The Chaperone - by M Hendrix

 

In the tradition of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale Hendrix creates a New America, one in which women are second class citizens and all teenage girls are required to have a chaperone when they go out in public. Chaperone's are exclusively other women who have decided to take one of the few jobs available to them.

Stella's Chaperone (Sister Laura) is not averse to bending the rules for her charge. Sister Laura sometimes disappears when she and Stella are at the library so that Stella can steal a few moments with her crush, Mateo.

It is intriguing that there even is a public library in New America. But of course there are also a lot of forbidden books. Sister Laura passes some of this literature along to Stella, helpfully suggesting that she hide the taboo works between the covers of some of the other books in her room.

It appears a revolution is afoot!

The Hero and the Crown - by Robin McKinley

Fire-haired Aerin, daughter of a king and a witch creates kenet, a salve that protects the user from dragon fire. Aerin becomes a dragon killer. The little-used royal library becomes a place where she not only discovers that she can read, but can learn as well.

One of the sixty books about dragons I'm reading this year Year of the Dragon, in which I turned sixty.

Fourth Wing - by Rebcca Yarros

 

If you tell people you are making a project of reading books about dragons you WILL be asked if you've read Fourth Wing. There are evidently a lot of people who either love or hate this work. I found myself a bit indifferent about it. But, let's face it, at sixty years of age I'm not exactly its target audience. This is a book for "new adults" and features a group of twenty-somethings at a magical war college (Basgiath) learning how to fly dragons. The classes are deadly. Many die before they even get to their first class. Violet Sorrengail never even wanted to join the elite team of dragon riders. She wanted to be a scribe and train to be a librarian in Basgiath's archives, like her father. Her mother, however, insisted that she risk her life in the Rider's Quadrant. 

Of course, her time studying to be a scribe only makes her more bad-ass, even though she is among the weakest and smallest members of the Rider's Quadrant. She knows not only the value of information, but also where to find it, how to use it to her own advantage, and to understand who gains from telling the stories.

Violet is also discovers that forbidden information is perhaps the most powerful information of all. 

Do Not Bring Your Dragon to the Library - by Julie Gassman

A rhyming book that explains everything that can go wrong if you bring your dragon to the library. 

The library in the story is called the Honalee Free Library - a nice touch!

There's a Dragon in the Library - by Dianne de Las Casas

 

No one believes Max when he tells them there is a dragon eating all the books in the library - not his mother, not his father, not the head librarian, not his teacher. Only Officer Riley suggests that they go and look, but by then it is too late. 

Of particular note is that the head librarian is a man. Because of course the head librarian is a man. Leadership positions in libraries always go to men. We can't really expect otherwise though. It's just so hard to find women in the field.😏

One of the sixty books about dragons I'm reading this year of the dragon, in which I turn 60.

Gay the Pray Away - by Natalie Naudus

 

Valerie and her brother are homeschooled with a curriculum sanctioned by the Institute of God's Basic Principles, a conservative Christian organization headed by Ben Goddard - a not-so-subtle camouflage of the Institute of Basic Life Principles once headed by Bill Gothard. Valerie has always been taught to obey her parents and the church's teachings. The seventeen-year-old is expected to marry and begin having children when she completes her studies in God's Training Academy. She interacts mostly with others from her church, and rarely talks to people outside of her insular world. Her haven is the public library - a place she is able to visit while supervised by her mother (who once organized a protest against it for "sexualizing children"). Valerie has learned to select books with innocuous covers so that her parents don't question her reading choices. It is through library books that she first learns about bisexual and other queer folks and begins to question her own identity. When she meets Riley, a "troubled youth" who got kicked out of her private Christian school for kissing a girl, she realizes that there is much that she still needs to learn. With the help of the public library's internet she begins to explore new territory, the freedom she experiences leads her to make some difficult decisions. 

This book reminded me of Pearl Abraham's The Romance Reader (which I read when it was first published almost 30 years ago). Abraham's work tells of a girl growing up in a strict Hasidic community who sneaks to the library to read romance novels.

The Neverending Story - by Michael Ende

I revisted this classic work after 40 years as part of my project to read sixty books about dragons during this year of the dragon in which I turned sixty years old. I remembered very little of the story (other than the fact that it had a dragon). 

The story begins in a bookshop, where our hero, young Bastian Balthazar Bux, steals a work called The Neverending Story. He is literally drawn into the story when he realizes that he is, in fact, part of it. In fact he is essential to it as only he can save the magical world of Fantastica.

Bastian creates Fantastica's past through the stories he tells and creates a library of them by telling The Story of the Library of Amarganth (aka The Bastian Balthazar Bux Library), a

large circular room...[where] "walls of books were divided into sections, bearing signs such as "Funny Stories," "Serious Stories," "Exciting Stories," and so on.

Like another book about which I recently blogged this book is about someone who is reading a book about himself as it is being written. See My Librarian is a Beautiful Lesbian Ice Cream Cone and She Tastes Amazing