Welcome to Litsy!

Wow what a dark read, especially that it's a children's book. The premise is that our main character wants to give a gift for his son at his christening but they are poor. So he is on a mission to find his son a godfather. He talks to God, the devil and Death and winds up choosing Death as his godfather. What happens after that is just crazy and wonderful. Definitely not a happy ending. Awesome illustrations as well.

Good story.

Treacle Walker, by Alan Garner (2021)

Premise: An isolated boy has his eyes opened to whole new worlds when a rag-and-bone man appears on his doorstep

Review: This was a surprise short-list pick for the 2022 Booker Prize and it definitely has that high literary flair to it. It‘s well-written, well-conceived, and well-executed. I just didn‘t find it all that interesting. It‘s a dull success.

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Random book from our home library:

📖 The Quest for Merlin by Nikolai Tolstoy

This very simple and charming story is about a girl who is sent back to the islands of her birth to live with her grandparents. She has vague memories of her time there, but one very strong one: her baby brother being swept out to see in his boat-like cradle. She is determined to find out what became of him.

Lisa Schneidau is an ecologist, conservationist and storyteller, knowledge and passion that she combines in these faithful retellings of British and Irish folktales.
Each story has a short introduction in which Lisa gives some ecological, historical and/or folkloric details, and she chooses a reasonable geographic spread of stories from across the Isles. I liked her inclusion of a couple of Romany stories, Appy and the Eel being one of the ⬇️

I don't know mythology very well and all I knew about Hippolyta and the Amazonians was from Wonder Woman. This novelization was good - lots of drama and action.