mean stepsisters, a Cinderella figure worked to the bone and covered in ashes, a pumpkin coach, and a handsome prince. But there are differences. One new twist that I really like is Ella has a magical book that I haven't heard of in any other Cinderella stories (tell me if you have). When other people (or elves) look at it, it's pretty much like a regular book. But when Ella looks at it, it will show her people or conversations or letters or whatever, that involve other people in her life. For example, when she gets sent off to finishing school with her nasty wig-wearing stepsisters, she has letters from her best friend the cook, Mandy. Sometimes she sees letter written by those nasty stepsisters to their mother, or letters from their mother to them. It's a bit of a way to spy on them. And she hears from the prince. This books comes in quite handy for Ella.

The story is a little bit different than other versions in that Ella knows the young prince long before the ball and is friends with him...or is it more? She knows him so well that she must hide her face when she goes to the ball. This is actually similar to something that happened in the Confessions tale, although the reasons are a bit different.

And the enchantment of the title is also different from other versions. In this re-telling, Ella HAS to follow any order. It's a "gift" bestowed on her by the not so delightful fairy, Lucinda. Lucinda has a bad habit of bestowing this type of gift, and throughout the story we see her making a mess of many a person's life through her "gifts."

I would definitely recommend this book to readers, and I've heard the movie is good, too, so perhaps a trip to Blockbuster is in my future :)

Happy reading!

EFB