Loveeeee itttttttt since I was a baby! I'm almost 17 and I still love it! It's so beautiful.

Fairy Dust and the Quest for the Egg (Di... I realized part of why I like the Disney Fairies better than the Disney Princesses: Disney Fairies have everything they need and are happy. Disney Princesses get everything they want. I just think I would rather be the Fairies than the Princesses. Disney Fairies are happy with the way things are, especially happy with themselves. Disney Princesses… Sure they are happy because they get what they want. But are they happy with themselves, or just with the things they have? This book starts the series of Disney Fairy chapter books, and who better to write it than Gail Carson Levine? The first thing I love about this book is the artwork. Being an artist myself my eyes always go to that first; it’s just how I am. There are drawings of fairies, mermaids and other creatures throughout the book, and they are beautiful. I love the way it is written. Fairy Dust is probably written for more of a younger audience than other books Mrs. Levine has written, but it is still a wonderful fairy tale. Mrs. Levine also wrote a sequel called Fairy Haven and the Quest for the Wand that I will be reviewing that one later, hopefully.

This is one of those DNF cases for me where I don't feel like rating the book makes a lot of sense. I mean, it wasn't a bad book, I just didn't connect with it at all for some reason. It didn't grab me, and I don't really know why. 

An ambitious and mostly successful combination of magical adventure and historical novel, this story of a half fairy girl set during the dust bowl years really brings that era to life with lively jazz clubs, deserted towns, racial inequities, and mountain high clouds of swirling, smothering dust. Though Callie has never known her piano playing father, her mother is sure he will be returning to the formerly fancy hotel they run and call home. Most people in their dust buried community have already fled, but hope keeps Callie's mother there until she is whisked away in a dust storm that seems to have been magically conjured when Callie tried playing her father's piano for the first time.Callie sets out on a cross country venture to find her mother with a homeless but resourceful boy she's just met, discovering her magic abilities as she goes. While not effortless and without cost, her magic solutions came a little too easily for my taste. That said I still enjoyed the book plenty and read right through it. I'm looking forward to its sequel.

And then I read Dust Girl, which is quite different in that it takes place in Kansas in the 1930s. And I love the world that Sarah Zettel created–the sense of the suffocating dust, the creepiness of the monsters. I like the characters too, and the way Zettel interweaves Callie’s different identities. So it’s fast-paced, Midwestern based, with great descriptions and good characters. Why don’t I love it?

I just don’t know. Sometimes that happens with books–I think I ought to love them, but there’s something so indefinable that I struggle with how to express it. I can’t even tell if it’s just a personal issue or there’s something very subtly wrong with the book. In this case, I think it has more to do with personal issues in that the book is a US-based fairy tale and somehow, for me, fairies are European, or at least not Midwestern. Cool glades and forests and stone. But I like the concept of what Zettel has done, and she executes it very well, which makes it all the more frustrating that I can’t just be all, “YOU GUYS THIS BOOK!”

But it may also be that the story tries to take on so much–racial identity and being Jewish in the 1930s, and rumrunning and divisions in the Unseelie Court, and music, and finding out that you’re not who you thought you were, and and and. It’s an ambitious scope and I’m not quite sure the book can carry the weight of them. Again, it’s one of those books where I’m really unsure why I reacted to it the way that I did. So if you’re intrigued, I’d say, check it out.