Still busy so I’m going to make these quick. Two series-es to recommend today!
Well, my thermometers aren’t uploading. Suffice it to say both of these book series are aimed at a younger teen audience so you’re not going to run into a lot of “content.”
Cece Rios
Cece Rios is a title you might remember me mentioning, if you were paying close attention, last February when I met the author at LTUE. Kaela Rivera is an amazing, funny, kind person who I was delighted to get to know. (She’s coming out with a new book next summer! Middle-Grade fantasy horror I believe, The Hungry Forest.)
Anyway, my girls are starting on the Cece series now, as they’ve devoured their way through all the Percy Jackson I could feed them, then The Girl who Circumnavigated Fairyland, and who knows what next. They audio-book it and I can barely keep pace. They’re enjoying her story! Cece takes place in a secondary world1 where the world of humans lives uncomfortably next to the world of creaturas. The creaturas are creatures or animals or beasts or monsters with roots in Mexican and Native American/Central American legends. La Chupacabra, for example, or Coyote the trickster. Humans fear them and drive them away, except for the brujas who steal their souls, in the form of stones on a necklace that they wear, to control them. Cece’s sister is stolen and Cece must face an angry world of creaturas and of people to get her back. This is not made easier by the fact that the people of Tierra del Sol, the blessed people of the Sun God, look at her as weak; her “soul like water” has been a reason for them to shun her for her whole life.
The story is a vivid, colorful, magical coming-of-age, where Cece discovers her strengths and her values as she grows with her friends. I loved seeing her grow and the world she creates by the end of the third book had me in tears.
Rivals!
Rivals is a series that you can only get if you have a current Audible subscription. That’s honestly my biggest ding against it. Why? Because I don’t like Amazon’s business practices. But I guess I can’t begrudge them their exclusive titles when they pay for the production thereof. They’re Amazon Originals and included in the series are Rivals, Rivals 2, Spies, Pirates, Vikings, and an upcoming Rivals 3. All of these should be followed by a ! but that starts to get exhausting to read. Sorry.
Scott McCormick writes these series as informative insights into history and the things we can learn from it. Like Adidas and Puma were brands created by two brothers engaged in bitter rivalry (and maybe some other shenanigans) in the years surrounding WWII. They’re also the reason we’ve got so much sports branding and so on today. Or that paleontology was driven by two fossil-hungry collectors who used explosives to find more bones. As well as to destroy ones they couldn’t carry so their counterpart couldn’t get to them. The scholarly soul shudders…
These fascinating glimpses into odd bits of history touch on much bigger pieces. Like slavery and the Revolutionary War and the founding fathers in Spies! and Rivals! Or the settlement of Russia, and where Russia’s name originated, in Vikings! They’re also presented in a way that I might call tongue-in-cheek, or at least willing to add in fun asides. Surely I can’t figure out why that appeals to me so…
They’re enjoyable and informative listens and maybe I’ll try getting the kids interested in this series next. If I can convince them non-fiction can at all compare with curanderas, Wyveraries, or Camp Half-Blood.
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- That is to say, a world like our own but also distinct. Maybe it has magic, maybe the gods or other forces who created it are more visible, etcetera. ↩︎
