The Story of Holly and Ivy is a Christmas story illustrated by a two time Caldecott award winner, Barbara Cooney. Holly is a Christmas doll, who wants nothing more than to belong to a little girl. Ivy is an orphan girl who wants so much to have a home to go to that she invents one and sets out for it on her own. Mr Jones is a kind police officer who's wife longs for a child... the ending of the story may not be surprising but it is startlingly sweet none the less.

Life in a Medieval City is an excellent non-fiction book about the daily business of Troyes, a middle sized city in France. The authors have chosen to look at the city specifically in the year 1250, at the height of it's economic importance as the host of two fairs, the summer fair and the winter fair, for which merchants and salesmen traveled from hundreds of miles.

I read Bone in the complete collected volume a few years ago, and greatly enjoyed it. It's an excellent YA fantasy comic, and Jeff Smith's consistency of style over 1,500+ pages is staggering. Now Scholastic is re-releasing the series in color. Bone vol 1: Out of Boneville is the first color trade. The coloring is very well done and I'm glad they are doing it, as I think it will likely reach a whole new audience with the colors. But the story was already so strong in black and white that the originals can still be enjoyed.

To Say Nothing of the Dog is the second book in Connie Willis' Oxford Time Travel series. These books handily blend two of my favorite genres: sci-fi and historical fiction. In the mid-2050s, the Oxford History department uses a time machine to send its grad students back in time to study the past. The time machine, or 'The Net', has its own inbuilt self-protective measures- it won't drop a historian anywhere a near a major historical event (eg, no killing Hitler, no stopping the JFK assassination). It won't drop a historian anywhere that a contemporary will see him or her materialize. And it won't allow historians to bring anything forward from the past to the present- or it hasn't until now. The Oxford History department is already being rampaged by the terrifying Lady Schrapnell when a historian manages to bring a cat through from Victorian England to the present. The following escapades of trying to RETURN the cat to the Victorian Era are silly and ridiculous to the extreme. I didn't enjoy this book as much as the first one, Doomsday Book (which traveled back to the 1300s) but it was still a good read.

The Winter Prince is a retelling of the Arthurian legend, but this book focuses not on Arthur and Merlin but on Arto's two sons: Mordred (called Medraut in this book), the bastard child of incest and Lleu, Arto's legitimate heir. The brothers have a strange relationship- Medraut by turns burningly jealous and fiercely protective of his younger, weaker, brother. Medraut is strong, talented, smart- he would be the perfect prince if not for the strain of his birth. Lleu, bedridden and spoiled, will inherit the kingdom he is not fit to rule, and the knowledge of that eats at Medraut constantly. Yet when Artos asks Medraut to teach his brother the skills he needs to rule, Medraut rises to the task. As with all Arthurian stories, this one holds a mixture of joy and betrayal. One of my favorite books of the year.

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept is a novel in prose poetry, considered one of the classics of that small genre. In floods of passionate and powerful words, Elizabeth Smart glides through the story of her affair with another poet, a married man. Their romance begins in Northern California under the cool pines of the coast. They attempt to travel together to Arizona and are arrested, leading to one of the most intense scenes where Smart weaves quotes from the Song of Songs through the police interrogation. While things are good, Smart's lines hum and sing with overflowing joy. Perhaps inevitably, things begin to go wrong. But the elegance of the language is no less as weary and confusing realities loom larger and larger.