Midnight Palace

Midnight Palace
Palacio de la Medianoche
by
Carlos Ruiz Zafon, translated by Lucia Graves
Young Adult Horror fiction

This author has had books on the New York Times bestseller list and has one a number of awards, but I found this book to be somewhat disjointed and at least a little confusing. Maybe this is because of the translation, but my guess is that this is not the author's finest work, either.
In 1916 Calcutta, a pair of twins are separated at birth to keep them safe from their father's foe who seeks to murder them. The boy is raised in an orphanage. The girl is raised by their grandmother on the run throughout India. Fast forward to 1932 when circumstances reunite the twins.
The menace still exists and starts to stalk the 16 year olds and the grandmother. As the tale progresses we find out about their father and his brilliant scientific mind and a tragedy that lead to the death of 365 orphans back in 1916. Through a curse, the ghost of their father's foe continues to incinerate parts of Calcutta as he exacts revenge on the family. The author points out that Calcutta is named for Kali, the black one, the goddess of destruction.
Some parts of this book were quite interesting, but it lacked in overall appeal.

Plain Kate

Plain Kate
by
Erin Bow

This book was not what I expected. I received a newsletter saying that it was a good teen fantasy read. It won a YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults at the 2011 ALA Midwinter conference. It is published by Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic.
When I checked the book out, the cover had a unicorn sticker on it and it was in the YA fantasy fiction section. The image on the cover of the book is of a girl and her cat on a roof of some pre-1900 city.

A) I read the book and don't remember her walking on any city roofs.
B) Most of the book is not set in a city, but in small villages and gypsy camps.
C) This is not a cutesy unicorn book.
D) I would not call this a fantasy book but a horror book.

By the time I got 1/3 of the way through the book about an orphaned girl who can carve wonderful figure the book had clearly taken a turn into a horror book. There is black magic with lots of blood letting and nasty ghost/demons and a twisted warlock. The book is pretty well written, but I couldn't get past the wicked parts. I skim/read the last 2/3 of it to find out how it ended. There were some unexpected twists. It is an original work and the talking cat character is great, but it is more for the Twilight vampire crowd than for the "unicorn" reader and I would not recommend it to readers under the age of 16.