FINISHED:

Jacques, Brian. (2002). Triss. New York: Philomel/Penguin Putnam.

[Whew. Don't get me wrong, I love the Redwall (i.e. "mousy tales") books - heck, I've read 14 of them - but they can be work. Well, I suppose that I'm not being fair. Jacques is actually a master storyteller, and although each of these tales tends to follow the same BASIC premise - really, a premise as old as Shakespeare - the writing in these is quite strong. Maybe a bit too dense which is why they can sometimes take a bit of effort. Truly, the one thing that causes me to trip up the most are the dialects that he uses for each animal race. At any rate, this one was about a slave named Triss who steals a boat with some others and then travels around, eventually meeting up with some young folks from Salamandastron who are out trying to have an adventure that will propel them into adulthood. The Redwall Abbey folks are here, too - some young dibbuns wander out of the abbey walls and stumble across a door in a tree that leads to an abandoned, underground kingdom once ruled by a tyrant, but is now inhabited by a trio of adders that are bound together by their tails. As in other Redwall tales, all three storylines meet up in the end, but it's the jumping around between tales, especially when they are all somewhat similar and have similarly named characters, that gets me all confused. On to something else for now, but I'll definitely keep reading if Jacques keeps writing.]

STARTED:
Lalicki, Tom. (2006). Danger in the dark: a Houdini & Nate mystery. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

[I've been intrigued by Houdini lately - don't know why, just have been. Maybe because he was the ultimate showman. Read about this one... somewhere... and, so far, it's well written and it's got me hooked.]

*