Fish

While not fantasy in the strictest sense, it is a little surreal that a
fish would show up in a mud puddle and that a girl would then carry
said fish all the way across a country on her journey to safety. A
missionary family must flee civil war, and this is the story of their
journey over the mountains and to a neutral zone. Girls and women alike
will identify with this very real and brave heroine. If you are partial
to books on tape, this one isparticularly interesting. The actress (Jenna Lamia) who reads it puts on a strange accent. I thought it was Welsh, then maybe some blend of South African with British
? but since she's is, in fact, neither, I have no idea what she was
going for. Oddly enough, it totally works, whatever it is.

Okay,
here's the weirdest part. After reading other reviews of this book, it
seems that our androgynous hero is, in fact, a boy. And apparently it's
a Christian allegory. Maybe I got a different sense of it all because I
listened to the book rather than read it, but in my mind Tiger is still
a girl, and I didn't pick up at all on the alleged themes ofChristianity. So, weird. Maybe it is a little sci-fi after all.

Author: L.S. Matthews