[HPforGrownups] What to Read After Harry Potter

[Sister Mary Lunatic]

No: HPFGUIDX 967

This is the oddest list of "what to read after HP" books I've ever come
across.  These are all historical novels -- what do they have to do with a
fantasy like Harry Potter?  Most of these kinds of lists recommend books
that are at least in the same genre as HP.  Strange.


-----Original Message-----
From: Denise [mailto:gypsycaine at yahoo.com]
Sent: Monday, September 04, 2000 7:55 AM
To: HPforGrownups at egroups.com
Subject: [HPforGrownups] What to Read After Harry Potter

Monday September 4 8:01 AM ET
What to Read After Harry Potter

By Ellen Freilich

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A month after the release of J.K. Rowling's ``Harry
Potter and the Goblet of Fire,'' any Potter fan worth his salt has finished
the 734-page book, an international publishing phenomenon and the fourth
volume about the plucky young wizard's apprentice.

So what can a youthful book-lover read in August?

Plenty, it turns out. Books about nature and summer itself seem particularly
apt for the season. But the key element of a good summer book is for the
reader be drawn in so completely that he doesn't want to come up for air
until the last page is finished.

One such tale is Gary Blackwood's ``The Shakespeare Stealer'' (Puffin
Books). Set in Elizabethan England, the Shakespeare stealer is a young
apprentice, Widge, who is ordered by his master, an angry former member of
Shakespeare's acting company, to sneak into the Globe Theater and copy down
the words of ''Hamlet'' so it can be performed by his rival acting company.

In the process of carrying out his master's orders, Widge is drawn into the
company of the Globe players, who begin to train him as an actor and treat
him as a friend. Widge's predicament of being charged to steal from his
newfound friends keeps the reader in suspense while giving us a taste of
what it might have been like to work at the Globe with the Bard himself
present.

``Mary, Bloody Mary'' by Carolyn Meyer (Gulliver Books, Harcourt, Brace &
Company) is set in a slightly earlier historical period, during the reign of
King Henry VIII. Mary ascended to the throne of England six years after her
father's death, and after her death she was succeeded by her younger sister,
Elizabeth.

Mary, Mayans And Monday

History has accorded Mary an unflattering nickname, but this book is most
sympathetic to a young girl and woman who was treated by her father, Henry
VIII, as nothing more than a high-priced piece of property and a pawn in the
king's bitter fight with her mother, Catherine of Aragon.

A Mayan city in the 9th century provides the setting for Chris Eboch's ``The
Well of Sacrifice'' (Clarion Books). Eveningstar Macaw lives in a Mayan city
that appears prosperous until its king dies and is succeeded by the High
Priest. The priest orders the sacrifice of Eveningstar's beloved brother,
along with many other young male nobles.

Eveningstar's attempt to rescue her brother puts her own life in jeopardy
and she must escape the city to save her life and rescue her family. This
fast-paced tale, narrated by its heroine, is rich with details of
9th-century Mayan life.

Eleven-year-old Monday de Groot is the protagonist of Sharon Dennis Wyeth's
``Once on This River'' (Knopf), set in colonial New York. Monday has known
nothing of slavery all her life until she leaves the safety of Madagascar
and sets sail with her mother for America, where her mother hopes to rescue
Monday's uncle, a free man who has been illegally enslaved by a wealthy
Dutch family in New York.

Wyeth repopulates downtown New York with the people who inhabited the city
in the mid-1700s, including a community of free blacks who lived there at
the same time enslaved Africans were being sold at a place called the Meal
Market.

Pioneers, Settlers And Soldiers

Joseph Bruchac's ``Sacajawea'' (Silver Whistle/Harcourt Inc.) is set half a
century later, in the early 1800s, during the carefully recorded expedition
of Lewis and Clark, two explorers who were authorized by President Thomas
Jefferson to explore the land from the Mississippi River to the Pacific
Ocean.

The story is told from alternating points of view -- the diaries of William
Clark and the fictionalized voice of a young Shoshone woman, Sacajawea, who
at age 16 served as translator, peacemaker, caretaker and guide for Lewis
and Clark on their historic explorations.

In 1870, on the flat, open prairie of America, the two pioneer sisters of
Frances Arrington's ``Bluestem'' (Philomel Books) must survive without their
parents when, with their father away, their mother falls strangely silent,
unable to cope with the loneliness of the prairie and the loss of her baby
during the winter.

Although frightened, 9-year-old Jessie and 11-year-old Polly manage to ward
off the intrusions of an unsympathetic neighboring family who would be happy
to grab their land, and the girls survive until, at last, their father
returns. ''Bluestem'' effectively portrays both the emptiness and the beauty
of the prairie.

In Sara Harrell Banks' ``Abraham's Battle: A Novel of Gettysburg'' (Atheneum
Books for Young Readers), Abraham Small, a free black man and the caretaker
of a Gettysburg estate, meets Lamar Cooper, a poor, white Confederate
soldier who has never known a slave, before the historic battle ensues.

Their paths cross during the battle, Abraham now a member of a Union
ambulance corps and Lamar a critically wounded soldier. It's a juncture that
forces Abraham, and the readers of this novel, to discern when people's
common humanity supersedes their differences.

Marisa, a Polish Jew whose blond hair and blue eyes allow her to pass as a
Christian, is the heroine of Carol Matas' ``In My Enemy's House'' (Simon &
Schuster Books for Young Readers). With her family either scattered or dead,
Marisa makes her way to Germany, hoping to survive the war as a Polish
worker. There she finds work in the household of a high-ranking Nazi and is
befriended by his daughter, all as she hides in plain sight in her enemy's
house.



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