Thrice Burned: A Portia Adams Adventure

Atlantic Canadian publisher Fierce Ink Press has generously included me in the blog tour Blog on Fire for the release of Angela Misri's sequel Portia Adams Adventure, Thrice Burned.  Please check out additional blog posts at Fierce Ink Press. And, for those of you who have forgotten the deals of Portia Adam's first cases, read my review of Jewel of the Thames and get some additional background from my interview with Angela Misri at the time of its release.

Thrice Burned 

A Portia Adams Adventure

Written by Angela Misri

Fierce Ink Press
978-1927746691
281 pp.
Ages 12+
For release March 24, 2015
Reviewed from advance reading copy ePub

The shocking revelation at the conclusion of Jewel of the Thames (Fierce Ink Press, 2014) that her grandparents on her father's side are ex-criminal Irene Adler–currently known as Irene Jones–and Sherlock Holmes may have hit Miss Portia Adams hard but she won't let it distract her from her law studies at Somerville College or from honing her detection skills.  She continues her lessons in self-defense from Bruiser Jenkins, and studying alongside Chief Inspector Archer of Scotland Yard.  But she's also learning more about London's landscape, both topographical and invisible, and about lie detection from the formidable lawyer Mr. Ian Meyers.  Having established her own group of Irregulars, street children whom she pays with money, food and treats, Portia undertakes three new cases, Casebooks Five through Seven : Thrice Burned, Box 850*, and Truth Be Told.

In Casebook Five, arsons at three different locations, but with no damage to adjoining buildings, have Portia making the acquaintance of Miss Anne Coleson, a reporter looking to salvage a marred reputation and earn a living to care for her younger siblings.  While Portia is reluctant to oblige, she begins to see some positives to Annie's proposal, especially once Annie becomes romantically involved with Constable Brian Dawes, a young man for whom Portia has romantic feelings.  Ultimately the two women work together somewhat to solve the perplexing arsons, though it is truly Portia with her sharp mind and doggedness who brings the criminals to justice.  And all that while she tries to balance her affections for Brian, the intriguing forensic scientist Dr. Whitaker, and her grandmother's choice of suitor, Dr. Beanstine, coroner and a lord's son.

While the title Thrice Burned does refer to the trio of arsons in which Portia becomes involved in solving, it can also refer to the multitude of circumstances by which her own reputation is injured, through antagonism, humiliation, disappointment and revelation.  Of course, the criminals whose crimes Portia reveals are always a potential threat to her, but the involvement of a reporter, Mr. Dick McGregor, whose fabricated and outlandish stories refer to her and her activities without any veracity, leads to endangering her work and privacy.  Though she has allowed Annie Coleson to refer to her activities as those of Consulting Detective P.C. Adams–without any reference to her gender or ancestry–McGregor puts Portia's actions into question with the police who begin to believe that Portia is taking credit for their work. Fortunately, the support of Brian Dawes, Chief Inspector Archer and Sergeant Michaels helps to right those incorrect insinuations.

In Casebook Six, Angela Misri effortlessly takes Portia into the darkness, that occasionally enveloped her grandfather Holmes, when flummoxed with a case of potential theft, an antagonistic British Secret Intelligence Service agent and her affections for Brian Dawes. 

"This is not an ordinary ennui, Portia.  The excitement and adrenaline of a case–a really engaging, difficult case–that was the high.  The solution and then the time between that and the next exciting case...that was the low.  And for Sherlock, the high was higher than anything else in his life, and, therefore, so was the low." (pg. 150)

Regardless of the complexity of the Box 850 case and the subsequent case involving the disappearance of women of ill-repute upon their public damnation at the Matfelon Church, Portia is able to focus her detection skills on solving the mysteries with scientific elegance.  Though struggling with amorous feelings with which she is wholly unfamiliar, Portia conducts her sleuthing with the eye for details and labyrinthine problem-solving of one grandfather i.e., Sherlock Holmes, and the humanity of the other, Dr. Watson. Angela Misri has created Portia Adams to be a true incarnation of the great detective and his friend and biographer, while ensuring the Canadian consulting detective is wholly her own person too.

Reading A Portia Adams Adventure, whether it be Jewel of the Thames or Thrice Burned, is like revisiting the writings of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Just as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle often chose to recount several of Sherlock Holmes' cases in a single tome, Angela Misri follows suit, extending the authentic and complementary nature of the series to those of the famous detective.  Thrice Burned is like having new Sherlock Holmes mysteries to read, only now starring an inquisitive and astute young woman (without the Asperger's Syndrome tendencies) and in a London of the 1930s.  And it works so, so well.  Elementary, wouldn't you say?

Dark Company: Book Launch (Toronto)

Award-winning Author

Natale Ghent

whose children's and YA books include

Against All Odds (HarperCollins, 2011)

The Odds Get Even (HarperCollins, 2010)

Gravity Brings Me Down (Doubleday Canada, 2009)

The Book of Living and Dying (HarperCollins, 2006)

will be launching 

her newest young adult book

Dark Company

Doubleday Canada

978-0-385667333

304 pp.

Ages 12+

on

Saturday March 28, 2015

8 p.m. - 12 a.m.

at

Junction Craft Brewing

90 Cawthra Avenue

Suite 101

(Keele-St.Clair area)

Toronto

See details here

Having not yet read Dark Company (though I have it on my to-be-read pile as I type this), I thought I'd share the synopsis from Penguin RandomHouse's website.  Tell me if this doesn't get you uncomfortably curious:

Natale Ghent brings us an engrossing fantasy set in the near-future about the war between two worlds and a girl pitted in the battle of good and evil. 

     Seventeen-year old Caddy is haunted by visions of global destruction. They come on like seizures, taking her to a desolate place where dispossessed souls struggle to be heard. It is one possible future--one she feels she must prevent. But in a world where food and money are scarce, and the struggle over resources between the continents is escalating toward war, Caddy has little hope. 

    When her father goes missing, she searches for him and is abducted into a cabalistic society called The Dreamers--visionaries who "dream" to sustain the light against the dark energies that threaten to take over the planet. Caddy is shepherded into the society by a high school classmate called Poe, and through him, uncovers long-hidden truths about herself and her father. 

    The situation darkens when Caddy learns that the dreamers are hunted and killed by an ancient order known as the Grey Men--a cult dedicated to eradicating the light to assist a demonic entity they call The Speaker. By killing the dreamers, the Grey Men open rifts in the light that allow The Speaker to seed evil and darkness on the earth plane with the ultimate goal of destroying the planet. Things become more complicated when Meg, a girl from Caddy's high school, who has been ushered into this other reality, clashes with Caddy to supress the forces of light and to try to win back Poe's heart.

    As she falls deeper and deeper into the world of the dreamers, Caddy discovers layers of deceit and treachery realizes it's up to her to find a way to overcome the dark and prevent the light from being extinguished forever. . .

Retrieved from Penguin Random House on March 9, 2015.

Jan Andrews: an evening with the author/storyteller (Toronto)

Join 

Jan Andrews

storyteller and author of

The Silent Summer of Kyle McGinley

(Great Plains Teen Fiction, 2013)

and 

When Apples Grew Noses and White Horses Flew: Tales of Ti-Jean

(Groundwood Books, 2011)

on

Thursday, March 19, 2015

at 8 p.m.

when she delivers the

12th Albert Lahmer Memorial Lecture

titled

Into the Darkness and Out:

Dreams of a Children’s Author for Her Readers, Young and Grown

for the Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books

Lillian H. Smith Branch

Toronto Public Library

Community Room, 4th floor

Details can be found at the Osborne Collection

I may see you there!

Book Event: Cracking the Case with Kevin Sylvester (Toronto)

Join author and illustrator 

Kevin Sylvester

in celebrating the release of his newest and 

fifth book in his award-winning Neil Flambé series, 

Neil Flambé and the Bard’s Banquet

by Kevin Sylvester

Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

978-1-48141-0-380

320 pp.

Ages 8-12

January, 2015

for a murder-mystery writing workshop

 (set in the kitchen of Wanda’s Pie-in-the-Sky Bakery)

and 

a guided walk & scavenger hunt in Kensington Market

for writers aged 8-12 

starting at the 

Lillian H. Smith Library 

on 

Saturday March 28, 2015 

from 1 - 3 p.m.

Space is limited.

Tickets (a steal at $5) are available at Eventbrite here

__________________________________________

______________________

The Launch Party 

is open to the public

and will begin at 3 p.m.

including a reading and autographing of 

Neil Flambé and the Bard's Banquet

Full details here

Masterminds

by Gordon Korman

HarperCollins Canada

978-1-443428726

323 pp.

Ages 8-12

February, 2015

Don't be fooled by the 185 cheerful residents and the social perfection–no poverty, no crime, no unemployment–of Serenity, New Mexico, with its mandate of honesty, harmony and contentment. Behind all that sunniness hides a darkness of secrecy that would shatter the town's status as #1 in the USA for the standard of living.  And it all starts to fall apart with a simple, innocent bike ride beyond the town limits.

Eli Frieden is the only son of the town mayor and school principal, Felix Frieden, and best friend of Randy Hardaway, a less-than-perfect thirteen-year-old who is definitely not a poster-boy-for-the-town. When the two ride out, Eli succumbs to a blinding headache and nausea and the police, the Surety a.k.a. the Purple People Eaters, the security force for the Serenity Plastic Works, miraculously fly in by chopper and rescue the two boys. And then Randy is sent away.

Meanwhile, twelve-year-old artistically-inclined Tori Pritel, a girl with whom Eli finds it really easy to talk, is drawn into supporting Eli while her own best friend, Amber Laska, the school's overachiever and list-making teacher's daughter, is secretly asking her own questions.  When two arborists come into town, Amber notices a newspaper in their truck and, with permission (she is a perfect Serenity student), she reads about things with which she is totally unfamiliar: murder, terrorism, power, war, homicide. On the other hand, her nemesis, the annoying Malik Bruder, the doctor's son, has always been negative about the town and its rules, determined to leave as soon as he is old enough.  His pint-sized sidekick Hector Amani, whose parents generally pay little attention to him, is happy to follow his supposed best friend.

A secret letter from Randy, a fiasco with the WiFi, and some late-night reconnaissance at the Serenity Plastic Works, the largest employer in town, have the kids demonstrating all the negative behaviours that have been eliminated from Serenity: lying, cheating, sneaking around, breaking and entering, stealing, and opposing authority.  And, I have to tell you, readers will be completely supportive of their actions!

Where does Gordon Korman come up with his ideas?  Masterminds is yet another completely unique series from the master of middle-grade plotting.  No way will the reader see what's coming.  There are so many subplots and threads of characters' experiences that need to come together to provide that exclamation of understanding.  And writing Masterminds in the voices of the five kids allows Gordon Korman to make it all mesh so perfectly.  With humour and suspense, too.

While this first book in the new series ends well-that doesn't mean a happy ending, though–Gordon Korman flawlessly sets the kids up for their next adventure in Book 2, a book already on my radar.

Sidewalk Flowers

Written by JonArno Lawson

Illustrated by Sydney Smith

Groundwood Books

978-1-55498-431-2

32 pp.

Ages 4-7

For release March, 2015

On a walk from the grocery store with her distracted father, a young girl in a red-hooded jacket gathers an assortment of flowers–a dandelion, an aster, a vetch, heal-all–that poke their way through the sidewalk cracks.  Unlike her father whose focus is often on his cell phone, the little girl notices everything: a dead sparrow, a man sleeping on a bench, a dog on a lead.  Using the flowers she collects, the child finds a way to commemorate, cheer and share with those she knows and doesn't.

Sidewalk Flowers is a wordless picture book, which has the feel of a graphic novel with multiple frames and black-and-white illustrations and occasional splashes of colour.  This format works to emphasize the sombre landscape of normalcy so that the girl's flower gifts are beacons of life, like scattering seeds of joy. Author JonArnoLawson ensures that the young girl's efforts are initially depicted in high contrast to her surroundings but then they are augmented with her arrival home where her joyful scatterings are the norm, while illustrator Sydney Smith appropriately uses coarse and bold lines for the encompassing milieu, softening and colouring those elements that are significant to the young girl's journey and her light-heartedness.

 A story of a child's compassionate and playful activities in the overloaded and unavailable world in which most of us work and live, Sidewalk Flowers reminds us that, when we stop and smell the flowers along the way, we can improve the lives of others as well.

The Blind Boy and the Loon

by Alethea Arnaquq-Baril

Illustrated by Alethea Arnaquq-Baril and Daniel Gies

Inhabit Media

978-1-927095-57-7

48 pp.

Ages 6-10

2014

Alethea Arnaquq-Baril makes it clear from her preface that the story of The Blind Boy and the Loon, first developed into her film Lumaajuuq (National Film Board of Canada, 2010), is both just a small part of an epic story told by her Inuit elders and simply her version, with its mistakes and omissions, "which our elders would never have committed." (pg. 3) Honouring their telling of the story, Alethea Arnaquq-Baril has compressed it into just a few minutes of film and a mere 48 pages of impressive text and illustration to tell a story of cruelty and revenge and the origin of the narwhal.

Living with his sister and mother in the far north, a blind boy endures his mother's resentment and cruelty. With the return of spring, he gets his sister to lead him to the lake to visit with the loon, a creature with formidable eyesight.  In addition to learning that his mother was responsible for causing his blindness, the boy regains his eyesight after repeated divings into the lake on the loon's back. Fully-sighted again, the boy resumes whale-hunting and uses an outing to exact revenge on his mother, whose plunge into the water turns her into the narwhal, her braids twisted into its characteristic tusk.

The dark tale within The Blind Boy and the Loon is nurtured by the highly-stylized elements of the illustrations, from the simple lines of the boy in his parka, to the hills and waters of the harsh landscape. Using shades and tones of greys, dark teal and taupe,  The Blind Boy and the Loon is rich with uncompromising elements of unkindness, deep waters, and expansive tundra, all essential in supporting the story within.  While Alethea Arnaquq-Baril may undervalue the content or interpretation of her telling of this origin tale, The Blind Boy and the Loon is an accomplished and breath-taking rendition.

If you want to see the animation of the stunning beauty that is The Blind Boy and the Loon, sneak a look at the original short film Lumaajuuq (National Film Board of Canada, 2010) upon which the picture book is based.  You will not be disappointed, but rather stunned by the starkness of its richness.