Willow
Not the tree, the movie. Kate come over last night for dinner and brought it with her. I hadn’t seen it in ages, so it was lots of fun. Such a young Val Kilmer! And nobody else I recognised. It must have been a great day for the dwarfish (dwarvish? and is that the PC term?) community when it was made, since they actually used real short people rather than lots of special effects (which they couldn’t anyway, since it was made in the 80s or something). We were convinced that one of the brownies was Flacco, but I don’t think he was. I might show it to my year 9s if ever I get a chance to do my fantasy unit, since I think they would be less likely to laugh at this than they might at Labyrinth (pft; no sense of style).
The Lost Kingdom of Lantia
Picked this up for $5; I knew it was going to be a kids’ book, but that’s partly why I got it – I’m realising I should teen fiction so that I can genuinely recommend books – current ones – to my students. Anyway; it’s by Maggie Hamilton, and I actually thought it was set in Melbourne, until at the end I read she’s based in Sydney so I guess it’s actually set there, although there was no mention of a bridge or Opera House which I thought was odd in a book about kids on holidays.
Overall I guess it was OK; as I read it I thought using the name Lantia was a bit dumb since it was quite obviously about Atlantis (magical kingdom destroyed by volcano) – at the end she does indeed say the book was inspired by her fascination by Atlantis, so I’m relieved the name wasn’t just a really poor way of covering it up. The writing was all right; I found it a bit basic, but I am well out of the target audience. The one thing I found incredibly annoying was her use of rhetorical questions all the time, and in italics. Why did she feel the need to do this? (Ha ha). It really, really got on my nerves.
I think I would recommend it to a kid; one who wasn’t a totally avid reader, but was looking for something fairly engaging and possibly a bit challenging, for younger teens.
Randomly Yours, Alex 