How to ditch your fairy, Justine Larbalestier

It is now cold enough that I am likely to be doing more posting due to a disinclination to move from the heater/computer combination I currently have, especially as it's also conveniently close to some duty-free chocolates. Anyway. Books read in transit coming up.

Justine Larbelestier, How to ditch your fairy. I liked quite a few bits of the Magic trilogy, but thought it ran out of plot about half a book too early. Nice set-up, though, and this book, a one-off, shares that, with interesting world-building and a city (New Avalon) that is somewhere between Sydney and New York, and (impressively) full of more self-obsessed inhabitants than either. In this world, people have fairies that give them certain powers and Charlie, the narrator, has a parking fairy that guarantees her a parking spot. As this ensures that she will be seized upon by everyone going anywhere regardless of what she herself wants (and she hates cars and driving) she is desperate to get rid of it, although doing so is causing her to rack up demerits at her ruthlessly rule-bound and sports-obsessed high school…

I really liked the world-building. I am pretty fond of the characters, and there’s a nice mix of teenagers and adults who don’t necessarily understand each other without feeling like they’ve been divided into separate hostile camps. The plot, though, has a couple of problems, and I will dive behind this spoiler cut to discuss them…

( How to ditch your fairy. Spoilers for ending. )

Refugee boy, Benjamin Zephaniah, 3/50.

Cross-posted to 50books_poc

Zephaniah famously turned down the Queen’s offer of an OBE due to his rejection of the concept and history of that Empire (interview, and rejection poem, here.) He’s better known as a poet, but he's also written at least four children’s books.

Refugee Boy is about Alem Kelo, a boy with an Ethiopian father and an Eritrean mother. The war between the two means that his family is safe in neither place, and instead his father takes him to the UK, where they have friends there working for peace – and leaves him. Alem is placed initially in a children’s home, and then with a foster family, as his application for refugee status progresses through the British legal system.

( Vague spoilers. )