CATS picks May 2012

A Greyhound of A Girl By Doyle, Roddy (Book – 2012)

A Greyhound of a Girl is a ghost story about four generations of women that will give you chills and warm your heart at the same time.  Join cheeky Mary O’Hare, her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother in a midnight adventure into the past and a lesson in letting go. “One of them is dead, one of them is dying, one of them is driving, and one of them is just starting out.” A perfect read for middle-school tweens and teens.

Icefall By Kirby, Matthew J. (Book – 2011)

This book made me want a pet raven.  See, Odin had two pet ravens named Huginn and Muninn, Thought and Memory.  Solveig, the second (and thus unimportant) daughter of the king, is sent to a stead along with her older sister and younger brother.  Under the protection of a small band of soldiers, they are to wait out a war being fought against their father.  The stead is on a remote fjord, and as the story opens the fjord is nearly covered over in ice, worrisome since the supplies are running low.  They fear the worst when a warship appears in the narrow sliver a water that remains.  But instead of enemy warriors, the kings has sent his beserkers, savage warriors clad only in animals furs, to the stead for extra protection.  This looks bad and the beserkers are rough company which means Solvieg has limited options when the fjord freezes completely and bad things start to happen to the inhabitants.  During the winter, Solvieg discovered she has a penchant for storytelling and aided by her pet raven (!) might one day become a skald, a storyteller who has the power to craft legends out of people.  If she survives the winter, that is.