3rdragon | Further updates from Miriam-land

Wednesday, continued.
I dreamed that I was infiltrating a school run by awful, terrible people with the intent to cause havok and mayhem. I was appropriately student-aged, so this wasn't terribly difficult. I had the help of a talking mouse (or maybe we enlisted the talking mouse after we were already in the school; I don't remember) and several kids unfortunate enough to be students at the school. After a period of waiting and planning, we developed a scheme in which I would take the mouse with me to an all-school assembly and let him loose at some particularly boring part. He would scamper across the floor at an opportune moment and then make his way to a pre-arranged spot where one of the conspirators would pick him up and get him away to safety. This plan worked excellently the whole way to the "go to the boring assembly" part. I had the mouse sitting somewhere discrete (the top of my boots, hidden by my skirt, maybe), but when I looked to tell him to scamper, he wasn't there. I spent the rest of the assembly alternately being worried about him/wondering if he was okay and being unhappy that we now had to sit through the entire assembly for no reason whatsoever. And it actually turned out to be more than the entire assembly, because the evil principal lady had some announcement she wanted to make to a particular group of students, and that group contained my friends and the group of students I was ostensibly in.

All I remember about my dream this morning is that it had something to do with Moodle. I hope I don't make a habit of that; dreams can be so much more interesting.

And as for the other aspect of Miriam-land that frequently winds up on this lj, over this past week, I've read Hilari Bell's The Wizard Test and Tasha Alexander's And Only to Deceive.

The Wizard Test
When I first picked this book up, my impression was that it was a somewhat original idea that would come to a fairly predictable ending, but as the book progressed, I became more and more impressed. I really like the way she handled a typically honorable character with a set-in-stone code of morality faced with the shades of gray that we face in the real world. Towards the end of the book, I wasn't even what the honorable path was, much less the right one, which is pretty impressive for a book that Amazon recommends for ages 9-12.

And Only to Deceive
I really enjoyed the heroine's character/sense of humor. Particularly in the first part of the book, I sometimes found myself laughing aloud (which doesn't often happen; I read in public places frequently enough that I tend to be restrained). It did get a bit tedious about a third of the way in, when she was being romantically ridiculous, but then the plot picked up and events changed such that she wasn't quite so ridiculous and I stopped being annoyed at her.