House Reads #04 – Pugs of the Frozen North

My Current Read Is: Pugs of the Frozen North by Philip Reeve and Sarah McIntyre
Published by: Random House, 2016
Cover Illustration: Sarah McIntyre
Read This: while playing in the snow or eating noodles

This is a silly story that has a tremendous heart at its center. Shen is a cabin boy who gets marooned in the frozen north with sixty-six pugs and a crate of Aran sweaters. He manages to find a settlement and meets up with a young girl named Sika who wants nothing so much as a dog team to take her grandfather’s sled to the north pole. Once in a lifetime, a magical True Winter descends and the first team to make it to the Snowfather’s palace at the north pole will be granted a wish. Sika’s grandfather almost made it and she hopes to fulfill his dream and use her wish to restore him to health.
There are the usual cast of wacky characters and various misadventures, but in the end, they all find something much more valuable than treasure. I’ll admit, my eyes were not entirely dry by the end.
Philip Reeve has written a delightful story and Sarah McIntyre (who I hear is the best be-hatted person in children’s literature) has done a series of utterly charming illustrations.

Sarah McIntyre and wig (from the author’s website)

Normally, I wouldn’t review a book so early (It comes out in the US from Random House on January 26, 2016,) but since I’m doing my House Reads challenge I wanted to go ahead and get this one down.
I’d also like to recommend Philip Reeve’s spot on Tea & Jeopardy as a delightful listen.
NaNoWriMo starts today. And, here in most of the US, if you stayed up until midnight to start you got an extra hour thanks to Daylight Savings Time, that unfathomable beast. I am trying NaNo again this year. I’m working on a horror story based off a dream, which I believe resulted from listening to too many episodes of Three Guys With Beards. We’ll see how that goes. I’ve written a zombie novel before, but I don’t really know about straight up horror.
Although, speaking of straight up horror, I got to do an interview with the spooktacular Cherie Priest for the Little Professor website. That’s available here if you’d like to take a look!