Too Much Pink: Deadly Pink by Vivian Vande Velde

GRACE PIZZELLI.
GO DOWN TO MRS. OVERSTREET'S OFFICE RIGHT AWAY.
YOUR MOTHER IS HERE.

When she is summoned out of her freshman math class to the principal's office, Grace cannot imagine anything good waiting for her there. But what she learns from her distraught mother is nothing that she could have imagined.

It seems her college freshman sister, Emily, the family superstar--brainy, pretty, and popular, with a prestigious internship programming computer games at Rasmussem Corporation--seems to have inexplicably entered one of her virtual reality projects, Land of the Golden Butterflies, from which she cannot be extricated, leaving behind only a cryptic note in her perfect handwriting:

Not anybody's fault.
This is MY choice.

In the Rassmussem lab, Grace and her mother find Emily, electrodes in place, pale and still on the gaming couch, eyes moving rapidly behind closed lids. Grace knows from her Rassmusem gameplay that this is normal for virtual reality games, but what she learns from the technical staff is alarming. Emily, the golden girl daughter, has programmed the game so that she cannot be exited from it, a game designed for a half-hour or so of immersion which becomes deadly for players to remain in it for many hours, as Emily obviously intends. Two hours have already passed, and her Rasmussem bosses and their lawyer seem very alarmed.

Mom is beside herself, and her total lack of gaming experience make it impossible for her to help her older daughter. Grace seems to be the only one with plenty of gaming hours who knows Emily well enough to try to go into the game and convince her to come out on her own.

A quick immersion into the game finds it a mystifying choice for the cerebral and practical Emily. Designed for elementary-age girls, princess wannabes who get off on sparkly pink and lavender wardrobes and Disneyesque landscapes with unicorns, wish-granting sprites and potential princes who seem to appear to meet every whim, this seems the last game she would choose. Once Grace makes her virtual way through the glitz, she finds Emily-in-the-game disgusted at the appearance of her little sister, sending her off on tasks which end with her "death" and instant emergence from the game

But the observant Grace notices something odd: all the endlessly compliant and impossibly hunky men in the game are either mute or speak no English, and Grace's hunch is that this silent role for men means that something has gone wrong with her sister's long-term relationship to her fiance Frank. Can all this digital drama be merely the result of the break-up blues?

Grace makes a few phone calls, from which she learns that Emily has apparently been living a different life from what her family thought, the friend-filled, romantically happy life of a care-free coed. Her old friends seem to have lost contact with her, and Frank reports brusquely that they are no longer a couple. Now Grace realizes that Emily's motive in imprisoning herself inside this virtual reality game is, in reality, a form of pink and lavender suicide.

Back in the game, Grace confronts her sister, and eventually the now-fading Emily confesses that she had used her computer skills to hack into college entrance records to alter some of her friends' SAT scores and that her dishonesty is about to be exposed to the world. Grace must convince her sister to give up her deadly game and return to real life. As her sister loses her real and gameplay strength, Grace realizes that it is up her, the average daughter, to outsmart her superstar sister's programming skills and gain exit for both of them before Emily's time runs out forever.

The third book in Vivian Vande Velte's series on virtual reality games is both witty and suspenseful, as the sisters ultimately team up to deal with the surreal Land of the Golden Butterflies, tricking gold-gathering dragons and outplaying the rapacious King Rassmussem himself before the deadly GAME OVER ends Emily's life, virtual and actual. Deadly Pink (Harcourt, 2012), forthcoming in July, utilizes the venerable "frame story" setting, in which characters living in the real world find themselves, through a fictional device (usually magic or a scientific device), suddenly interjected into another world populated with strange beings and its own set of rules and tasks. Although the game's setting is fluffy and girly, the danger becomes just as real as any alien warriors or sword-and-sorcery warlock warlords for the two teen-aged protagonists. Girl gamers in particular will go for this feminine-friendly fantasy fiction which racks up a high score at the virtual arcade. "... the author delivers another clever, suspenseful drama in the digital domain" says Kirkus Reviews.

Other books in this virtual reality game sequence by Vande Velde are Heir Apparent and User Unfriendly.

Fortitude Triumphs: Wisdom's Kiss by Catherine Gilbert Murdoch

Trudy began weeping even before she awoke the next morning. "What is it?" Tips whispered.

Trudy pulled away. "I don't want to be your family. I want to be your wife!"

Gently, Tips shook his head. "We haven't talked in six years. This is my life here---"

Wisdom opened her eyes. "Where are we?"

"It doesn't matter," Trudy said bitterly. Tip, overcome, stared at the floor.

"Doesn't matter?" said Wisdom. "It's the future of Montagne. It's my future, my sister's, it's...."

Trudy glared at her. "It's my future, too! My future is over. You stole my future."

Wisdom recoiled. "How dare you!"

"How dare I? What's that, princess talk? You can have anything you want, in the whole world. Why did you have to take him?"

"I didn't "take" him. I love him."

Happiness is many things. In Catherine Gilbert Murdoch's forthcoming Wisdom's Kiss (Houghton Mifflin, 2011), the human quest for happiness is played out from the multiple perspectives of its characters--Queen Mother Benevolence (nee Princess Ben), her spinsterish older daughter Temperance, her ditsy and adventurous younger daughter Wisdom (Dizzy), childhood sweethearts Tips the miller's son and Trudy (Fortitude), an orphaned kitchen wench of dubious lineage, the avaricious Queen Wilhelmina of Farina, her effete son Roger, dispatched to woo Temperance but enamored of Wisdom, and Felis El Gato, the showman who apprentices Tips for his agility and takes him away from Trudy and off to the court of Wilhelmina of Farina.

It all begins when Queen Wilhelmina sends her dim son Roger to woo Temperance in order to acquire the riches of Montagne for her kingdom, but when he chooses instead the anti-princess Dizzy, the unwieldy plot swings into motion, sweeping up the beauteous (and strangely clairvoyant) Trudy as a substitute lady-in-waiting along the way. Wisdom and Tips fall into a star-crossed love; Queen Wilhemina is unable to conceal her evil intentions; and Queen Benevolence (nee Princess Ben), reviving her renounced wizardly skills, takes a page from Juliet's faux suicide scene to confound the dastardly Wilhelmina's imperial lust and unite the true lovers, to the vast dismay of the thus lovelorn Roger and Trudy. Then, with a Deus ex machina resolution involving a magically-driven hot air balloon escape, Trudy's clairvoyance, and assorted transformations, including that of a doppelganger cat, it all concludes with a happy-ever-after for all...and, incidentally, the historical genesis of several of Europe's best-known fairy tales.

Just your average teenage love triangle novel--with appended glossary and author's notes, that is.

Told not in straight-forward narration, but in eight parallel literary sources--encyclopedia entries, bombastic memoirs, journal postings, various epistles and missives, and a sixteenth-century drama--the story almost founders under the weight of its clever complexity, saved by an enticing pair of romances, a cut-throat royal rivalry, and curiously talented black cat. If the plot sometimes struggles to move forward under the weight of its several narrative threads, it becomes apparent that it is through their different takes on the same events that the diverse characters are developed in what is ultimately revealed as a supremely character-driven plot.

Sometimes confusing, occasionally tedious, and ultimately delightfully satisfying, this novel is not one for the reader seeking a light, quick read. Murdoch, author of the poignant and hilarious Dairy Queen trilogy and this novel's prequel, Princess Ben, nevertheless emerges as the real magician behind this literary legerdemain. "An ebullient fairy tale," as Kirkus Reviews has it, this novel joins Gail Carson Levine's Ella Enchanted and Fairest in the pantheon of the popular young adult genre of plucky-princess fractured fairy tales.

Going Full-Time: Always a Witch by Carolyn McCullough

"As you do know," says Cera, "our power comes from the elements."

"Earth, Air, Water, Fire," I quote.

"Yes, but Blood and Time are also considered elements. Those we rarely touch or call upon. They can be dangerous. They can so easily spiral out of control."

"But the Knights aren't afraid of that."

Her mouth twists downward. "Clearly not."

In the long-awaited sequel to her Once a Witch, Carolyn MacCullough picks up the story of the wizardly Green family without a hitch. Tamsin has settled in with her new-found Talents, like those of the other members of her family, secure that she can repel spells and and freeze anyone, magic or mortal, with a touch to the forehead. Things are going well with boyfriend Gabriel Snowe, and her only annoyances are sister Rowena's pre-wedding jitters and her manipulations to force Tam into an unflattering bridesmaid gown.

But this relative calm ends when the time-travelling Alistair Knight appears and reveals that the Knight family, immobilized by Tamsin's earlier time-travel encounter and control of the Donati talisman, are now scheming to regain their full powers back in the nineteenth century and destroy her own family more than a century before her birth. Tam knows that obliterating their last obstacle to power will mean that she and her modern family will also cease to exist.

Tamsin is determined to Travel back to 1877 to prevent this outcome. Declining Rowena's jproferred help and Gabriel's protection, she goes alone back to nineteenth-century New York City and wangles a maid's job in the Knight mansion, a position which has strangely come open with the mysterious disappearances of a sucession of lady's maids to daughter Jessica Knight. Tamsin, as household domestic Agatha, finds that the job has its ordinary perils from the rude advances of oldest son, Liam Knight. But Tam soon learns that these advances are not merely a matter of master-servant lust, but indeed a blood lust which is both horrifying, and, as she comes to realize, a means to magical powers which will enable Liam and his evil mother La Spider to destroy the nineteenth-century Greens and all of their issue.

Grandmother Green has warned Tamsin that she will soon face a choice, and as the episode with the Knights plays out, Tamsin realizes that her prophecy is indeed true, and that in making this dangerous choice, her life and future will depend upon one member of the Knight family, one who is different from the others, one who is also willing to use the elements of Blood and Time to change the present and the future.

A tightly woven and gripping sequel which is sure to please her fans, Carolyn MacCullough's Always a Witch (Clarion, Houghton Mifflin, 2011) is forthcoming August 1.