"The Christmas Pig" by J. K. Rowling

Having just finished rereading the Harry Potter series, it was super exciting to have a brand-new Rowling adventure to enjoy before the end of the year!  And The Christmas Pig did not disappoint.

Jack's favorite toy, Dur Pig or DP for short, has been his constant source of comfort throughout his short and sometimes troubled life.  When his father leaves, DP comforts him.  When Jack and his mother move to a new house, DP bolsters his courage.  When Jack gets bullied, when life is unfair, when nothing goes the way it ought to, DP is always there for Jack.

Until he isn't.  DP gets lost.  And, with a new Christmas Pig for a guide, Jack goes on an Epic Quest to find and rescue DP from the Land of the Lost.  And I do mean Epic Quest.  You know Rowling loves her mythology, and this book kept reminding me of the myth of Orpheus descending into Hades to rescue his wife Eurydice.  With a little of Dante's Inferno and Toy Story mixed in.  All of that infused with Rowling's heady creativity, of course.

Did I love The Christmas Pig?  I might have.  I think I will when I reread it.  I certainly laughed and cried over it, and I'm now handing it off to my kids to add to their box of Christmas books.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG for some intense scenes of peril to a child, themes of loss and broken families, and bullying.  No bad language or other objectionable content.

This has been my 53rd book read off my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2021.

"Till We Have Faces" by C. S. Lewis

I had really zero idea what this book was going to be about because I don't know the story of Psyche and Cupid, so people telling me "it's a retelling of the story of Psyche and Cupid" didn't really mean anything to me.

Anyway, I'm soooo glad Olivia hosted a read-along for this because it's not a Lewis book I had any real interest in reading, so I probably would have gone YEARS before getting around to it.  But I dug it very much indeed.  Thank you, Olivia.

It's hard for me to explain what this book is even about.  On its surface, it's about a king's ugly daughter, Orual, who is fiercely possessive and protective of her younger half-sister, Psyche, who is even more beautiful than Orual is ugly.  They live in an ancient kingdom in the Middle East-ish sort of area, I guess?  And their father is a tyrant, they have a sister who's a fool, and they have a Greek slave called The Fox for a tutor.  

The Fox teaches them all sorts of fairly athiestic philosophy.  Their own culture worships a rock-goddess and believes in many deities.  But Orual basically worships her sister.  Until she loses her.  And gets freaked out by what she finds when she goes looking for her sister.

Basically, the whole thing is all about what it's like to be an unbeliever who loves a person who becomes a believer.  How left out you would feel, then how rejected, how angry, how confused.  How betrayed and bewildered.  Orual cannot accept or believe what happened to Psyche, and her unbelief drives her to desperation.  It's masterfully told, of course, and I think that when I re-read it, I'll enjoy it even more because it wasn't until the very end that I finally got what Lewis was saying about unbelief and belief, so I spent most of the book going, "Um, wait, what?"

Particularly Good Bits:

The days were endless.  The very shadows seemed nailed to the ground as if the sun no longer moved (p. 102).

I was with book, as a woman is with child (p. 281).

Memory, once waked, will play the tyrant (p. 287).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-16.  Much more raw and adult than I was expecting, yet never crosses over into being explicit or dirty.

This is my 42nd book read and reviewed for my second go-'round with the Classics Club and my 3rd for #TheUnreadShelfProject2020.  And my first for My Year with C.S. Lewis!

"Norse Mythology" by Neil Gaiman

This was amusing, entertaining, and sometimes enlightening.  Neil Gaiman for the win again!

My husband actually got this out of the library because he heard somewhere in his section of the internet that it was really good.  I'd heard the same over here in my section of the internet, so when he finished it, I decided to read it before we took it back to the library.  And then life intervened, and War and Peace intervened, and I had to renew it twice before I got around to reading it.  Sigh.  

Once I actually started it, this was a fast, fun read.  It made me laugh aloud in many places, mostly in scenes involving Thor and Loki.  Y'all know that Thor is my favorite of the Avengers, and I admit I half read this just to get a better grasp of the mythology behind the comics that gave rise to the Thor of the MCU.  Now, this is Gaiman retelling Norse Mythology, and he himself first got into it because of the Thor comics, so... there's a nice circle of common interests there.

Anyway, my son keeps begging to read this, mostly because I laughed so much over it, but he's only 11 and parts of it are pretty graphic about violence, there's some scatological humor, and while there are no described sex-scenes, characters do talk about desiring each other, and they make love and produce offspring, so... I'm making him wait a few years.

Particularly Good Bits:

"Because," said Thor, "When something goes wrong, the first thing I always think is, it's Loki's fault.  It saves a lot of time" (p. 52).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-13 for the aforementioned content.  No cussing that I recall, though.