Hold on tight; here comes "The Bone Season."

"Samantha Shannon is being touted as the new J. K. Rowling. She’s 21, a fresh graduate of Oxford, where she was a student when she wrote The Bone Season, the first in a projected seven-novel urban fantasy series. She’s got a film deal with the new London studio set up by Andy Serkis of Lord of the Rings fame, and she’s been courting booksellers, book reviewers, and fantasy fans for more than a year.
     It’s tricky when a book arrives with such preliminary brouhaha. I’ve learned to scrub my mind of hype and leave it to the text. The proof is in the reading.
     So how is The Bone Season?
     It’s terrific—intelligent, inventive, dark, and engrossing enough to keep me up late to finish.
     Paige Mahoney, the novel’s street-smart clairvoyant narrator, is more akin to the post-apocalyptic girl gladiator in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games than to Harry Potter. There’s a distinct Margaret Atwood-style wash to Shannon’s dystopian universe, and echoes of Anthony Burgess’s Clockwork Orange in the colorful lingo."
— Jane Ciabattari, OPB
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Fantastical Realist

"A new book from the - hugely prolific - Godmother of British fantasy fiction [Diana Wynne Jones] is always a cause for celebration in Verbal HQ. Long before Philip Pullman’s Lyra first blundered her way into a parallel world, Wynne Jones’s characters had them explored, mapped and settled. Before Harry Potter and Hogwarts were a twinkle in J K Rowling’s eye, this underappreciated author was penning captivating stories about boy (and girl) wizards that enchanted any child lucky enough to stumble across her novels in the local library or bookshop."
— Verbal
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"Like many good writers, Diana Wynne Jones, who [...] died [March 26, 2011] aged 76 of cancer, worked for long years in relative obscurity, in her case sustained as a children's fantasy author by a modestly sized but devoted young readership. That obscurity provided the freedom to develop her own voice without the distractions of having to build on perceived success. By the time real success found her, in Jones's case almost by chance, she was a mature writer with a solid and varied body of work that was ready to be appreciated by a much bigger new audience. Her intelligent and beautifully written fantasies are of seminal importance for their bridging of the gap between 'traditional' children's fantasy, as written by CS Lewis or E Nesbit, and the more politically and socially aware children's literature of the modern period, where authors such as Jacqueline Wilson or Melvyn Burgess explicitly confront problems of divorce, drugs and delinquency.
     [...] Both [her] parents were intellectuals and progressive educators, but were stingy not only with money but also with warmth and attention. The skinflint father bought the children a complete set of Arthur Ransome books as Christmas presents, but doled them out at a rate of one a year. In self-defence Jones began to write stories for her sisters and herself. When the second world war broke out Jones and her family were evacuated to the Lake District, eventually living in the house once inhabited by the Altounyan children, on whom Ransome had based his Swallows and Amazons series. The great children's author was still around, one day complaining angrily that the children were making too much noise.
     On another occasion, Diana's younger sister and a friend had their faces slapped by a second Lakeland author who hated children but who was rich and famous because of them: Beatrix Potter. Jones's distinctive scepticism about conventional children's fiction must have started to set in early."
— Christopher Priest, The Guardian
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Getting the Girl

"Many people, generally those who have never read the book, consider Wuthering Heights to be a straightforward, if intense, love story — Romeo and Juliet on the Yorkshire Moors. But this is a mistake. Really the story is one of revenge. It follows the life of Heathcliff, a mysterious gypsy-like person, from childhood (about seven years old) to his death in his late thirties. Heathcliff rises in his adopted family and then is reduced to the status of a servant, running away when the young woman he loves decides to marry another. He returns later, rich and educated and sets about gaining his revenge on the two families that he believed ruined his life."
— The Reader's Guide to Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights”
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"[...] Well, you have to keep in mind that what we [men] learn as kids is really hard to deprogram as an adult. And what we learned as kids is that we males are each owed, and will eventually be awarded, a beautiful woman.
     We were told this by every movie, TV show, novel, comic book, video game and song we encountered. When the Karate Kid wins the tournament, his prize is a trophy and Elisabeth Shue. Neo saves the world and is awarded Trinity. Marty McFly gets his dream girl, John McClane gets his ex-wife back, Keanu "Speed" Reeves gets Sandra Bullock, Shia LaBeouf gets Megan Fox in Transformers, Iron Man gets Pepper Potts, the hero in Avatar gets the hottest Na'vi, Shrek gets Fiona, Bill Murray gets Sigourney Weaver in Ghostbusters, Frodo gets Sam, WALL-E gets EVE ... and so on. Hell, at the end of An Officer and a Gentleman, Richard Gere walks into the lady's workplace and just carries her out like he's picking up a suit at the dry cleaner. [...]
     With Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling played with the convention by having the beautiful girl get awarded to the sidekick character Ron, but she made it a central conflict in the story that Ron is constantly worried that, since Harry is the main character, Hermione will be awarded to him instead. In each case, the woman has no say in this — compatibility doesn't matter, prior relationships don't matter, nothing else factors in. If the hero accomplishes his goals, he is awarded his favorite female. Yes, there will be dialogue that maybe makes it sound like the woman is having doubts, and she will make noises like she is making the decision on her own. But we, as the audience, know that in the end the hero will 'get the girl,' just as we know that at the end of the month we're going to 'get our paycheck.' Failure to award either is breaking a societal contract. The girl can say what she wants, but we all know that at the end, she will wind up with the hero, whether she knows it or not."
— David Wong, Cracked.com
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Writing's on the Wall

From: Calendars.com

"This is a story about the end of the gatekeeper. About the movement spreading throughout media, from which book publishing is hardly exempt, as readers of Harry Potter, Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey have made all too clear.
     It’s about the reading public – the great unwashed, the hoi polloi – no longer letting tastemakers decide what’s worth reading. It’s about the masses seizing the means of publication.
     Publishing is an injured beast, but it was mortally wounded before Amazon attacked. And the injuries themselves are partly self-inflicted.
     The proof? The vast majority of top-heavy legacy publishers’ books – agented, edited, sales-managed, otherwise massaged, and only then published – tank, sinking with nary a trace. Conversely, some books, refused by dozens of publishers, go on to achieve rock stardom when some kindly soul finally deigns to bring them to market.
     Which means only one thing: Despite their vast education, experience and good taste, publishers have only about a quarter of a clue what the public really wants. For publishers, it’s 'the end of the world as they know it.'"
— Beverly Akerman, The Globe and Mail
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Young As You Read

Every Girl's Story Book (The Avenue Press, circa 1938)

"With The Hunger Games movie coming out in March, the frenzy for young adult (YA) fiction has reached an all-time high. With series like Harry Potter and Twilight, young adult fiction has gained so much attention that those outside of the typical 'young adult' age group have taken notice.
     For those of you who still haven't read young adult books, I have a few suggestions below to help ease you into this ever-growing genre."
— Lisa Parkin, Huffington Post
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The illustration from Every Girl's Story Book is by G.W. Goss.

"Is that a broomstick between your legs — or just a flamingo?"

"Alice trying to play croquet with a flamingo" from Lewis Carroll's
 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) original illustration:
John Tenniel  (from: Wikimedia Commons)

"Huddled together in the chill January wind, the players listened as a PPE fresher in a black cape read the rules of the game: a Quaffle through a hoop would score 10 points, capturing the Snitch would yield a bountiful 30, and under no circumstances was there to be any 'grabbing of broomsticks.' With that, they were off: two teams, with seven players each, racing round a playing field and trying to shoot a basketball through hula-hoops. [...]
     Known as Muggle Quidditch to those for whom JK Rowling's lexicon is as familiar as any entry in the dictionary, the game was adapted for non-wizards around seven years ago in the US, where it has since caught on and become a familiar pastime for students at some of the country's best-known institutions, including Yale, Harvard and Tufts (Wipfler's college). Instead of flying, players run with broomsticks between their legs, and instead of a golden ball with wings attached, the Snitch is a person dressed in yellow. Although tackling is frequent and being hit by a volleyball, or 'bludger,' is likely, the 'spirit of Quidditch' is encouraged. As one player for the University college team put it: 'If you're massive and there's a little person, don't run into them.'
— Lizzie Davies, The Guardian
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For a list of games found in works of fiction, go here...

Buy books by Lewis Carroll and
J. K. Rowling here...