Two more books

I have finished two books since I last posted. The first was Pendulum, by Ruby Jean Jensen. It's about a little girl who uses a pendulum to tell fortunes for people, some with unhappy results. The wording in the book is very spooky, things like describing tree limbs scraping windows, how the moon shines through the trees, eerie Halloween decorations, things like that. Not scary, just scene settingly spooky. The book seems to have two stories running at the same time, and, at first, you're not sure how they're connected. Eventually they all combine rather soap opera-like. There's a few loose ends, but I love the telling of the story anyway. The teacher, especially, Miss Upton, I loved watching her character's evolution. More on that in the spoiler-filled review. Overall, the ending left me slightly confused but it's easy enough to make my own assumptions and conclusions on the things left hanging. But that could just be my view as an adult. I think a pre-teen (which seems to be who this was aimed at) would find it very entertaining, ending and all. It's a keeper.

Now the spoiler filled review. If you want to skip this just move down to the next paragraph where I review the second book. So the pendulum was given to the girl by a gypsy who happens to be the grandfather of a boy who was bullied into drowning. The kids who's futures were foretold with unhappy endings are the ones who did the bullying. All of them get futures that predict they'll die or have unspeakable horrors. So, to all appearances, this is a story of revenge from beyond the grave. The little girl is cousins to two of the bullies, and it's their parents who refused to allow gypsy trash into their house, so, naturally, the ghost boy wants revenge on them too and winds up killing both of them as well. At the end of the book all the bullies are dead except the girl's cousins and one other. Where's their death? Did the ghost give up? Or was the horror of losing their parents enough? Why did one of the kids become a werewolf instead of dying? Running parallel to this story is the one of the teacher, Miss Upton. At first you see her looking at the little girl, seeing in her the fiancee or husband (we're unsure at this point) who cheated on her and you feel bad for her. As the story progresses you unlock bits of her history and she slowly transforms into a sad character into this monster who "had to resort to seduction" to try and get this guy because she delusionally had herself convinced he was hers and then killed him when he refused her! And we find these things out over the course of the whole book in bits and pieces so that you find out her character in dawning and growing horror. I think she was actually one of the most well written characters I've come across in a while.

The second book was Stardust, by Neil Gaiman. I don't know how popular this book is, I know it was made into a movie. I saw the movie in the theaters with my sister so when I saw this book I figured I'd get it. It was a good movie. The book was good too. Beautifully done. I'm definitely keeping this one, and if I see any of his other books for cheap I'll probably give them a try. I'm also going to have to re-watch that movie now!