Rankin-Rampant, Reviews, and the Red Sea

The other day, those of you who follow me on Twitter saw me post that I had a secret. there was much speculation on the nature of that secret. Mari Mancusi asked if it was official that Rampant was going to be the first book released without a cover (somedays, it seems like it). Then, Saundra Mitchell asked if it was a new cover for Rampant.

Saundra was right. And here it is:

Very Rankin-Bass, what?

The thing I like best about this one is that the unicorn here actually is Rampant. Wait, maybe, I can’t tell about that last foot (“Rampant,” for the uninitiated, is heraldic jargon for the position that an animal is in when it is rearing with three feet off the ground. So, in heraldry, the following crest would be described as:

Vert a Unicorn Rampant Argent

(Vert=green; unicorn=the animal shown; rampant=the position its in; Argent=the color of the animal — in this case silver/white)

Heraldry-speak is actually super cool, once you start getting into it. And it makes the last line of The Scarlet Letter seem so much less bizarre. It can get a lot more complicated than that, too. Like some heraldry purist would want me to talk about how the animal is facing left, or its tongue, or all kind of things. But that’s where the title Rampant came from, in case you/’re curious. And also, where the title of the awesome LIONESS RAMPANT, by Tamora Pierce, came from. Heraldry, bay-bee!

I really don’t know if I’m amusing anyone but myself with this stuff.)

And, on the adult side, guess what? I got my first blog review of Tap & Gown, from Angie of Angieville. It’s a triumph of spoiler-freeness, so don’t worry about checking it out. My favorite part (other than the fact that, bless her, she used the PROPER cover of Tap & Gown, rather than the mutant, yellow, color-corrupted scan that somehow made it free from the top secret underground graphic design laboratory at Bantam Dell and is, even as we speak, wreaking havoc all over the internet):

Amy is such a strong character. She’s an everygirl and, as a result, it’s just so dang easy to empathize with her, particularly when we’ve had the opportunity to follow her through four books and watch her progress from an uncertain, unwelcome, uncomfortable-in-her-own-skin fledgling Diggirl, to a confident lynchpin member of a whole new order of Rose & Grave. Perhaps most satisfactory of all, she becomes brave in her honesty. Even when it scares her. She learns to be careful with (and protective of) the relationships she formed in her time at Eli. She understands how she fits into the larger scheme of things and she knows what (and who) is important. Frankly, I was proud of the girl. I have to say, it is extremely gratifying to finish a series feeling like the characters would be people worth knowing, like it played out the way it was meant to, like the author knows the score. Diana Peterfreund delivers with Tap & Gown.

Yay! Isn’t that nice? What a welcome warm fuzzy.

I hope you have a lovely weekend. I’ve got the old two-holiday thing happening around here. Growing up, Passover was always one of my favorite holidays, even though I didn’t discover until college how utterly bastardized our celebration was. (It probably also helped that we did not follow the special diet.) I think I actually scandalized my Jewish friends in college when I described to them what we used to do. My mom, who grew up Catholic, tried so hard to put together a Seder for my grandfather and father, who grew up Jewish, and us kids, who were growing up without organized religion, but she was pretty much working from zilch. All she had were vague descriptions of the dishes, and there was no internet to help her out back then. For instance, we never had actual Charoset, just sliced apples and nuts on a plate.

Still, we had the story. Which is the most important part, and I think it was the part I liked the best. (Though the matzoh hunt was always fun, as was trying to rush back to the table before Elijah came and left.) It’s an awesome story. Plagues! Miracles! Freedom from Slavery! Story and ritual food = awesome holiday. The best Seder I ever went to was the year I graduated from college, where I went to my roommate’s father’s home. He was a cantor in New Jersey and there were dozens of people there. All the furniture was out on the lawn so they could fill the house with endless rows of folding tables and chairs snaking from room to room. And we all had tambourines. And we sang and ate and danced all night. And my other roommate, who is a Christian from the heartland, went around singing the song about Miriam finding water in the desert for like a week straight after that.

I never hear the name Miriam without thinking of that night.