YOUR HOMEWORK IS TO WRITE A BOOK REPORT ON WHATEVER YOU'RE CURRENTLY READING.
(I TRUST AND ASSUME THAT YOU ARE CONTINUING TO USE THE LIBRARY ON A WEEKLY BASIS, AND ARE READING EVERY NIGHT.)
I'm presently wolfing my way through Terry Pratchett's excellent book I Shall Wear Midnight (Pratchett is hands down one of my all-time favourite writers) and I also just finished reading Derek Landy's fourth Skullduggery Pleasant book, Skullduggery Pleasant: Dark Days. I'm going to tell you a little bit about the Skullduggery Pleasant book just here (although another time I really must tell you why I think Pratchett is one of the very greatest living writers working in English).
A little background on the ideas behind the books: the stories are set in Ireland, and they are about a dark, strange and magical world which exists alongside our own. The main characters are Skullduggery Pleasant (a powerful wizard detective who came back from the dead and is now an animated skeleton) and his partner, trainee wizard Valkyrie Cain.
Landy continues to impress me with his storytelling skills: his books are funny and accessible, but he's also great at writing action and at building up tension and creepiness. What's more, his characters grow and change as they get older - Valkyrie Cain is gradually turning from a kid into a young adult as the books progress, and although she's getting better at fighting and at using magic, she's also getting in deeper and darker trouble. I've been gnawing my fingernails to the quick throughout the past couple of books wondering what creepy thing is going to happen with her reflection - Landy's been leaving little hints that there's something weird going on that we don't know about, but it's still not come to a head.
This book starts off with Skullduggery trapped in a hellish dimension where he's being tortured by The Faceless Ones (at the end of the last book he managed to trap them and save our world, but unfortunately he got trapped along with them). Valkyrie has been working frantically for months trying to figure out a way to set him free, and in the process she's been working with the necromancers, learning about a newer, darker kind of magic. She's also been hanging out with the teleporter, Fletcher, and with some of the other characters we know from the earlier books. They all want to get Skullduggery back. Unfortunately the magical law enforcement agency known as The Sanctuary is pretty glad to be rid of Skullduggery, and they're trying to make sure he never comes back.
Things I really liked about this book: I love Valkyrie Cain. Well, I love Skullduggery too, and most of all I love Skullduggery-and-Valkyrie together as a team, but let's spend a moment on why I love Valkyrie. First: she's sensible. Well, okay, maybe not SUPER sensible; I suppose that if she were very sensible, she probably wouldn't have jumped into the magical world with both feet in the first place, let alone decided to start learning necromancy or messing around fighting against all manner of ancient evil, or provoking various assassins and known criminals into acts of violence. So - perhaps not sensible, as such. But she's very practical. Valkyrie rolls up her sleeves and gets the job done, whatever it takes; she's brave, she's resourceful, she's undaunted, and she's very difficult to impress. She doesn't waste time sitting around feeling sorry for herself, or waiting for somebody else to save her. I like that.
Skullduggery is a marvellous character. He's reckless, seriously dangerous, clever, powerful, and pretty unflappable. He's not always honest or nice, but he's generally right and generally righteous, and you really REALLY don't want to have him as your enemy. He's got a warped sense of humour (which Valkyrie shares) and he's remarkably good at bluffing, and at acts of serious mayhem. He's a very good detective.
I love the relationship between Skullduggery and Valkyrie. It's the kind of relationship that I could just eat up with a spoon: not a romance, but an intense, supportive, wisecracking, BFF, buddy-buddy kind of vibe, where they spend almost every waking minute together, get one another's jokes, know one another's habits and always ALWAYS have one another's backs. They're partners, and although they are both pretty impressive alone, they work best together.
Landy's world is packed with interesting and entertaining characters, both friends and enemies of Skullduggery Pleasant. It's also packed with wizards and monsters and vampires and zombies and general weirdness, and people do sometimes get hurt or killed, and friends are sometimes enemies, and enemies sometimes friends. It's never dull.
(I should probably admit that there IS a minor romanticish subplot in this book and in the previous one; Valkyrie is becoming a young woman, and she's awesome, and although she's mostly very busy kicking zombies in the head and twisting shadows into blades and trying to save the day, she DOES have hormones, and isn't completely oblivious to the fact that one of her companions is a cute young guy with too much hair product. So there's a bit of a frisson of romantic tension in the background, but if that's not your cup of tea you can ignore it most of the time and focus on the wizard assassins, the evil spirits, the argumentative zombies and the reassembled bombs instead...)
