The Art of How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (Linda Sunshine)

The Art of How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World
Linda Sunshine
Dark Horse
Nonfiction, Art/Media Reference
***** (Great)

DESCRIPTION: The third and final film installment of the How to Train Your Dragon series follows former-misfit Viking Hiccup and his Night Fury dragon companion, Toothless, as they struggle to achieve their dream of a world where dragons and humans can live together. They've successfully convinced the Berkians that dragons are friends, and turned the village into a sanctuary for hunted dragons... but they're running out of room and resources, and making themselves more of a target for dragon hunters. The solution may lie in old legends of a "hidden world" beyond the horizon, from which the dragons originally came. But even as Hiccup determines to find this paradise, Toothless becomes distracted by a female Light Fury... and Berk becomes targeted by a ruthless hunter determined to finish exterminating the Night Furies once and for all - and, with them, Hiccup's dream of peace.
This exploration of the art of the movie includes forewords and notes from voice actors and production staff.

REVIEW: The movie was a spectacular animated experience, both visually and emotionally, and this book is a perfect homage as it explores the creative process that translated it from pencil sketch and story notes to the finished product. Unlike many animated movies, this franchise successfully aged up the heroes, physically and emotionally, and this book gives insight into that process. Even the dragons do some growing up, particularly Toothless (who remains perhaps my favorite movie dragon of all time.) The ending was sweet and sad and satisfying, and reading this book brought it all back. (Though, in the interest of full disclosure, I was listening to the soundtrack from the first film as I wrote this review; about the only area I could fault the second and third films on was somewhat less absorbing scores, but that was probably just me.) From concept sketches to finished screenshots, this book is a must-have for fans of the movie and of modern animation in general.

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Paleofantasy (Marlene Zuk)

Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live
Marlene Zuk
W. W. Norton and Company
Nonfiction, Science
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: From "paleo" diets to barefoot running to "natural" child-rearing and family structures, countless modern trends look to our ancestors as the ideal model of human lifestyles and behaviors. Surely, the argument runs, the environment we evolved to fit in for hundreds of thousands of years is a better fit for us than all this newfangled agriculture and city-dwelling, which must be to blame for most (or even all) of our modern stresses and ills. Back then, we were perfectly suited to our place in our world, and it in turn was perfectly fitted around us - right?
Not so, says evolution.
Since the first single-celled organisms started reproducing and passing on genes, life has been less of a spiritual quest for harmonic perfection than an eternal ad-hoc balancing act of survival, every competition won bringing one up against new challenges, every innovation fraught with unintended consequences. Humans are no different from other lifeforms in this respect, and our past was no less full of problems than our present, if different problems than some we face today. Author Marlene Zuk explores and explodes the myth of a golden paleo past, as well as the notion that we humans are somehow beyond the processes of natural selection and evolution that brought us to where we are today.

REVIEW: I've always been a little skeptical of these trends that claim all the answers to our ills lie beyond a golden, conveniently opaque curtain of time: how things were invariably and universally happier, healthier, and better X generations ago, or Y ages ago... even the notion that life on Earth was perfectly peaceful and harmonious until Z event. It strikes me as the evolutionary equivalent of the old saying that nostalgia is remembering yesterday's prices while forgetting yesterday's wages; it's easy to just look at one side of things through rose-colored glasses and imagine (or handwave) away the less appealing sides lost in the shadows.
Zuk cites numerous researchers and studies as evidence that the answers to the world's ills are not to be found by regressing to a previous era. Indeed, the era that many are envisioning as ideal - often pegged sometime in pre-agricultural Paleolithic times - was likely nothing at all like popular culture imagines it, as indicated by archaeological evidence and studies of modern pre-industrial cultures. That's not to say there aren't numerous problems created by modern life, but that pretending we were perfectly adapted for a world that no longer exists is not only not helpful, but ignores our cultural and genetic history, not to mention blinds us to actual and practical solutions. Zuk has a particular bone to pick with the paleo diet fads, particularly the idea that Homo sapiens has not had adequate evolutionary time to adapt to eating grains or consuming dairy products; numerous studies and genetic evidence show that evolution works much faster than some people seem to think, within a few thousand years in the case of several genetic adaptations, well within the timeframe for agriculture's development. She can get a trifle overbearing on these points, clearly frustrated by how people seem to fetishize a Paleolithic world that's more Flintstones than actual science. (The idea that modern lifestyles alone are responsible for diseases like cancer is its own source of obvious irritation.) The chapters can sometimes feel a bit long, and now and again the tangents into genetics feel thick for an undereducated layperson like myself, though there are numerous footnotes and an extensive chapter-by-chapter bibliography for further research and reading.
On the whole, Zuk effectively makes her points about how mythologizing prehistory does little good, and might even do actual harm, while cheapening the remarkable truth about human origins and the ongoing, marvelous mechanism of evolution itself.

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Seraphina (Rachel Hartman)

Seraphina
The Seraphina series, Book 1
Rachel Hartman
Ember
Fiction, YA Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: For forty years, a tenuous peace has kept the dragons of the north and the humans of the south from slaughtering each other. Dragons even take human form to visit the cities of the Southlands, studying the sciences alongside human colleagues - but the two species never truly understand each others' minds, let alone their hearts, and mutual distrust makes for a fragile peace indeed. The young musician Seraphina knows this only too well, for her mother was a human-formed dragon and her father a lawyer for the royal court. Half-bloods like her should not exist, and if she were discovered it would only fan the flames of hatred on both sides to outright violence. Yet as long as she has struggled to hide her secret, she may be the only one who can prevent another interspecies war when assassins infiltrate the heart of the kingdom of Goredd and slaughter a beloved prince.

REVIEW: I've heard great things about this series for several years, and looked forward to finally reading it... until I found myself saddled with a protagonist I didn't care for, in a world largely made up of flattened stereotypes seemingly designed to drive home themes of prejudice and xenophobia and even religious zealotry. Hartman's take on dragonkind lends them a nicely otherworldly mindset - they have structured their entire society around the excision of emotions, even regularly carving up the brains of their own kind to remove "deviant" behavior and memories - yet they often come across less inscrutably alien and more stiff and uninteresting. Humans, on the other hand, are prone to wild emotional swings, emotions being emphasized as the species's greatest weakness (as when turned to short-sighed fanatical hatred under the cult of Saint Ogdo, though truthfully every human in the story seems to have some basic level of prejudice about dragons) and greatest strength (in their ability to create art and - for the umpteenth time in fiction - to love, a force stronger than dragonfire.) It doesn't help that I found Seraphina herself to be irritatingly obtuse as a heroine for long stretches of story, prone to wallowing in angst and conveniently ignoring blatant clues. Things eventually build to a decent climax that nonetheless drags on a little long, as does the wrap-up (which seems to forget a key thing about Seraphina's love interest.) This book only barely earned a half-mark above Okay for some nice concepts that finally played out in interesting ways, which isn't enough to convince me to press ahead, especially not with Seraphina as the lead again.

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Never Trust a Dead Man (Vivian Vande Velde)

Never Trust a Dead Man
Vivian Vande Velde
HMH Books for Young Readers
Fiction, YA Fantasy/Humor/Mystery
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Selwyn thought things couldn't get any worse when Anora, the most beautiful girl in town, chose to marry the arrogant Farold instead of him. When Farold is found dead - stabbed in the back with Selwyn's knife - he finds out that things can indeed get worse. Hastily judged and condemned, sealed in the crypt with Farold's body, Selwyn faces a slow and terrifying death.
Instead, he finds - or, rather, is found by - the witch Elswyth.
Bargaining away years of his life, Selwyn gets her to agree to use her magic to disguise him, so he can return home and figure out who the real killer was and clear his name, not to mention the honor of his family. But the more he learns, the longer the suspect list grows, and the less he realizes he knew about his closest friends, his lifelong neighbors, and even his greatest rival Farold.

REVIEW: This is a fast-reading blend of mystery and fantasy, but feels a bit hollow and shallow. Selwyn's a bumbler and a fool, which makes him frustrating to follow as an amateur investigator. Farold, returned to life by the witch to help him in his investigation, is often no help at all; it's quickly clear why the suspect list is so long. Never friends in life, the two nonetheless must work together, though I never really felt the partnership click as I think I was supposed to. At times, the story gets silly, especially when Seldyn must disguise himself as a young woman (and stumbles into an embarrassing family secret), and I never really felt the urgency of the mystery. The conclusion seems obvious, as well, and doesn't quite ring true, for all that I saw it coming a mile away. It's not a bad little tale, and at times it was kind of fun, but I didn't find it particularly memorable.

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Robots Vs. Princesses Volume 1 (Todd Matthy)

Robots Vs. Princesses Volume 1
Issues 1 - 4
Todd Matthy, illustrations by Nicholas Chapuis
Dynamite Entertaiment
Fiction, CH? Fantasy/Graphic Novel/Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: In the capital city of Harmonia, four princesses prepare to demonstrate their abilities before the kingdom in a recital, using songs and animals to perform magical wonders. But Princess Zara has greater dreams than woodland housekeepers or bird dressmakers. She wants to sing down a dragon - and the only place to find a dragon is beyond the forbidden woods.
In the endless robot battles, the Destructicons and Centurions fight for supremacy... and one robot is tired of it. Wheeler runs away from the Destructicons, from the war, from everything - off to the forbidden woods, where nobody will follow him. Then a strange sound takes hold of him, changing him, and drawing him to the side of a young human girl.
But there was a reason the woods have kept the two worlds apart for generations. And now that robots and princesses have met, neither will be the same...

REVIEW: Exactly as the title and cover promise, this is a story of singing fairy tale princesses and blasting, smashing war robots. Princess Zara and her friends are plucky princesses gifted with songs that work magic, in a world barely a step removed from a Disney movie. The "brave princess" has become its own trope by now, and this graphic novel does little to put its own twist on that, though the heroines are decent enough for the story and world they inhabit, especially to young readers who aren't looking for terms like "tropes" and are just enjoying the tale. Making the music its own form of magic is a nice, if small, tweak, giving princesses some inherent power. The robots are their own trope as well, basically a watered-down version of the Transformers without the transforming (save when princess magic takes hold; when the robots cross into the princesses' realm, they become dragonish beings.) Naturally, things don't go well when Tyrannis, Wheeler's former Destructicon commander, and the rest of the robots tromp into a fairy tale kingdom to retrieve their wayward soldier, but these princesses aren't going to sit out a fight when their home and their friends are threatened. The means by which they fight sort of come out of nowhere, and the explanation for why there are robots in a magical world is best not overexamined. For younger readers, though, this makes for the start of a fun adventure where princess magic and robots collide.

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