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Not long after Abigail O'Malley helped solve the Moorehead kidnapping case, a problem she'd had all her life took a definite turn for the worse. It was a personal and very secret problem that she'd never shared with anyone, not even Paige Borden, who was her best and closest friend. So embarrassingly personal, in fact, that she had never allowed herself to believe that it actually existed, at least not for sure.

Abby was twelve and a half years old when the kidnapping occurred, and in the seven years since her mother, Dorcas O'Malley, had become a private investigator, Abby had never gotten involved in any of her cases. At least not on purpose. And she had no plans to do so in the future. She had, in fact, made her feelings on the subject quite clear in an essay she'd written only a few days before Dorcas started work on the Moorehead case.

-The opening to The Magic Nation Thing by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

I'm still a little sad I can't find The Egypt Game as an ebook. Okay, now that that's out of the wa, let's talk about The Magic Nation Thing.

I summarized it on twitter as: Girl has special ability to find things. Wackiness ensues.

It's not actually wacky, I lied about that. It's about Abby, who has supernatural powers (that she denies and would rather keep her room clean and make lists and play with her friend Paige) to find stuff and how it starts to interact with her mother's job as a private detective (which Abby would much rather her mom was a secretary or something normal).

I like Abby a lot. She's so ridiculously sensible and determined to stay that way. She's cautious and determined not to give her mom the slightest hint about her skills. However, she has all the skill at hiding a twelve year old has, so it's not working that well.

There's a lot I like about this book, actually. Abby's close friendship with her friend Paige, and the fact that there's a lot of different types of women (in fact, most of the cast is women and it's not a small cast), and Abby's relationship with her parents, who are divorced. The parents still get along, but Abby has her issues on the topic and it feels very real.

I'm only about fifty pages in, so there'll be another post as I get to the end.

Also, I'm reading Calvin and Hobbes in full for the first time since I was nine because it's awesome:



A note on the icon: It's a painting by Renoir (I wanted something out of copyright), and I'll be using it for children's books I don't feel fall too much into the sci-fi or fantasy section (somehow Abby convinces me she is a normal girl, despite the powers). I figured that since if I can help it, I choose protags that are girls, it was most appropriate to use them as the subject of the icon.

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Books I just loaded onto my ereader:

• The Chrysalids, The Day of the Triffids, and The Midwich Cuckoos, all by John Wyndham
• The Bronze Pen and William's Midsummer Dreams, both by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
• We Have Always Lived In The Castle by Shirley Jackson
• Another Fine Myth by Robert Aspirin
• The Grimm Legacy by Polly Shulman
• The Lord God Made Them All by James Herriot
• Fer-de-lance by Rex Stout
• A new copy of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
• Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos by R.L. LaFevers

So... I should be covered for a while, not counting the 100+ already on the reader.