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Cimorene is a princess who gets bored with all the proper things she is supposed to learn (etiquette, sewing, and the like), and keeps finding more interesting things to do-- like fencing lessons, learning magic, or even how to cook-- but her more interesting lessons are always halted as soon as her parents find out. Despairing over what to do with her, they decide to marry her off to a prince in a neighboring kingdom. When Cimorene figures this out, she decides to run away-- and with a helpful tip from a talking frog, she finds some dragons and volunteers to be a dragon's princess-- which is quite "proper," since it happens to princesses all the time, and much more interesting for Cimorene.

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Charmain is volunteered by her aunt Sempronia to watch her great-uncle William's house while he is away for health reasons. William is a magician, and both he and Sempronia assume that Charmain has basic knowledge of magical things-- but she doesn't, because her mother doesn't think it is nice or proper to learn such things. Charmain is excited about it only because she thinks it will give her more uninterrupted time to read books. The house is a magical one-- it seems to have only two rooms, but if you go through the door to the kitchen and turn just as you go through, you find yourself in a long hallway with the study and several bedrooms, and a window that lets out onto a meadow-- and that is just one of the simpler of the "many ways" of this house. Charmain finds herself adopted by a dog named Waif, and becomes friends with Peter, who has come to be an apprentice to her uncle; Peter is a bumbling magician, but has much more practical knowledge than Charmain herself, who doesn't know how to do laundry or dishes.

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The first story arc of Fathom is utterly compelling. Aspen Matthews is a marine biologist who has always been drawn to the ocean-- she was an orphan who returned to land with an ocean liner that had been thought lost, and she doesn't remember beyond that, but she surfs, was an Olympic swimmer, and when she is invited to a deep sea research station, she is drawn into a bigger story of a war being instigated by a group of beings who live in the ocean, with involvement of Air Force pilots testing amphibious planes, and along the way Aspen discovers more about her own heritage and how powerful she is.

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Yorick, 355, and Dr. Mann meet up with a Russian agent who is trying to get somewhere in the Midwest U.S., because the three astronauts who have been on the Space Station since the plague hit are going to try to land-- and two of them are men. Yorick, 355, and Dr. Mann go to a “hot suite” and try to make arrangements to protect the men (so the plague doesn’t kill them as soon as they land), but the Israeli military force that’s been tracking Yorick gets in the way-- kidnaps Yorick, attempts to take out the landing capsule, possibly contributing to its explosive landing.

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Does a good job of summarizing what happened in Vol.1 (all the males on earth died except Yorick and his pet chimp Ampersand), and reminding us what a male-dominated world we still live in, as most of the business owners, pilots, construction workers, etc. are now gone. Yorick, Agent 355, and Dr. Mann are working their way across the country to get to Dr. Mann’s laboratory and backup copies of the notes and data destroyed when her east coast lab was burned down. After a little incident on their train, they end up in a small town that seems Edenic in comparison to the rest of the places they have seen on their way through the country-- they have electricity, food, and seem to be taking care of themselves quite well, and even deal rather well with the news of Yorick’s existence (as compared to the other extreme reactions he’s seen before). Meanwhile, Yorick is being hunted-- by some Israeli troops, and by the extreme Daughters of the Amazon, now accompanied by his sister Hero, who seems to have been brainwashed by the care and attention of the leader who protects and feeds her and all the other women.

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After finishing reading Howl's Moving Castle, I wanted to re-read Castle in the Air. It is an unusual sequel, because the characters we know from the first book are in disguise (by magic of course, in this case not their own) when we first meet them in this story, and even that is not right away. We actually follow a day-dreaming carpet merchant named Abdullah, whose fairy-tale daydreams start coming true after he buys a magic carpet-- he meets a beautiful princess, he ends up wandering in the desert and runs into the villainous bandit he dreamed up, and ends up on a quest to rescue the princess he loves. Of course, his daydreams literally are coming true because a djinn has overheard them and is playing a bigger game.

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The delightful story of Sophie, Howl, and Calcifer. In a magic, fairy-tale land where seven-league boots actually exist (although they are demonstrated to be difficult to control when your balance is very good), Sophie doesn’t ever bother to seek out her fortune because she knows as the oldest of three sisters, she is destined to fail first and worst. Her sisters aren’t afraid to seek out what they want (even to the extent of deceiving their mother to trade places), but Sophie stays where she is. Only when she is cursed into old age does she venture out, and her “disguise” as an old woman gives her a new kind of freedom-- she isn’t afraid, she’s more willing to speak out and do what she wants, even to the extent of forcing herself into the castle of the wizard Howl as his housekeeper. Howl is selfish, vain, slapdash, and heartless (literally, in a way, because of his contract with Calcifer that Sophie is supposed to be trying to figure out and break), and yet he is also sweet, quite thoughtful at times, and tenderhearted. Of course, it is Sophie’s qualities as an older sister that make her capable of dealing with Howl-- when he has a tantrum of green slime, she and Michael push him to the bathroom and dump him in the tub, and Sophie mops up the slime that is everywhere.

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As an infant, Sabriel nearly-- or, to be more accurate, briefly-- died. But her father, Abhorsen, stepped across the boundary between Life and Death, and brought her back. Abhorsen is a necromancer unlike any I have ever read about-- instead of summoning the dead, he binds the dead that haunt the living, and he assists-- or forces-- them to cross the final gate. Now a young woman and nearly finished with her schooling in Ancelstierre, Sabriel learns that something has happened to her father-- he is either bound somewhere in Death, or perhaps actually dead. So, she crosses back into the Old Kingdom, where she discovers that Abhorsen is not a name but a title, and that she has inherited it. A powerful, Greater Dead creature and its minions are stirring, and she must outrace them to find her father and save the kingdom.

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