Wide-Eyed Reader

Title:  Girl in the Blue Coat Author:  Monica Hesse Category:  Historical Fiction Hanneke lives in Amsterdam in 1943, surviving by smuggling black market goods to wealthy clients in order to provide for her mother and disabled father. She's good at what she does, though she has never taken the time to dig past the black market trade into the revolution she knows is happening under the noses of the German invaders now occupying her city. However, when one client asks Hanneke to find a teenage Jewish girl she was hiding, Hanneke's drive to solve the mystery leads her straight to the heart of the revolution, and to finally see the pain that is being caused all over Amsterdam. I am very glad that I read this novel! I've read a great deal of WWII fiction, though none besides this one set in Amsterdam, and I found it interesting to get a peak into life in the city during German occupation. I found Hanneke to be a little self-centered at times, but I loved seeing her growth. I t...

  Title: Black Horses for the King Author: Anne McCaffrey Category:  Author Assignment Black Horses for the King  follows Galwyn, a young runaway from his uncle's ship who meets Lord Artos--whom we know as King Arthur of legend--and uses his skill with horses to aid Artos in finding strong horses to bear his men in battle. Galwyn is skilled with horses, as his now-deceased father was a horse trader, and the boy loved the animals, so it isn't odd when Artos hires Galwyn to work as a groom and trainer for his fine black horses. In the process, Galwyn learns to care from horses and helps to perfect the horse-sandal, an invention that would later become known as the horseshoe. While McCaffrey's writing style is easy to read and understand, obviously geared towards a younger YA audience, I quite enjoyed it. I didn't feel that she "dumbed down" anything, showing a respect for the young audience. I also quite liked her character work, as Galwyn is easy to root for, a...

   Title:  Code Talker Author:  Joseph Bruchac Category:  Multicultural Ned Begay, a Navajo boy who has spent the last several years in a government boarding school known as a "mission school" designed to teach him to act as white citizens would, joins the marines upon finding out that they are recruiting Navajos who speak fluent English. Once past training, Ned finds that he has been recruited to send messages in a code developed by other Navajo men from the language he grew up speaking--the Navajo language that the mission school had attempted to beat out of him. The novel follows Ned through his service in the Pacific theatre of WWII. I found this book to be written very simply, with very little character or emotional resonance. However, Buchac very obviously did a great deal of research in writing it, and as a result the novel is more fact--descriptions of battle strategy, the events of the war, and anecdotes about code talkers--than anything else. I think t...

Things I learned from this novel: Margaret Beaufort was self-righteous and power-hungry; and the Cousin's War (the War of the Roses) was really long and drawn-out. Like, generations long and drawn-out. Let's talk about the novel, though! CHARACTERS The main character of The Red Queen  is Margaret Beaufort, daughter of John Beaufort, the Duke of Somerset, and an heiress to the Lancaster House of England - at the time of Margaret's birth, the royal house. As a young girl, she is married off to the king's half-brother, Edmund Tudor, who was some twelve or so years older than her. Through him, Margaret conceived her only child, Henry Tudor, who was royal through both parents and had a vast claim to the throne. Cue, the Cousin's War. At the start, Margaret is shown to be someone who thinks she is above others. She expects special treatment from her mother (see: begging to be a nun rather than marry, though she was her father's only child and as such, was exp...