May Book Review

Another month, another book review! (Click on the Book Review Club logo for links to this month's other reviews.)

Our little town has been the Bermuda Triangle of technology this week. My desktop computer and DSL connection both pooched last Friday, leaving me to schlep the laptop to the library when I want to go on line or check email. I am alternately encouraged and disheartened to know that several of my fellow townfolk also have mysteriously crashed their computers at the very same time, some of them more than one. (I put my hands over my laptop’s little ears when I typed that.) ( I love you, little laptop. Love you. You’re the best little laptop. The Best. In the world. ) (Don’t crash.)

Anyway, here’s this month’s review. I’ll check back in when possible.

The Mysterious Benedict Society
By Trenton Lee Stewart
Little, Brown & Co., 2007

Four kids are plucked from orphanages or families that don’t understand them, and trained to save the world by using their unrecognized talents.

They’re in a boarding school setting, with the full complement of baddies and their victims. They face dangers, some physical and others deeply, horrifyingly psychological.

The plot hangs together beautifully. The tone is one of delightful deadpan goofiness, permeating characters and action and setting.

Wow. This novel has it all.

So why did I have to keep forcing myself to read it?

I’d saved this book for a period of convalescence, so perhaps that’s the problem. I was fogged up on painkillers while reading it, only slightly less so when I wrote this review. Bear that in mind, by all means.

But still. I can’t help thinking that at least part of the problem is that I really didn’t care whether the good guys won.

For me, that’s the danger of goofiness. There’s a level of comedy (“level” may not be the right word— maybe I just mean “type”) that isolates me from characters, makes them and their plot and their actions seem less real, less important. This is why I tend not to enjoy slapstick—even, I’m embarrassed to say, the Marx Brothers. The minute I sense that the author cares more about laughs than understanding a character, I lose interest.

MBS sacrifices character for action, message, and humor…and the sacrifice almost works. The fact that the four main characters represent “types” is actually part of the fun. They are brought together by the mysterious Mr. Benedict, head of a very select and very secret group that is trying to prevent the villain from destroying the world in a particularly dreadful way. (I won’t tell you anything about the villain, because finding out about him also is part of the fun.)

Benedict chose the four for their important attributes: There’s eleven-year-old Reynie, a genius and born leader; Stickie, another genius who retains everything he ever reads; the redoubtable Kate, who is uncommonly brave and resourceful ; and the intensely annoying Constance, a very young child whose important attribute remains hidden until the end.

Benedict trains his team , then dispatches them to an island school where all the evil stuff is taking place. The foursome accomplishes remarkable feats of puzzle-solving, intrigue, insight, and derring-do while facing down soul-chilling dangers.

It’s boarding school novel, spy thriller, dystopian warning, and Kids-Against-Authority comic whirlwind rolled up in one. It has a lot in common with the Harry Potter books.

Except for one important factor. In Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone, the moment when Harry learns he’s a wizard, destined to leave his despicable foster family and go to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, is a moment of giddy triumph for the reader as much as for Harry. It’s the moment you dreamt of when your parents had just grounded you—somebody showing up out of the blue to announce that these dull and unworthy people weren’t really your parents, you were really the lost queen of Anatolia. We already know enough about Harry, faults and all, to imagine ourselves in his situation.

In MBS, Reynie is our point of view character. We’re told he’s smarter than everyone at the orphanage and is made fun of, but what we actually experience of his life seems pretty good. He has a tutor who loves him and acknowledges his genius, he has a full stomach and clothes that fit. He doesn’t yearn for his lost parents, or for anything much. We’re intensely interested in what it takes for him to pass Mr. Benedict’s qualifying tests, but otherwise there’s nothing at stake. We don’t identify with Reynie or his situation, we can’t see ourselves in his shoes¬—we want to know what happens next but not necessarily what happens to him.

Worst of all, we don’t know him any better at the end of the novel than at the beginning. He has none of Harry’s flaws or humanity. He’s a figure on a chess board—no matter how thrilling the match, in the end he just gets packed up and put back in the box. Nothing of him stays with you when you close the book.

The Mysterious Benedict Society has a lot going for it—recommended reading, certainly, for anyone who likes puzzles and figuring things out. If you’re looking to populate your brain with a new set of characters, though, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

OK, So Maybe a Bit Longer Than a Week

Howdy. I am not dead, although I play one on TV.

Turns out I was a tad optimistic about my recuperative powers. I don't know where I got the idea that, two weeks after total knee replacement surgery, I would be off painkillers and a fully functioning member of society (such as I ever was).

We are closing in on six weeks and I still needs me my Vicoden. I tried making it through Monday and Tuesday on Tylenol, and re-confirmed my belief that Tylenol is what they use for a placebo in drug trials. By Tuesday night, I was in that achy state in which you can't sit still because you keep thinking the Perfect Painfree Position is out there somewhere waiting for you if you just squirm enough. So, back to Vicoden.

Percocet, which was My Drug for two weeks, is probably mentioned in those torture memos Obama just released. It works great on pain, less great on the entire rest of one's physical being. I lost a week of my life (Week Three, in fact) lying in a nauseated heap a/ because I had been taking Percocet for two weeks or b/ because I was not taking so much of it anymore. Or some lethal combination of a and b. On the plus side, I lost 15 pounds. On the minus side, my clothes hang on me and I don't have the time or the money to replace my entire wardrobe, so now I'm trying to regain 8-10 pounds but not the whole 15, ha ha ha ha. This requires just exactly the right ratio of chocolate chips to yoghurt.

As a result of all this, I did not get to attend the lovely party for the Maine Literary Awards, in which I was a runner-up. My childhood friend Amy MacDonald, who writes books for young kids, did go to the party and said it rocked. Oh well. Back when I thought I was a demigod who could have her knee cut off without particularly noticing, Amy and I were planning to turn the party into a Brookwood (elementary) School reunion, and Pammy Winsor Brindamour, one of my three absolute best friends from childhood, was going to come up from Rockport. No dice, but at least we got to exchange a lot of email.

Rescuing me from my bed of pain was the news that The Unnameables made VOYA's list of Best Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror, 2008. (That link is a pdf.) (Along with Carrie Jones' Need, which means two of the 33 books on the list were written in Hancock County, Maine. Heh.) Plus, Medford and friends have been nominated for YALSA's 2010 Best Books for Young Adults list, the final version of which comes out next January. This is very cool indeed, although my editor is preparing me for disappointment in the end because lots of readers will think my book is anything but young adult. Still, much better than Tylenol. (Carrie's on that one, too. Go Hancock County.)

Possibly the biggest surprise about this whole publishing gig has been the number of times my name has been spelled right in print. I never expected that...in fact, I reserved domain names for my web site in the most common misspellings, because I've lived with this name all my life and I know what it does to people's brains. As it turns out, VOYA and YALSA are the first to get befuddled by all the vowels and things. The VOYA misspelling is one of the common ones, the YALSA one not so much. Guess I'll have to reserve another domain name.

The other thing that happened during my Perambulations in Pergatory was the launch of The Enchanted Inkpot, a group blog I helped to organize and will participate in once I have a brain. The members all write fantasy novels for kids and they know about a million times more about the field than I do, so I'm thrilled to be involved. Check it out, and you'll see what I mean.

I got my editorial letter for revisions on The Filioli a week or so ago, so am trying to figure out a way to sit at the computer with my leg up without twisting myself into a pretzel. Tried the Laptop in Bed routine, and think I prefer Snakes on a Plane. Stay tuned.

Off to Be Bionic

I thought I'd get a chance for a nice, newsy post before I went off for knee replacement, but no such luck. Thanks to everyone for the good wishes, and send some extra potent vibes to St. Joseph's Hospital, Bangor, Maine, tomorrow (Monday) at 7:30 a.m. EDT.

Tata for now... back in about a week, I imagine.

Lemon Tree Very Smelly

Sorry about the silence. But preparing to get your leg cut off at the knee turns out to be time consuming. (Don't worry...they'll reattach it. With a sparkly new titanium knee. Ooooo....shiny.) The big day is March 23. The surgery is at 7:30 in Bangor, and I'll have to get up at 3 to do all the stuff they want you to do beforehand and then drive for an hour. Yish.

My doctor says the two weeks after surgery will be "uncomfortable" -- that's doctorspeak for painful and depressing. Ooooo...damn well better be shiny.

Plus, I've come up against a major logical inconsistency in The Filioli (thanks to my friend Shelly) and a matching one in the sequel, which for the moment is called The Gloucester Ghost. Solutions have come to me in the middle of the night (duly written down and, miraculously, understandable the next day), but not enough of them.

For example, there's a character in GG who has drunk an elixir that enables her to see through enchantments. So there she sits, right next to an enchantment, and does she see through it? No indeed, so far she does not. Why is that? You tell me. Someone tell me. Please?

And then there was the Brooklin Cat Pee Disaster of 2009. Not quite as monumental as the Boston Molasses Disaster of 1919.

We have a potted lemon tree in the front hall, sometimes lovely, sometimes sad, depending on how many caterpillars landed on it when it spent the summer outside under the maple. This year it's marginal. Anyway, I'd been noticing dirt sprayed on the floor and, like an idiot, thought nothing of it. "Oh, how cute, the cat's been playing in the plant," I thought.

I've had cats all my life. But denial dies hard.

Ignorance reigned until I watered the tree. Lots of water, which spilled out into the saucer under the pot. And within minutes the entire front hall smelled like an untended litter box.

"How could you do this?" I asked the cat, who was contentedly tormenting the dog with the "is this a paw or a claw?" game, which ends only when the dog, shaken, cedes her spot in front of the woodstove.

"Do what?" the cat asked.

"You don't smell it?"

"I don't smell. I create." (I don't think that's true but that's what she said.)

I solved most of the problem by hauling the saucer under the pot outside and dumping it out. Rob suggests that I don't water the tree again until summer, when we can put it outside and flush it out. At which point it will, conveniently, be dead. Since Rob hates the tree even when it doesn't stink, I'm beginning to wonder exactly who peed in it.

If it was the cat, I've foiled her for the moment by sticking a miniature stonehenge of chopsticks into the soil around the tree. If it's Rob, I hope it gets on his shoes.

The latest news: The Unnameables was a runner-up for the Maine Literary Award for kidlit. The winner was Brett McCarthy: Work in Progress by Maria Padian of Brunswick, which I haven't read but it sounds wonderful. There have been some more nice reviews, too, but I'll have to write about them later. This time I spent too much time writing about cat pee. There are priorities in this life.

March Book Review!

Well, doesn't time fly. It's been a month since our last book reviews, and more than a week *blush* since my pitiful last post. I have things to write about, too...the great cat pee disaster, snow, that sort of thing. But first, the Book Review Club! (Head over to Barrie Summy's blog for a list of this month's other reviews.)

Conrad’s Fate
By Diana Wynne Jones
HarperCollins (paperback), 2006
ISBN 978-0-06-074745


For years, books by Diana Wynne Jones have been one of my guilty pleasures. Even now, when reading kidlit fantasy could be considered part of my job, I get a nice rush of guilt settling down with yet another magical, funny, adventuresome DWJ.

Oddly, I’d gotten the idea somewhere that I wouldn’t like the Chrestomanci books. I am drawn to fantasies that have one foot in the real world, and most of the adventures of Christopher Chant and friends take place in alternate universes. Nope, I thought. I’ll stick to Archer’s Goon, in which a seemingly normal British family finds out that demigods are running municipal services, or The Ogre Downstairs, in which a magic chemistry set helps a blended family overcome its differences.

But one day I had nothing to read when eating out alone, so I picked up The Pinhoe Egg, the most recent Chrestomanci, set in a world that is just like ours except that magic and enchanters are commonplace. Normal and magical run up against each other…just my cup of mandragora tea. (Which probably would kill you but never mind.)

By now I’ve read all but a couple of the books and am hankering after the short stories. I probably should have read Conrad’s Fate before Pinhoe, but who knew I’d become an addict? And the way these books go zooming back and forth in time, it hardly matters.

The Chrestomanci books more or less follow Christopher Chant’s career from the discovery of his powers as an enchanter through his elevation to the role of Chrestomanci, the controller of magic in the thousands of alternate worlds that co-exist with ours. Some of the books are actually about him; in others, he simply sweeps in to help sort things out.

Here’s the thing about Diana Wynne Jones: Her plots are marvelous, intricate knots, delightful to unravel when you’ve got one of her books in front of you and, for me anyway, totally unmemorable a week or so later. This is a great boon to those of us who like to re-read favorite books, but it’s an odd attribute for such wonderful work.

What you do remember is her characters…proof that, while all novelists recycle and embellish the same basic plots, it’s a book’s characters that make it unique. And Christopher Chant just keeps getting better and better. Jones introduced him thirty years ago as a grown-up Chrestomanci, then slid back in time a decade later so we could follow his upbringing as an enchanter. He’s powerful and brilliant but deeply flawed, prone to arrogance, pouting, and, in his youth, thoughtless action. Jones manages to make him a figure of both romance and comedy, always a neat trick.

Conrad’s Fate is one of the back-sliding books, introducing us to Chant as a rebellious teenage student on the lam from the current Chrestomanci and searching alternate worlds for a fellow renegade, Millie. Add to the mix the unfortunate Conrad, a boy who is in the process of being as deeply misled and betrayed by his family as Chant was when we first met him. The two form a strong bond with each other—and with us—as they sort out who’s been misusing magic in Series Seven, Conrad’s native universe.

The two find jobs as manservants in Stallery Castle, a nest of aristocratic hypocrisy which Jones mines for expert comedy. They run afoul of the magical misdoings there, and do their bumbling bit toward unmasking the misdoers.

This isn’t the tightest of Jones’ plots—it’s a bit sloppy, actually, with a deus ex machina at nearly every turn. The discovery of Conrad’s secret talent is unnecessarily contrived. Conrad himself, though, is a heart-rending character who’s got you on his side from page one. Adding Christopher Chant is almost more than the heart can stand.

Spending time with Conrad, Christopher, and Millie is such a pleasure that I almost don’t feel guilty about it. Almost.

Blog of Blog

In the dregs of February, we need this blog. (Thank you, Fuse #8.) (I think. It was a while ago. I bookmarked it and forgot about it until today.There will be 7-10 inches of fresh snow tomorrow and Monday, and I can't ski on it. So I definitely needed the pick-me-up.)

Make sure you scroll down to the High Five Escalator.

Excuses, Excuses

There's a very good reason why I haven't blogged for a solid week. Really. An excellent, undeniable, unarguable excuse.

I have nothing to say.

Unless, of course, you'd like to hear about Cape Verdean animism. After weeks and weeks of fighting this stupid sequel, I have finally, finally reached that point when your innards hum with new ideas and anything that makes you think about something else seems like an imposition. Taxes, for instance. The Brooklin Youth Corps budget. Blogging.

This does not mean that the writing is zooming along, mind you. It just means I feel that writing this book is what I'm supposed to be doing, as opposed to trudging out to find paying work. The fact that there is no paying work is a huge help.

The writers that starve in the spring, tra-la...

My funny bone reawakened last week with the news that Bill and Joyce at Literate Lives have decided to sponsor a Grand Discussion about The Unnameables. Scroll down to check out the self-portrait for their flyer...