Rebecca Lickiss

This sounded like a fun idea. Fairies at the bottom of the garden, taken to a new level. It has a great tag-line: "The doctors said Piper Dickerson's grandmother died of old age. The elf said it was murder." That's all kinds of good – a very short encapsulation of how it all starts. But unfortunately the book was kind of a mess, and, while a quick and easy read, not much fun at all.

Eccentric is what it says on the front cover, and eccentric is what Lickiss makes every effort to provide. However, the full extent of the characters' unconventionality is dressing oddly and giving children twee names – oh, and collecting and reading books of more than two genres and to what onlookers consider excess. The main character, Piper Pied (who spends a considerable amount of first-person narrative space complaining about her and her brother's and cousins' god-awful name and musing about why none of them change them), is not very eccentric – she is the black sheep of normalcy in a peculiar family, which can be a great angle, done well. (It's fairly obvious, I think, what the next sentence might be, if I wanted to write it.) True eccentricity, either in the characters or the writing or the plot, would have been a major asset.

My assumption (geometry class having been a long time ago) was that the title, besides referring to the so-eccentric Pied/Dickerson family, was a play on "concentric circles". But it apparently isn't; the actual definition makes some sense, I think, given the conception of how the mundane world and Fairy converge, but given that not a soul in the book is indicated as having the least mathematical aptitude, the title is another grafted-on oddity.

Added to the mild frustration existing with the idea and the plot and the characters is a mild frustration with the editing. There are random, commas all throughout, and some odd and awkward moments in which a character answers a question that was never asked. And, finally, it's a terrible shame when a publisher pays so little attention to the manuscript that the main character's name is gotten wrong on the book's back cover. "Piper Dickerson" is how she appears there. But Grandma was a Dickerson. Piper is a Pied. How very sad.

(Longer version on my blog: http://agoldoffish.wordpress.com/)… (more)

When the aliens send two male human appearing androids to earth to check out the earthlings battle capabilities and defenses, they meet up with four young boys on their way to school. The school playground becomes their instructor...not exactly what their creators had in mind. And then they meet Mom. I think we'll be safe.

This short story is cute and humorous but I didn't find myself laughing out loud. The bottom line was, you don't mess with the moms...now or ever. It was a tribute to all the moms around the world, and an enjoyable quick read.… (more)