In the Deep: Song of the Abyss (Tower of Winds 2) by Makiia Lucier

They came in the night as she dreamt, in her berth, in a ship sailing home to del Mar. Two carracks, painted Scorpion black. No emblem flying to hint at a kingdom of origin.

"Quiet!" Gunnel ordered. She wore her sword. "Up, up, quickly, Reyna!

Sea raiders!"

To the sound of sound of soft humming, the crewmen lie still, as if somehow enchanted, while the guttural sound of a vaguely familiar language is heard, ordering the crew of pirates looting the ship. As a map maker, Reyna knows she must save the charts of trading routes, the lifeblood of the kingdom of del Mar. With them safe in a water-tight quiver, she goes overboard and swims through the monster-filled sea until she reaches an island, a land which she recognizes as Lunes, one for which she has learned the language, but still strange and seemingly undergoing a crisis, with no torches or signs of activity, but where she hopes to find a del Marian trading ship to take her home.

As the rising sun shows her a landing, she sees the dark figure of a young man slumped, as if in grief.

In Lunesian, in a voice that rolled deep and pleasant in the dark, "Between the two of us, I wonder who's had the worst night of it!"

He tells her that he is Levi, a son of the King who has just died.

Reyna vanishes into the dawn, but later, she meets up with him again. He is the second son of the king, and when Reyna's ship is towed into the harbor with its dead, the two of them find themselves assigned the task of finding his older brother and locating the mysterious raiders before they strike again.

With Reyna's navigational knowledge and Levi's knowledge of sailing ships, they sail out from Lunes into the Sea of Magdalen and through the Strait of Cain, with its maelstrom filled with drowned but undead souls, and trace their pirates to the distant land of Miramar, a secretive and xenophobic people with exquisite etiquette and with the barbaric custom of tutto mortise, burying their ruler with his chosen retainers. It is to this land that the mysterious raiders belong, inexplicitly swapping their stolen booty for shiploads of Lunesian clay. In managing to stay alive and discover the unthinkable logic behind the piracy, Reyna and Levi find themselves falling in love.

In her Song of the Abyss (Tower of Winds) (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019), author Makiia Lucier fashions an compelling fantasy romance within an extravagantly imagined world drawn from the Mediterranean society of the early Enlightenment period. Del Mar resembles Portugal in the days of Henry the Navigator, and Lunes is reminiscent of the Venice of Marco Polo, while Miramar suggest a rigid, ingrown Asian empire. Within this exotic setting, Lucier tells the intrigue-filled story of two strong-minded, star-crossed, but chaste lovers whose love and loyalty grow during their own odyssey through their world. The sequel to Lucier's Isle of Blood and Stone (Tower of Winds), this title sets the roles of the characters for the last book of the trilogy, perfect for knowledgeable young adult readers with promise for those who crave a bit of sophistication, an amalgamation of familiar cultures with fantasy, in their romance novels.

Hide This Book: Foolin', Fibbin', and Fakin' It: The Naughty Kid's Handbook by Rod Green

"REMEMBER, BEING NAUGHTY IS NOT THE SAME AS BEING STUPID."

With that warning caveat emptor out of the way first-off, Rod Green's The Naughty Kid's Handbook (Dino Books, 2015), heads off into capers that most kids will claim to, at least  as wishful thinking. What kid hasn't wished he or she could avoid sitting in the middle of back seat on a long car trip, book-ended by two pesky siblings? What kid looks forward to being kissed by distant great-aunties, or eating unfamiliar or even foreign foods on vacation?

Is there a kid with soul so dead who hasn't to himself have said, "How can I get out of eating Brussels sprouts for dinner?"

With tongue totally in cheek, author Green has the handbook to end all handbooks for kids, written with touches of British slang that somehow add to the fun.

Take getting out of yard work (or as the Brits euphemistically term it, "gardening"). The best ploy is an allergy (the vaguely defined "hay fever") which comes and goes conveniently throughout the growing season. First brush up on fake sneezes. Practice honking into a hanky until it sounds believable. Then brush a little pink blush lifted from mom's bath around the eyes, add a little baby oil on the lower lids to fake watery eyes, and for sniffly verisimilitude, the perfect product is probably right in the cupboard:

Now for the snotty nose. . . Don't actually blow your nose (fake that), because between your nose and your top lip you are going to have a very convincing moist, glistening, slow-moving nostril slug. The best way to fake a snot creature emerging from your nose is to use honey. Honey is easy to wipe off but looks truly disgusting.

What parents can look at that pitiful and unpleasant face and not send the kid inside? With luck, they'll even say "Send out your sister to help then!" Double points!

For the middle seat on the car trip dilemma, you'll have to fake a barf. No parent wants a pukey kid in the middle of the back seat, and a window seat is guaranteed. But this one takes some sneaky planning to produce faux throw-up before entering the car. What is required is extensive prank prep, beginning with rehearsing the sound of a barf convincingly. Then there's some sleight of hand practice to be done:

What you are going to do is to fake a vomit.

You will need a small tin of vegetable soup--reddish brown and plenty of carrots which, as every fool knows, always seem to turn up in every puke.

Now you will need a long, straight balloon. Cut the open end off and use a funnel to fill the balloon with cold soup. Don't overfill the balloon; you will need enough balloon at the top to hold it shut so that the soup doesn't come out until you want it to. Keep it upright under your sleeve.

Then before you get too close to your waiting family, deliver your "I'm really not feeling very well" line, turn away from them, make a huge retching sound, and let the balloon deliver the faux pavement pizza. Then say bravely, "I think I'll be okay now."

No one in his right mind is going to want you sitting in the middle.

There are plenty more clandestine capers in this handbook--practical tricks such as ways to win every time at tic-tac-toe, (naughts and crosses in Brit-Speak), rock-paper-scissors, and cutting the cards. How to avoid a sing-along to your parents' music ("They'll tune the radio to a station so boring that only old people know how to find it, with songs so ancient Noah's family hummed them while counting the animals.") needs only a simple bit of chicanery that siblings will willingly join in.

More complicated naughtiness requires serious planning, e.g.,. sneaking back down to watch the telly after being sent up to bed requires faking a doorbell or noise at the backdoor to get your parents out of the room for a moment and fashioning a telescope from a plastic wrap box and two mirrors to use to watch from behind a chair or the curtains. And fooling teachers to get out of PE or chilly, rainy recesses, faking a shower after said PE, or pulling off the old ruse of "the dog ate my homework" in convincing style--all get their own chapters with helpful hints for every step of the plan.

Text boxes ("Fact or Fib") in each chapter give readers a chance to determine their own gullibility, and the whole book is a clever and witty tour de force for upper elementary and middle school kids that will win LOLs all around. Even one-time naughty kids all grown up will want to sneak a read of this one to get in on the glee.

Uneasy Lies the Head...: Cleopatra Confesses by Carolyn Meyer

Father turns and takes my face in his hands so that I am forced to look into his eyes.

"I am not sure you understand, Cleopatra.

I'm not sure you realize yet that my wish is for you to rule Egypt someday, and that burden--and the power--will then become yours."

As the third daughter, with two younger brothers bearing their father's name, Ptolemy, Cleopatra is not the natural successor to the throne, but from the time her father the Pharoah Ptolemy XII, gives her that charge, young Cleopatra begins to prepare herself. Superbly educated, fluent in many languages, trained in science, mathematics, and the literature of the ancient world, Cleopatra is a talented scholar, and her vain and rivalrous older sisters, Tryphaena and Berenike, sense the threat of her intelligence even by the time she reaches the age of eleven.. Despite their schemes to thwart her at every turn. Cleopatra remains her father's favorite, and as she matures into a politically astute and beautiful young woman during her father's three-year exile in Rome, she comes to fear for her life as her sisters seize the throne.

But as Cleopatra nears the age of fifteen, Berenike has Tryphaena murdered, and although their father returns from Rome, where he has borrowed vast sums beyond Egypt's means to repay to raise an army to take back his throne, even the defeat and execution of Berenike doesn't give Cleopatra any security. Her father makes her his queen, his titular co-ruler, but forces her to marry her younger brother Ptolemy XIII, still a child, and the crushing debt and failures of the Nile's inundation for successive years leave Egypt vulnerable to the empire-building Romans. With her father's death and the very young Ptolemy proclaimed Pharoah, Cleopatra needs a strong ally, and finds it through her seduction of Julius Caesar, who temporarily vanquishes her brother and helps her secure her claim to the throne of Egypt.

Cleopatra, the quintessential celebrity chick of history, gets a measured narrative in Carolyn Meyer's engrossing new historical fiction title, Cleopatra Confesses (Simon & Schuster, 2011). As a young adult read, her story has all the right stuff, "mean girls" in the form of her shallow and malevolent older sisters, a loyal friend, her struggle to find her place in what must be one of history's more dysfunctional royal families, and her steely determination to survive to bring stability to her nation, realizing early on that she is alone in that role:

I must... keep the reins of power in my own hands if I am to restore prosperity to Egypt. The welfare of the people rests entirely on me. I trust only myself, and I am ready.

In her highly reviewed Young Royals and Royal Diaries series, which include such notable books as Mary, Bloody Mary: A Young Royals Book, Beware, Princess Elizabeth: A Young Royals Book, Anastasia: The Last Grand Duchess, Russia, 1914 (The Royal Diaries), and her recent The Bad Queen: Rules and Instructions for Marie-Antoinette (Young Royals) (see my 2010 review here), Meyer, herself the queen of her genre, builds a first-person narrative which is reasonably accurate and filled with the details of life in the period, introducing believable conversations, thoughts, and memorable characters which makes this account a truly absorbing novel.

Meyer hits the high points of Cleopatra's known history, her childhood trip down the Nile with the Pharoah which gives her insight into her kingdom, her struggle to stay alive during the precarious rule of her sisters and the young Ptolemies, her contrived meeting with the conquering Julius Caesar to gain his support of her rule, their voyage down the Nile, her subsequent romance with Marcus Antonius after Caesar's assassination, and her own suicide in her tomb to avoid her certain captivity in chains by the future emperor, Caesar Augustus. A useful appendix, "Cleopatra in History," includes a brief bibliography, ten relevant web sites, a time line, and a short summary of the Egyptian and Ptolomaic deities and calendar, making this historical novel a useful piece of adjunct reading for ancient history courses.

In Meyer's skillful prose, the much-portrayed and parodied Cleopatra becomes a real child and young woman, shaped in the crucible of the palace intrigues and international politics of her time, accustomed to luxury and yet, except for a very few trusted friends, alone and on her own in a terrible time. Meyer manages to walk the line between grim historicity and the superficialities of princess pandering in this account, portraying the legendary Cleopatra as a young woman both as fascinating as history has always made her and yet humanly recognizable for modern young adult readers.