Juniper Harvey and the Vanishing Kingdom (CBR16 #10)

As I mentioned in my review of The Carrefour Curse there are two tasks in the 2024 Read Harder Challenge that are specifically about middle grades books. Juniper Harvey and the Vanishing Kingdom is my selection for task 6: read a middle grade book with an LGBTQIA main character. Right off the bat, this is a good book, in fact Nina Varela can write better than most authors I’ve come across in the past year or more. I just wish Middle Grades was an audience demographic that worked for me more reliably as a reader, it is where I most clearly feel the “this book is not written for me” gap between children’s/YA and Adult literature. I think I would LOVE the adult version of this story, and even really enjoy the YA one. But the MG version left me forcing myself to pick it back up, which is why I eventually went ahead and granted myself a DNF for my birthday.  

What we have here is a retelling of the Pygmalion/Galatea myth set in a modern Floridian middle school. From Goodreads: “When Juniper Harvey’s family moves to the middle of nowhere in Florida, her entire life is uprooted. As if that’s not bad enough, she keeps having dreams about an ancient-looking temple, a terrifying attack, and a mysterious girl who turns into an ivory statue. One night after a disastrous school dance, Juniper draws a portrait of the girl from her dreams and thinks,  I wish you were here.  The next morning, she wakes up to find the girl in her room…pointing a sword at her throat! The unexpected visitor reveals herself as Galatea, a princess from a magical other world. One problem—her crown is missing, and she needs it in order to return home. Now, it’s up to Juniper to help find the crown, all while navigating a helpless crush on her new companion. And things go from bad to worse when a sinister force starts chasing after the crown too.” 

While I picked this one up based on its queer representation, it was the anxiety representation that really stood out to me. Both are incredibly well handled but the way Varela crafts Juniper to show her readers ways in which to deal when they are feeling overwhelmed felt truly excellent to me and something I would have loved to have seen more of when I was a much younger reader. So, if fantasy middle grades adventuring sounds like your kind of thing, I really hope you pick this up and have a better time than I did – because I’m like 98% sure I’m the problem in this book relationship. 😊  

The Art and Life of Hilma af Klint (CBR16 #9)

While perusing the Arlington Public Library’s List of Books You May Have Missed Last Year I spotted The Art and Life of Hilma af Klint written by Ylva Hillström and illustrated by Karin Eklund. I vaguely recognized af Klint’s name and popped it onto my list since a YA non-fiction was on my to read and this one struck my fancy, especially once I found out that Hillström is a curator at the Modern Art Museum in Stockholm. Woohoo for museum people writing books outside of the stuffy halls of academia! 

What I neglected to catch on to was that this was for younger readers than I thought. In fact, its Goodreads description opens with the fact that it is, in fact, a picture book. (Look at that, I went from not reviewing any I could remember in over 12 years to two in the same month!) What we get is a biography introducing readers to the life and art of Hilma af Klint (1862–1944), and she’s a bit of a standout character even if she never attained the notice she should have in her own lifetime since she began painting abstract art as early as 1906, before the accepted birth of modern abstract art with artists such as Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich.  

The Art and Life of Hilma af Klint aims to tell the whole story of af Klint, from her growing up years, to the loss of her sister and how that opened her up to the spiritual side of the world, to her time at art school and the women who she formed “The Five” based on their theosophy beliefs with and the art she created both before and after she decided to open herself up to what she described as instruction from the spirit world. I thought the work did a nice job of explaining her beliefs and how they impacted her work, but a less good job of explaining her queerness or even really acknowledging it outside of one illustration. But that said, Karin Eklund’s illustrations, as well as the reproductions of af Klint’s works, are great and will really help pull the reader in, as this is a much wordier picture book than Hardly Haunted.  

Hardly Haunted (CBR16 #8)

In January’s Cannonball Read Diversion there was a conversation about genres that you had never read before, and I thought to myself that there had to be at least one or two, but I was a little stumped. I didn’t really think about it again until it came time to review Hardly Haunted by Jessie Sima because without even having to look, I’m pretty sure I’ve never reviewed a picture book (and it’s been A LONG TIME since I read one either).  

Hardly Haunted is about a house that no one is living in, and it suspects that it may be haunted. There’s quite a bit of evidence, so House worries that no one will want to live there and that makes her sad because she really wants a family. So, she tries to suppress her squeaks, creaks, and groans. But… does she really want to? Does she instead want to just… be herself? Maybe she likes being noisy, and the right family for her will too. 

Sima imbues the book with a lighthearted, cartoony style with a delightfully cozy palette of colors that soothe. What we get in Hardly Haunted is a gentle, upbeat vibe. In being told from the point of view of House young readers (and less young readers) are encouraged to strengthen their empathy muscles. Each two page spread focuses on House, and its varying emotions about its circumstances. Its a picture book, so the text is sparse – just a couple sentences per page – and in service of the image, placed around the pages in the place most suited to Sima’s intent.  

I’ve read this one through a couple of times, and I smile every time. And not just because of the cute black cat. 

The Carrefour Curse (CBR16 #7)

There are two tasks in the Read Harder Challenge that are specifically about middle grades books (and others that are for a picture book, YA book by a trans author, and YA non-fiction) and works intended for readers on the younger than YA end of the spectrum are basically non-existent on my to read list so I had to do some research to find books to read. By and large, libraries can be relied upon to point you in good directions, so I went hunting for options and Arlington Public Library had a handy-dandy list of books that went under the radar in 2023 (yet another Read Harder Task) broken down into genres.  

One of those was middle grade books and as I was on the hunt for two, I went looking for titles I would be interested in. One that jumped out to me immediately was The Carrefour Curse by Dianne K. Salerni, which the author describes as being her homage to Dark Shadows and the Goodreads blurb describes as “The Addams Family meets The Westing Game in this exhilarating mystery about a modern magical dynasty trapped in the ruins of their once-grand, now-crumbling ancestral home.” Count me in, that should do nicely for middle grades horror. 

The Carrefour Curse juggles a few different horror tropes for its audience. We follow twelve-year-old Garnet Carrefour as she and her mother are summoned to the family home she has never seen as the patriarch’s health is failing. Her family is full of magic users in each of the earth elements, named for their area of specialization, but the family and house are encircled by death, which often comes in multiples. Garnet learns the family secret: her dying great-grandfather is stealing life power from others, lengthening his own life. But that isn’t the only problem Garnet discovers, unearthing an even deeper curse polluting the family’s magic and making people disappear.  

Middle grade horror is an interesting little nook in the literature universe since middle grade works do not include profanity, graphic violence, or sexuality, which tend to show up quite a lot in other horror genres. But they tend to focus on the characters’ friends, family, and immediate surroundings and there’s plenty of horror in interpersonal dynamics, especially once you throw in a magical family who is seemingly cursed. I enjoyed the magic of the Carrefour family and the complexities of how the curse and dangers are layered by Salerni. I think there was probably one or two too many characters to mentally juggle, but this was an enjoyable, while slightly spooky, read.