November 2007 Staff Picks--Library page Leah is the library's resident Harry Potter expert. She also enjoys reading, playing piano, and watching sitcom reruns.
If you are looking for a great, epic fantasy series, look no farther than Anne McCaffrey's Pern series. Set thousands of years in the future, the books follow the people of the planet Pern as they battle to survive a deadly invasion that devours everything it touches. Their only solution is to rely on the dragons and their riders to scorch it before it reaches the ground. Unfortunately, at the time of Dragonriders of Pern, the invasion has been dormant for many years, and the dragonriders have become nearly obsolete. So, when the deadly invasion returns, the few remaining riders have to find a way to defend their entire planet. McCaffrey's books about Pern tell the stories of many different characters spanning the history of the planet. Start by reading the first book in the massive series, Dragonflight or the first three novels combined in Dragonriders of Pern.
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You know the story of the Wizard of Oz: Dorothy shows up, the good Glinda helps her, the evil Wicked Witch tries to kill her-or do you? Gregory Maguire takes the familiar story and turns it on its head. He explores what happened before Dorothy arrived, and how the conflicted and idealistic Elphaba became the Wicked Witch, and the self-serving, ambitious Galinda became the Good Witch. The basis of the smash Broadway hit, Wicked is a politically-charged fantastical tale of good and evil and our perception of it. In his other novels, Maguire also takes on the curse of beauty in Cinderella (Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister), and vanity in the tale of Snow White (Mirror, Mirror).
As a library employee, I love that So You Want to be a Wizard begins in a library. It is there that Nita finds a book that instructs her on how to be a wizard. Hardly able to believe it is more than a joke, she tentatively begins and discovers that she can talk to the trees and do other amazing things. She meets Kit, another beginning wizard, and the two of them must face their Ordeal together, in order to become full-fledged wizards. In this Ordeal, they must battle monsters and machines in a deadly parallel-universe Manhattan. Diane Duane creates a magnificent saga of two wizard friends that she continues in other adventures and other planets throughout her eight-book (so far) series.
Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series is at the same time a homage to and a parody of great literature. Thursday Next is a Special Operations officer in the Literary division, rooting out Shakespeare forgeries and stolen manuscripts. She then discovers a talent for going into the actual books, and fighting literary crime from the inside. In the first novel of the series, The Eyre Affair, an evil villain kidnaps Jane Eyre out of her book, causing a Book World crisis. It's up to Thursday Next to return Jane to her story, and return the world to normal. Fforde's writing is uproarious and witty, and there is never a dull moment in any of his books. If you enjoy this series, he has also written a Nursery Crime series starting with The Big Over Easy.