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The Apothecary
Maile Meloy
Young Adult

Something Cold War-ish must be in my reading water. I seem to be choosing books with a Cold War themes fairly regularly -- David Almond's The Fire-Eaters, which centers around the Cuban Missile Crisis, Cecil Castelucci's Rose Sees Red, which is set in the early 80s with the Cold War tension as a back drop to a friendship that develops between an American and a Russian immigrant, and now, The Apothecary. It's not the side effects of too much dystopian ya for dessert, I promise.

It was for dinner.

Nonetheless, if  you find yourself feasting on dystopian but are looking for a little diversity in your dark, The Apothecary serves it up fresh and fun. The story centers around Janie, a teen whose writer parents are marked as Communists during the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s and thus forced to leave LA for London where they get jobs writing for the BBC. At her new school, Janie meets a boy, Benjamin, who wants to be a spy, a Russian boy whose father is, and a chemist-apothecary-physicist triangle trying to contain the effects of a nuclear bomb.

There are so many twists, James Bond-like chase scenes, an unexpected apothecarian surprises, replete with a serum that turns humans into birds and another that can make them invisible, as well as the threat of a nuclear bomb that does go off. It's all there in spades.

The biggest leap of faith I found strained in the novel were the serums. The book is so solidly set in the Cold War, that to expect a character, let alone the reader to buy into the fact that chemical compounds can do what alchemists believed they could do hundreds of years ago is tough. The author acknowledges this by having her character say that it would have been hard to believe her friend could turn into a bird if she hadn't actually seen it happen herself. Still, for me, it disrupted the fictional dream. I believed that chemstry and physics could come together to undo the destruction of a bomb, but to tie that right into the magicalness of herbs was a stretch.

Then again, I spent my teens in the Cold War era. I'm bomb scare scarred. Today's young audience will likely have far less trouble taking that leap. If the reader does, the book continues on in a fast-paced, no-holds-barred, edge-of-your-seat ride to the very end.

One other interesting note. The book is told from the perspective of the main character, Janie, albeit as an adult. I haven't run across too many POVs from this angle of late, and Meloy plays it lightly, allowing the adult only to surface at the very beginning and the end to lend the story an air of continuing mystery. It's well-balanced and a great example of how to use the adult POV to a writer's advantage.

For more great reads and winter distractions, sled on over to Barrie Summy's website. She's serving them up hot...and with marshmallows!

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This trailer for The Apothecary by Maile Meloy is just as gorgeous and intriguing as the book itself.




There are several different trailers for Variant by Robison Wells. This one makes it sound kind of like Divergent with the different factions, but set in an academy environment. Intriguing nonetheless!




And for fairytale lovers like me (high five!), there is a new television series coming to ABC called Once Upon a Time. I thought I'd add this preview in our Trailer Tuesday post because it sounds to be right up a fairytale lover's alley. I'm hoping it's done well.

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The Apothecary by Maile Meloy

Review by Chris Singer

About the author:

Maile Meloy (www.mailemeloy.com) is the award-winning author of the short story collection Half in Love and the novels Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, Liars and Saints, and A Family Daughter. This is her first novel for young readers. She lives in California.

About the book:

It’s 1952 and the Scott family has just moved from Los Angeles to London. Here, fourteen-year-old Janie meets a mysterious apothecary and his son, Benjamin Burrows – a fascinating boy who’s not afraid to stand up to authority and dreams of becoming a spy. When Benjamin’s father is kidnapped, Janie and Benjamin must uncover the secrets of the apothecary’s sacred book, the Pharmacopoeia, in order to find him, all while keeping it out of the hands of their enemies – Russian spies in possession of nuclear weapons. Discovering and testing potions they never believed could exist, Janie and Benjamin embark on a dangerous race to save the apothecary and prevent impending disaster.

Watch the book trailer:

My take on the book:

I received “The Apothecary” in the mail a while ago. It came in this fancy package with this little antique-looking jar filled with glitter or something. It actually was kind of a turn-off to be honest. I wasn’t crazy about the title even, and admittedly I didn’t read the synopsis on the back cover either.

I had forgotten about it until about a month ago when I came across the book trailer. The trailer was very cool (watch it below) and I decided I had to give the book a chance.

I wasn’t disappointed at all. It was a very unique story and I really enjoyed the historical aspects of the Red Scare and the Cold War combined with the elements of magic and fantasy. While the magic, fantasy, mystery and intrigue of the plot will be what draws teen readers to this book, I loved the historical and political aspects included in the novel.

The novel is a quick read. I breezed through it over a weekend. This is Meloy’s first crack at writing for teens and I was impressed with her effort. There was great balance in the story. Even while there was an underlying tension in the story where the main characters were struggling to save the apothecary and solve the mystery, there were also light moments of humor thrown in to keep readers wanting more.

I enjoyed the main characters (Benjamin and Janie), but Pipp steals the show. I won’t give things away, but if this was a movie, he’d be the character everyone would be talking about.

If I had to make one small constructive criticism, I felt Meloy struggled with how she wanted to end the book. While the rest of the story was really paced quite well, I think some readers might labor a bit near t

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I had heard so much that was so good about A Monster Calls, the Patrick Ness novel inspired by an idea from Siobhan Dowd, that last night, when my arms were too achy to type a single letter more, I downloaded the book onto my iPad2.

Had I known that this book was so beautifully illustrated, I would have gone out to the store and bought myself a copy instead, so that I could, from time to time, look at these extraordinarily interesting, wildly textured Jim Kay drawings.  A Monster Calls would be a very different book without these images, just as Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, the Ransom Riggs books enlivened by surreal old photographs, would not be the book it is had not a publishing house decided that teens, too (and the adults who inevitably read teen books) need, every now and then, to stop and see the world not through words but through images.  Maile Meloy's new historical YA book, The Apothecary, is due out soon—a book that (if the preview pages on Amazon are accurate) features some very beautiful illustrations by Ian Schoenherr.  And let's not forget The Boneshaker by Kate Milford, with its beautiful Andrea Offermann images. (And, of course, there are so many, many more.)

A Monster Calls reminds me, in so many ways, of the great Roald Dahl story The BFG.  Dahl's books, illustrated by Quentin Blake, sit beside The Phantom Tollbooth (Norton Juster, illustrated by Jules Feiffer) on my shelf—books that take me back to some of my favorite mother-son reading days.  We loved the stories.  We loved the illustrations, too.  We loved the entire package.

Maybe we have Brian Selznick to thank for this return to the visual—to ageless picture books.  Maybe it was just plain time.  I only (with absolute surety) know this:  I recently completed a young adult novel amplified by (in my eyes) gorgeous illustrations. I can't wait to see where that project goes, and on what kind of journey it takes me.

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