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Huggins and Kisses

HugginsKisses

Huggins and Kisses by Susan Creighton, illustrated by Ron C Lipking, 1985.

Mary has been wanting a dog for some time. She admires her neighbor’s dog, Sugar, who is so well behaved.

When her parents finally give her the puppy she’s been wanting, Mary is thrilled, and names the puppy Kisses. However, taking care of a dog and training it turns out to be a lot more work than Mary expected! Kisses doesn’t know how to walk on a leash, and he sometimes chews things he shouldn’t.

One day, Mary gets angry with Kisses for ripping the arm off of her favorite doll and yells at him. While Kisses is hiding under Mary’s bed, and Mary is crying, one of the Hugga Bunch, Huggins, appears to comfort them. Mary is surprised to see Huggins, and she explains to Mary that she is from Huggaland, which can be reached through her bedroom mirror. She invites Mary to see it for herself, and Kisses follows them.

HugginsKissesDoll

In Huggaland, Huggins repairs Mary’s doll, which makes her feel better. Then Kisses knocks over the birdbath at Huggins’s house, and Mary gets angry again. Huggins points out to Mary that Kisses hasn’t actually broken anything and that he was probably looking for water because he was thirsty. Huggins gives Kisses more water and a hug.

Mary asks Huggins how she can hug Kisses when he’s been bad, and Huggins explains the importance of gentle discipline. Dogs may be naughty sometimes, but what they really need is love and training. Mary just hasn’t been patient with Kisses and given him the time he needs to learn how to behave.

Mary remembers how much that she really loves Kisses and resolves to give him the time and attention he needs to learn to be a good dog.

It’s a cute picture book, and a nice story about learning to care for pets, giving them the training they need and the time to learn.

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Zathura

Zathura

Zathura by Chris Van Allsburg, 2002.

This book begins where Jumanji ends. It’s not completely a sequel because it has a different set of children and a new game, but it’s connected because the two children from Jumanji left the board game in the park again after they finished it, and they saw two boys that they know pick it up and take it home.

ZathuraBrothersWrestling

However, the two boys, Danny and Walter, don’t end up playing the same jungle board game, Jumanji, that was in the previous book. They find a second board game in the Jumanji box called Zathura and decide to try it instead. Zathura is a space-themed game where players travel a path from Earth to the planet Zathura. Like in Jumanji, elements from the board game come to life as the boys play, and someone must reach the end in order to end the game.

ZathuraStartingGame

Danny and Walter, a pair of brothers, fight a lot. Walter hates doing things with Danny. However, when Danny starts playing the game, sending their house into outer space, Walter must join in and play with his brother in order to bring the game to an end so they can go home. The two of them learn teamwork as they help each other face the dangers of the game while trying to reach Zathura.

ZathuraOuterSpace

There is a movie version of this book, but there are major differences between the original book and the movie. The conflicts between the two boys are similar in the book and the movie, but the movie added a subplot about the boys’ parents being divorced (they weren’t in the original book), an older sister for the boys (it was just the two of them originally), and a kind of alternate reality where the older boy was trapped in the game by himself for years because he wished his brother away before finishing the game until his alternate self realized that he cared about his brother and wanted to cooperate with him.  In the original book, nobody was trapped in the game.

ZathuraAlienRobot

Chris Van Allsburg illustrations are always good, although I have to admit that I preferred the illustrations in Jumanji to the ones in Zathura.  It just seems to me that the pictures in Jumanji were more detailed and realistic.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

ZathuraGoingHome

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Jumanji

Jumanji

Jumanji by Chris Van Allsburg, 1981.

Judy and Peter, a brother and sister, are left home alone while their parents go to an opera. In spite of their parents’ warning not to make a mess because they’ll be bringing guests by later, the kids scatter all of their toys around while playing. Then, the kids go to the park to play for awhile, and they find a board game labeled Jumanji with a note that the game is free to anyone who wants to play it. Judy and Peter decide to give the game a try and take it home.

JumanjiPark

Jumanji turns out to be a kind of race game. Players are supposed to make their way down a path through a jungle, facing all kinds of dangers, until someone reaches the golden city of Jumanji. The instructions warn them that once a game has begun, it will not be over until one of the players reaches Jumanji.

JumanjiGameStart

At first, Peter thinks that the game is boring and easy, but it soon becomes apparent that things that happen in the board game are starting to happen in real life when a live lion suddenly appears after an encounter with one on the game board.  Peter is scared and wants to stop playing, but Judy reminds him that they can’t stop because the game won’t end until one of them reaches the end of the path on the game board. Until the game ends, they’re stuck with the lion and anything else that happens to appear because of the game. They have no choice but to keep playing, facing each danger as wild animals rampage through their house.

JumanjiLion

Chris Van Allsburg books always have amazing illustrations, and the pictures in this book are especially good!  At the end of the book, the children see two other children find the game, which leads to the sequel, Zathura.

JumanjiRhino

There is a movie version of this book, but the movie differs greatly from the original story. In the movie, the two kids were friends, not brother and sister, and the boy ends up trapped in the game for a period of years until, finally, a new set of kids starts playing and helps the original players to finish their game.  When their game ends, the original children are returned to their own time, and no one but them knows that they were ever gone.  Things turn out better for the future children as well because the older players make things better for everyone in their own time.  There were no players stuck in the game in the original book, and everything takes place during a single day.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

JumanjiParents

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The Bassumtyte Treasure

BassumtyteTreasureThe Bassumtyte Treasure by Jane Louise Curry, 1978.

When young Tommy Bassumtyte’s parents died, he went to live with his grandfather. However, his grandfather is now dead, and he is living with his 92-year-old great-aunt, who is in a wheelchair, and her 72-year-old daughter, who has recently had her driver’s license revoked due to her poor eyesight. Although the pair of them have taken good care of Tommy, neighbors have become concerned that they will not be able to do so for much longer because of their age and failing health. Rather than see Tommy sent to a foster home, they decide that he must go to the man who Tommy learns should really be his legal guardian, a distant cousin also named Thomas who lives in the family’s ancestral home, Boxleton House, in England.

The elder Thomas Bassumtyte, who should have taken Tommy when his grandfather passed away, has also since died, but his son, also named Thomas, agrees to take him. Tommy is quickly shipped off to England before there can be a custody hearing in the United States about him because the relatives fear that some official might try to prevent Tommy from being sent out of the country. Tommy is eager to go because he remembers fantastic stories that his grandfather told him about Boxleton House. The current Thomas Bassumtyte also lives there, although the place has become rather run-down, and he fears that he will not be able to keep the place much longer. Thomas was a mountain climber, but he was injured in a fall and hasn’t been able to work much since. He tells Tommy that the two of them might have to move when he is fully recovered and can do more work for the Foreign Office, but Tommy loves Boxleton House from the first moment he sees it and wants to stay.

According to the lore of Boxleton House, a distant ancestor of theirs hid a treasure there, but no one has been able to find it. If young Tommy and Thomas can find it, it would solve many of their problems, and they would be able to keep the house and restore it. All young Tommy has is the mysterious rhyme that his grandfather told him and the strange medallion that his great-grandfather brought with him when he went to the United States in the late 1800s. Thomas tells him that the treasure was supposedly hidden by a distant ancestor of theirs who was fond of riddles, called Old Thomas.

The Bassumtytes were secretly Catholic during the reign of Elizabeth I. Old Thomas was alive then and had a son called Tall Thomas. Tall Thomas traveled frequently and was mysterious about the places he went. One night, he returned to Boxleton House with a young baby, who he said was his son. He had married in secret, and his young wife had died shortly after giving birth. Tall Thomas also brought her body back to Boxleton for burial. However, that wasn’t Tall Thomas’s only secret. Although he remarried, giving his son a stepmother, and lived on for a number of years, he was eventually executed for smuggling messages for the captive Catholic queen, Mary, Queen of Scots. The family was stripped of its noble title and only barely managed to hang onto their house and land. If there was a treasure hidden during this time, it was probably something that the Bassumtytes were afraid would be confiscated by the queen’s soldiers as punishment for the family’s disloyalty or something that Mary had given to Tall Thomas to hide for her.

As Thomas tells Tommy more about the house and the family’s history, he points out Tommy’s uncanny resemblance to Small Thomas, Tall Thomas’s son, as shown in an old painting. Tommy feels a strange connection to Small Thomas, and begins seeing and hearing strange things. An older woman comforts him in the middle of the night, having him recite the same rhyme that his grandfather taught him. A small painting later reveals that this woman was Small Thomas’s grandmother. She appears to Tommy other times, giving him a glimpse back in time and clues to solve the puzzles of Boxleton House.

It is only when Thomas accepts the advice of a family friend who works for a museum that they come to understand the full significance of their family’s heirlooms and the hidden treasure. The treasure may not be quite what the Bassumtytes have always believed it was, but then, the Bassumtytes themselves aren’t quite who they always thought they were, either.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

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The Root Cellar

RootCellarThe Root Cellar by Janet Lunn, 1981.

Rose Larkin is an orphan, living with her grandmother, a stern businesswoman.  Her grandmother travels frequently on business, so from the time Rose came to her when she was three years old, she just took Rose with her wherever she traveled, tutoring her in school subjects in the evening after work.  Rose’s early life is largely one of travel to strange places and isolation.  When her grandmother is working, Rose is pretty much left to her own devices, often either reading alone in their hotel rooms or exploring strange cities by herself.  Not going to school, she has no friends her own age and doesn’t really know how to behave around other children or live as part of a normal family.

When her grandmother dies suddenly of a heart attack in Paris when Rose is twelve years old, her remaining relatives have to decide what to do with her.  She temporarily stays with aunts who are into fashion and high living before goes to live with another aunt and uncle and their boys on an old farm.  Aunt Nan (Rose’s father’s sister) and her husband are better suited to caring for Rose and can give her a more settled family life, but Rose’s other relatives don’t seem to think much of Aunt Nan, who is an author of children’s books.  Rose has heard that Aunt Nan has no sense and that the family has just moved to a shabby little farm house in Canada.  Rose is prepared not to be happy there, on a dumpy little farm, miles from anywhere, with a bunch of strange people.

Her new life gets off to a bad start when there is no one to meet her at the house when she arrives.  As she waits for her aunt and uncle to return, a strange old woman appears who seems to know her.  She calls herself Mrs. Morrisay and acts like she belongs to the house.  But, when Rose’s relatives arrive home, Mrs. Morrisay suddenly disappears, and none of them seem to know anything about her.  Later, Rose sees a girl making a bed upstairs, but her relatives just laugh when Rose asks them about the maid, which is who Rose thought the girl was.  There is no maid in this house, and Rose is the only girl.  To Rose’s annoyance, her relatives think she imagined the whole thing.

Actually, life in her aunt and uncle’s house in the country isn’t as bad as her other aunt has lead her to believe, but becoming part of their household isn’t easy because Rose is used to a very different kind of life.  The house is definitely old and in bad need of repair, and her relatives are noisy and disorganized, at least more so than Rose is accustomed to.  Rose isn’t used to the chaotic life of a family with a lot of children, and Aunt Nan has another on the way.  Also, tourists who are fans of Aunt Nan’s books sometimes stop by the house, and Rose doesn’t like dealing with their scrutiny and questions.  Sam, one of the older boys in the family, seems to resent Rose’s presence in the house, and Rose overhears him saying a lot of bad things about her to her aunt, calling her snobby and criticizing her appearance.  Rose takes his attitude as further evidence that she doesn’t really belong in their house and that she’ll never fit in.  If they think badly of her, why should she think any better of them?

Rose also becomes increasingly aware that there is something not quite normal about her relatives’ house, especially the old root cellar, and the people she saw on her first day in the house are part of it.  Sam thought that he might have seen a ghost in the house one day, an old woman, and Rose recognizes his description as that of the Mrs. Morrisay she saw on her first day there.  She sees Mrs. Morrisay in her bedroom later, suddenly walking through a wall.  Rose thinks Mrs. Morrisay is a ghost, but Mrs. Morrisay tells her that she’s not dead, just “shifting” through time and that she wants Rose to stay in the house and help restore it to its former glory.  Rose doesn’t know why or how she can possibly help Mrs. Morrisay.

Rose learns that her aunt’s house was once an old farm house that belonged to the Morrisay family, and there is still an old root cellar on the property, a relic from the time when people had to store certain kinds of food underground to keep them cool and prevent them from spoiling.  One day, Rose goes down into the root cellar and meets a mysterious girl dressed in old-fashioned clothes, the same girl she saw earlier, making beds.  Although Rose and the other girl don’t realize it immediately, Rose has gone back in time.  The girl was someone who lived on the farm in the past, during the 1800s.

Rose and the girl in the past, Susan Anderson, become friends, and Rose is grateful for another girl to talk to.  Susan is an orphan herself, living with the Morrisay family as a servant girl.  She and Will Morrisay, old Mrs. Morrisay’s son, are friends, and both of them are sympathetic to Rose when she tells them about her new life with her relatives and the problems she has. Rose finds herself wishing that she could stay in the past with them forever.  However, once they realize that Rose is traveling through time when she goes in the root cellar, they also discover that it isn’t reliable about exactly when Rose will reappear in the past.  Although at first there are only days between Rose’s visits from her perspective, months or years pass in her friends’ lives between her visits.  They eventually manage to solve this problem through a friendship pact where they exchange favorite objects.  It’s at a good time, too, because soon Rose’s friends need her help as much as Rose needs them.

After a terrible fight with her relatives in which her aunt slips and falls and Rose worries that her aunt and the baby might die, Rose runs away to the root cellar and goes to see her friends, discovering that in their time, Will has gone away to fight in the American Civil War alongside his favorite cousin and has not returned.  It’s been awhile since Susan has heard from him, and she fears the worst.  Rose suggests that they go to look for Will at his last known location, but it’s a difficult, perilous journey. At first, they’re not sure whether they’ll find Will alive or not.

When they finally find Will, he is a changed man from the war, and Rose and Susan have to help him to remember who he really is and where he really belongs.  In helping Will to remember where he comes from, his life before the war, and how much Susan needs him, Rose comes to realize some important things about herself and where she really belongs.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction and Spoilers

As difficult as the choice is, Rose realizes that she must return to her own time, face the consequences of her earlier actions, and do what she can to become a real member of her new family.  After she returns home and the root cellar is destroyed in a storm, it seems as though she might never see her friends from the past again, but friendship can transcend many boundaries, including time.

I didn’t realize this the first time I read the book, but it’s actually part of a loose trilogy.  I say loose because none of the main characters from each story appear in the others (except, perhaps, for one who is in both the second and third books), which also take place in different time periods.  What binds the stories together is the location where the stories take place and also some distant family relations, particularly focusing on the Anderson and Morrisay families.

It is something of a spoiler, but it seems that the time travel in this story may not be so much a matter of the house being special or magical, but because Susan is special.  It is revealed in one of the other books, Shadow in Hawthorn Bay, that her grandmother was psychic.  Will and Susan briefly refer to Susan’s grandmother and her stories about ghosts when talking to Rose.  Susan seems to have little control, especially later in life, over her ability to shift through time, but it may be her special attachment to the Morrisay house and her need for Rose’s friendship and help that makes Rose’s time travel possible.  It’s never explicitly stated that Susan inherited her abilities from her grandmother, but I think that it is implied during the course of the books.

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Magic Elizabeth

MagicElizabeth

Magic Elizabeth by Norma Kassirer, 1966.

Young Sally’s parents are away on a business trip, so she’s been staying with Mrs. Chipley, but now Mrs. Chipley has a family emergency to tend to. Mrs. Chipley’s daughter is ill, and Mrs. Chipley needs to go and help her with her children. While Mrs. Chipley is gone, there is only one other person for Sally to stay with: her Aunt Sarah, an elderly woman who Sally doesn’t really know. Aunt Sarah moved to California when Sally was just a baby, and the only reason why she has returned is that she has decided to sell her old house.

MagicElizabethArrival

Sally is a rather shy girl. She’s uneasy around Aunt Sarah, who is obviously unaccustomed to spending time with children, and Aunt Sarah’s creepy cat, Shadow. The house is old, chilly, and filled with strange things. However, Sally is enchanted with the bedroom that Aunt Sarah gives her and the portrait of a girl and her doll that hangs on the wall. The girl looks very much like Sally herself, and Aunt Sarah tells her that the girl was also called Sally and lived in that bedroom as a child, many years ago.

MagicElizabethKitchen

Fascinated by this earlier Sally and her beautiful doll, modern Sally decides to try to find the doll. Although her aunt tells her that she shouldn’t go poking around in the attic, Sally can’t help herself. She finds a trunk with Sally’s name on it full of girls’ clothes, just the right size for modern Sally to wear. There is a doll in the trunk also, but it’s not the same doll as the one in the portrait. When Sally reads the diary in the old trunk she learns the reason why. The doll in the picture, Elizabeth, was lost many years ago, when the earlier Sally was still young. As modern Sally plays dress up with the earlier Sally’s old clothes and studies herself in the mirror, she finds herself taken back in time, seeing the house through earlier Sally’s eyes. In the past, it was a busy and happy household with parents, an elderly aunt, earlier Sally, Sally’s little brother, and Sally’s pet cats.

A short time later, Aunt Sarah wakes modern Sally on the floor of the attic, and they assume that it was all a dream, but this look into the past changes Sally’s feelings about the house and her aunt’s cat, who suddenly seems friendlier and reminds her of the mother cat she saw in the past. Aunt Sarah also seems a little less stern as they discuss earlier Sally and her lost doll. Aunt Sarah says that no one ever saw the doll again after it disappeared on Christmas Eve all those years ago.  Earlier Sally had put the doll on top of the Christmas tree, like an angel, and after the family finished singing Christmas carols, the doll was gone.  They could never figure out what happened to her.  Modern Sally thinks that sounds very sad and wants to investigate the mystery of the missing doll, although Aunt Sarah isn’t very enthusiastic. She says that if the doll could be found, it would have been found long ago, and the earlier Sally has long since grown up and no longer needs it. Although, oddly, Aunt Sarah remarks that the earlier Sally had always thought that Elizabeth was “a little bit magic.”

Modern Sally continues to look for the doll anyway and also continues having moments when she sees the past as the earlier Sally did many years ago, especially when she looks into the mirror in the attic. One day, she invites a neighbor girl named Emily over, and while the two of them are looking around the attic, Emily finds Elizabeth’s old doll bonnet. The girls are excited because they now know for certain that Elizabeth is still in the house, waiting to be found. The girls are running out of time to find her. If Aunt Sarah agrees to sell the house, it will be torn down to build apartments. But, Sally falls ill with the flu, and it isn’t until Shadow gives her an important clue that Sally realizes where Elizabeth must be.

This book is currently out of print, but it’s one that I’d dearly love to see in print once more!  It is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction and Spoilers

Adults reading this story will probably realize before the children do (spoiler) that Aunt Sarah herself was the earlier Sally, the one who lost her favorite doll many years ago. “Sally” is a nickname for Sarah, like “Molly” can be for Mary and “Peggy” can be for Margaret, although any of those names can also be used by itself.  (In the Middle Ages, it was common for popular names to get different variations of nicknames by changing one sound in the original name and then changing one more sound in the first nickname to get another one, and sometimes even moving on to change one more sound to get yet another nickname that was very changed from the first. Those nicknames that look significantly different from their original names are a holdover from that practice, having lasted even into modern times.  John/Jack works on the same principle.  Fun fact!)  When Aunt Sarah grew up, she stopped using her childhood nickname, but the name was passed on to modern Sally.

At first, modern Sally sees her stern aunt as being witch-like, all dressed in black and fussy, but gradually, the memories of the past, her new relationship with young Sally, and the finding of her slightly-magical doll soften her. There are hints of Aunt Sarah’s youth in the attic, although Sally at first dismisses thoughts that some of the lovely things there could have belonged to her cranky old aunt because she has trouble thinking of her aunt as once having been young, pretty, and sweet. However, part of the theme of the story is that everyone was young once. Aunt Sarah is is bent and achy from arthritis, giving her the witch-like appearance and making her short-tempered at times. She also hasn’t been around children much for years, and part of her fussiness comes from forgetting what it was like to be young herself. Modern Sally, with her resemblance to her elderly aunt, and Elizabeth the doll both work their magic on her, reminding her what it was like to be a young girl and helping to revive a more youthful spirit in her.

I was happy that (further spoiler) Aunt Sarah decides not to sell the house after all, not just because she and Sally will get to spend more time together, but because old houses like that are rare these days. I like the idea that the old family heirlooms in the house will now be preserved, like the sleigh out in the old barn and the melodeon, a type of small organ.  I liked the way the book described the melodeon making musical sounds as people walk past it because of the way the floor boards move.  I also loved the description of the gas plant that Sally sees in earlier Sally’s memories.  If you’d like to see what a gas plant looks like when it’s lit, have a look at this video on YouTube.MagicElizabethMelodeon

Posted on by TracyC

Strega Nona

StregaNona

Strega Nona by Tomie dePaola, 1975.

Strega Nona is a witch who lives in a small town and uses her magic to help people in various ways, everything from small cures or love potions.  However, she runs into problems when she hires Big Anthony to help her around her house.  Big Anthony is helpful, but he doesn’t always pay attention or follow orders.

StregaNonaAnthonyPot
Strega Nona has a magical pot that makes pasta.  To get it to make a never-ending pot full of pasta, she recites a certain rhyme.  To get it to stop making pasta, she recites a different rhyme and blows three kisses to it.

Big Anthony is forbidden to use the pasta pot himself, but he can’t resist telling people in town about it.  At first, no one believes him because it sounds so strange.  Everything thinks he’s just making it up.  Big Anthony is offended that no one believes him, so one day, while Strega Nona is gone, he sets out to prove to everyone that this magical pot exists.

Big Anthony knows the rhyme to get the pot to start making pasta, and he uses it to make pasta for everyone in town so they will know that he was telling the truth.  Unfortunately, he doesn’t really know how to get it to stop because he didn’t know that Strega Nona blows kisses to the pot.  With the pot now sending a massive river of pasta through the town, what can Big Anthony do?

This is a Caldecott Honor Book.  It is currently available online through Internet Archive.

StregaNonaPastaRiver

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The Magic School Bus Lost in the Solar System

MSBSolarSystem

The Magic School Bus Lost in the Solar System by Joanna Cole, 1990.

Ms. Frizzle’s class is planning a trip to the planetarium as part of their lesson about the solar system, but of course, their magic school bus has other plans.  When they get to the planetarium and find out that it’s closed for repairs, the bus sprouts rockets and takes them on a real trip through the solar system.

MSBSolarSystemBlastOff

This time, the class is accompanied by Arnold’s visiting cousin, Janet.  Janet is a show-off who brags constantly about everything, making up stories when she has nothing real to brag about.  She gets on the other kids’ nerves, but when they’re separated from Ms. Frizzle because she got out of the bus to fix a taillight broken in the asteroid field, Janet takes charge, using Ms. Frizzle’s lesson plan to continue the field trip, eventually figuring out how to turn the bus around to rescue her and get back to Earth.

MSBSolarSystemMoon

All through the book, there are facts about the sun, the moon, and the planets in the solar system from the students’ reports.  Each time they stop at a planet, a scale shows the difference between Arnold’s weight on Earth and his weight on each planet.  The book considers Pluto to be a planet because it was written before its planet status was reconsidered.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

MSBSolarSystemRescue

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Journeyman Wizard

JourneymanWizardJourneyman Wizard by Mary Frances Zambreno, 1994.

This book is the sequel to A Plague of Sorcerers.

Jermyn Graves has finished his apprenticeship and is ready to move onto his Journeyman studies.  As a Spellmaker, an especially rare type of wizard, he really needs to study with a Master Spellmaker, and for years, there has only been one in the Wizard’s Guild: Lady Jean Allons.  Jermyn’s current teacher, Theoretician William Eschar, once studied under her himself.

Mistress Allons is a formidable old woman, and Jermyn is nervous about going to live with her and completing the next part of his training. Master Eschar says that she is strict but an excellent teacher, and he has fond memories of her from his own youth.  However, much has changed for Mistress Allons since those days.

Mistress Allons lives in her manor house in the small town of Land’s End with her widower son-in-law, Duncan, and her granddaughter, Brianne, who is only a little younger than Jermyn himself. Since the death of her only daughter, Annalise, in a mysterious accident during a magical experiment, Mistress Allons has not really practiced magic and no longer even keeps a familiar.  As Jermyn soon learns, everyone in Land’s End is still haunted by Annalise’s death.

Although Brianne has magical talent, both her father and grandmother refuse to let her study magic.  In defiance and because her talent will not allow her to leave magic alone, Brianne has taken to studying magic with a local Hedgewitch, Maudie.  Hedgewitches, or Wise Women as they call themselves, practice a very natural form of magic, but it can also be very dangerous because of its raw, undisciplined nature.  Although magical accidents are usually rare, that type of magic is more prone to them than the more formal kind that Jermyn is studying.  Jermyn tries to convince Brianne of the danger, but Brianne sees it as her only hope for learning anything, in view of her father and grandmother’s opposition.

Jermyn is not there for very long before Mistress Allons herself dies, the victim of another strange magical accident. Was it really just a terrible accident, or was it actually murder?  Jermyn struggles to find the answers while some people believe that he may have been responsible for Mistress Allons’s death himself.

I enjoyed the fascinating combination of mystery and fantasy in this short series.  While Jermyn’s magical studies are fictional, the book has some interesting insights into cross-disciplinary studies as Jermyn comes to understand something that Mistress Allons was trying to explain to him about using lessons from art and science to solve magical problems because different fields of knowledge are connected and the principles of one discipline have some bearing on the other.

There is also something interesting that Jermyn says to the evil wizard who is responsible for everything about how he can’t really do all the things that he thinks he can do (specifically flying) because the kind of drugs that evil wizards use to boost their powers also cause hallucinations.  When I was in college, I did a report about witchcraft trials, and some of the plants used by supposed “witches” in their potions also had hallucinogenic properties, which is probably the origin of the belief in flying witches.  Just an interesting little cross-over from real history.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

A Plague of Sorcerers

PlagueSorcerersA Plague of Sorcerers by Mary Frances Zambreno, 1991.

Jermyn Graves comes from a family of sorcerers, but although he seems to have the talent, it takes him unusually long to get his familiar. Familiars, animals with a special link to a wizard, assisting them in their magic, come to their masters when they are ready to begin learning magic, and without one, Jermyn cannot really be a wizard.

When Jermyn’s familiar finally appears, everyone is surprised to find that it is a skunk. Some people make fun of him for having such a strange familiar. No one is quite sure what the meaning of his familiar is, and the exact nature of Jermyn’s magical talent is still unknown. Still, his aunt apprentices him to a theoretician, a man who does not actually practice magic himself, but who studies the theory behind it. He can assist Jermyn until Jermyn’s true talents become known and he can study with a master who shares his specialty.

Jermyn likes his new master and the young orphan girl who lives with him. However, disaster soon strikes the city. Sorcerers are falling victim to a strange disease that sends them into a coma. Despite their best efforts, none of the remaining sorcerers can discover the source of the disease or its cure, and all the time, there are less and less sorcerers to continue the work. Time is running out, and Jermyn and his unusual familiar may be the only ones capable of finding the answer.

Jermyn does have a special talent which he comes to fully understand, and he uses it to save the other sorcerers and put an end to the mysterious plague.  Although the others had laughed at Jermyn’s skunk, he later comes to realize that she was the one keeping him from getting the plague himself because of some unusual qualities of her own.  The combination of mystery and fantasy is exciting, and there is a mysterious villain who may not even be aware of their villainy because of their own hidden sides.

This book is currently out of print, but there are used copies still available, and you can also buy an electronic copy from American Fantasy Press.

There is a note in the beginning of the book that says that the first two chapters are based on a short story written by the author earlier.  The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.  There is also a sequel to this book, Journeyman Wizard.