Rocket Girls by Housuke Nojiri

June 13, 2011 by 5 Comments

From the back cover:
Yukari Morita is a high school girl on a quest to find her missing father. While searching for him in the Solomon Islands, she receives the offer of a lifetime—she’ll get the help she needs to find her father, and all she need do in return is become the world’s youngest, lightest astronaut. Yukari and her half-sister Matsuri, also petite, are the perfect crew for the Solomon Space Association’s launches, or will be once they complete their rigorous and sometimes dangerous training.

Review:
I was really looking forward to reading Rocket Girls. I’ve long been intrigued by VIZ Media’s venture into Japanese sci-fi, Haikasoru, but this is the first title in the lineup that I’ve read (unless you count Brave Story, which I read before it was grandfathered into the imprint). Alas, I ended up disappointed.

The basic plot is that Yukari Morita, a high school student weighing 37 kg. (81 lbs.) has traveled to the Solomon Islands during summer vacation to search for her deadbeat father. She ends up meeting scientists from the Solomon Space Association just when they’ve determined that they need a really light person to pilot their rocket, and when the director promises to help her find her father, she agrees. Later, her similarly petite half-sister Matsuri joins up to serve as backup. The SSA folks have a lot of trouble getting a rocket into orbit, but eventually succeed (sort of) and Yukari becomes a national hero.

I guess I was hoping for the novel equivalent of Twin Spica or something, but Rocket Girls doesn’t even come close to achieving the passion and poignancy on display in that series. In fact, it almost totally lacks any depth whatsoever. The book is about 80% dialogue, with very little insight into Yukari’s thoughts, let alone anyone else’s. As a result, many of the characters’ reactions and decisions are inexplicable. Here are some examples:

  • The director of the space program, Isao Nasuda, calls up Yukari’s mother to obtain her permission for Yukari to become an astronaut. Without asking any questions at all, her mother agrees. I could accept a similarly carefree mom in a manga comedy, but it’s harder to swallow in a sci-fi novel.
  • Very quickly, Yukari finds her father, who had no idea she even existed (having disappeared during his honeymoon). His reaction? “How about that?” What, that’s it?!
  • Yukari decides she doesn’t fancy dying in an unsafe spacecraft, but her father won’t come back to Japan with her if she outright quits, so she decides to gain weight so that Matsuri will have to take her place. And then, suddenly, she’s done with that idea. I think this is because one of the scientists guys waxed poetic about his spacefaring dreams, but I’m not sure.
  • Yukari then decides to become hyper-vigilant about the safety of the craft and goes on a hunger strike protesting some new fuel mixture. And then later, when she’s strapped in and ready to take off, the team finds a problem. Her response? “If we let every little thing scare us, we’ll never launch.” Uh, then what was that whole protest about? She even had a sign.

At first, I was bothered that none of the adults seemed to have any empathy for Yukari. They treated her as a tool and spoke dispassionately of bringing her to her breaking point so they could test the jungle-survival capabilities of the new skintight spacesuit they’d designed for her. But then I realized that I had lost all empathy for Yukari, too! Probably I was supposed to care when she nearly died during the flight, but I did not. I just wanted the book to end. After a kind of cool but very brief visit to Mir, I got my wish.

Is one slightly nifty bit near the end enough to recommend the book? I think not. There is also a sequel, but I’ve no intention of reading it.

Filed Under: Books, Sci-Fi Tagged With: ,

The Science of Doctor Who by Paul Parsons

June 4, 2011 by Leave a Comment

From the front flap:
Almost fifty years after the Doctor first crossed the small screen, he remains a science fiction touchstone. His exploits are thrilling, his world is mind-boggling, and that time travel machine—known as the Tardis—is almost certainly an old-fashioned blue police box, once commonly found in London.

Paul Parsons’s plain-English account of the real science behind the fantastic universe portrayed in the television series answers such burning questions as whether a sonic screwdriver is any use for putting up a shelf, how Cybermen make little Cybermen, where the toilets are in the Tardis, and much more.

(Note: This is the 2010 revision of a book originally published in 2006.)

Review:
I am not a science person. In my years of schooling, I never once came up with a non-lame idea for a science project and was positively abysmal at experiments. I did pretty well on tests and homework, but if someone’s test tube was going to spontaneously erupt in a geyser of brown froth (true story!), it would be mine.

Suffice it to say, then, that while I enjoy science fiction entertainment, it’s not because of the science. Still, The Science of Doctor Who promises “a plain-English account of the real science behind the fantastic universe portrayed in the television series,” so I reckoned on being able to follow it. Alas, Paul Parsons’s definition of plain English is a bit different than mine.

I was okay with the majority of the material. Chapter topics include the Doctor’s recurring foes, regeneration, gadgets, weapons, space stations, force fields, parallel universes, and more. In general, Parsons would start by mentioning something that happened in a particular Doctor Who serial and then interview renowned scientists as to whether this is actually possible. Most of the time the answer is “no” or “only with extreme amounts of energy/effort,” but there are a few things that are not so far off. The chapters on alien worlds (Lots of planets really do have a north!) and mirror planets were particular favorites of mine.

Stupidly, however, I hadn’t counted on there being so much physics! I frequently found my eyes glazing over during these sections, which were unfortunately clustered near the beginning (making it hard to get started) and end (causing a strong urge to set the book down with only forty pages to go) of the book.

Take, for example, this quote from page 35:

M-theory’s main thrust is to generalize the one-dimensional objects of string theory into p-dimensional objects known, amusingly enough, as p-branes (where setting p = 0 gives a particle, p = 1 gives a string, p = 2 a “membrane,” and so on).

My brain’s response: asdlkjasldkfzzt!

Seriously, is that plain English? I note that Parsons did not bother to define “p-dimensional,” though that probably wouldn’t have been much help to me anyway.

In the end, I did learn some interesting things. In the chapter on Cybermen, for example, I learned that a cybernetic brain implant currently exists that can block the signals that cause Parkinson’s disease. That’s pretty awesome! I also now know that Sontarans reproduce by cloning and it takes only ten minutes for their offspring to reach adulthood. That’s less awesome.

I’m glad I didn’t give up on reading The Science of Doctor Who but now I think I’ll give my brain a rest by actually watching some.

Additional reviews of The Science of Doctor Who can be found at Triple Take.

Filed Under: Books, Nonfiction, Science, Television, Triple Take Tagged With: ,

A Spy in the House by Y. S. Lee

June 4, 2011 by Leave a Comment

From the back cover:
Mary Quinn leads a remarkable life. At twelve, an orphan and convicted thief, she was miraculously rescued from the gallows. Now, at seventeen, she has a new and astonishing chance to work undercover for the Agency.

It is May 1858, and a foul-smelling heat wave paralyzed London. Mary enters a rich merchant’s household to solve the mystery of his lost cargo ships. But as she soon learns, the house is full of deceptions, and people are not what they seem—including Mary herself.

Review:
As a convicted thief, twelve-year-old Mary Lang is about to be executed when she is saved by the ladies of Miss Scrimshaw’s Academy for Girls. There, she receives an education and by the age of seventeen is teaching other students the skills they will need to be independent. Trouble is, she’s not satisfied and the few other career options open to her gender don’t interest her much, either. When she mentions this to the two women running the school, they suggest another alternative: the Agency.

The Agency is a covert organization of female spies, operating under the assumption that because women are presumed to be flighty and empty-headed, their agents will be able to retrieve information more easily than a man might, particularly in situations of domestic servitude. Mary quickly agrees, despite the threat of danger, and soon finds herself serving as paid companion to spoiled Miss Angelica Thorold, whose merchant father is suspected of dealing in stolen Hindu goods.

Mary (now using the surname Quinn) isn’t the lead on the investigation and isn’t supposed to actually do much of anything, but she gets antsy, and in the process of snooping meets James Easton. James’s older brother desperately wants to marry Angelica, but James has heard rumors about her father’s business practices, and so is doing some sleuthing of his own to determine whether a family connection would be unwise. He and Mary form a partnership and spend most of the book poking about in warehouses and rest homes for aging Asian sailors and following people on foot or in carriages while maintaining a flirty sort of bickering banter.

Author Y. S. Lee tries to make the mystery interesting, giving us a bit of intrigue between Angelica and her father’s secretary as a distraction, but ultimately it feels very insubstantial to me. Nothing much comes as a surprise and two story elements that could’ve been highlights—Mary’s month-long intensive training and Scotland Yard’s raid on the Thorold house—occur off camera! Too, Mary is harboring a secret about her parentage which is thoroughly obvious: she’s part Asian. Only towards the end did Lee actually make clear that Mary is keeping this a secret from others because of the foreigner bias of the time, and I must wonder whether the intended young adult audience was reading this going, “What’s the big deal?”

Not that it isn’t nifty to have a part-Asian heroine, of course. Mary is competent and level-headed, though I admit I did get irritated by how often she is favorably compared to “ordinary women,” who would scream or faint in situations in which Mary is able to keep her head. When a mystery stars a male sleuth, do we need to hear over and over how much smarter he is than the ordinary fellow? I don’t think so. On the flip side, the overall theme of the book seems to be “don’t understimate women,” and Mary finds time to inspire a scullery maid to seek out Miss Scrimshaw’s and to convince Angelica to pursue a musical career.

In the end, A Spy in the House is a decent read. It’s not perfect, but I still plan to read the second book in the series in the near future.

Additional reviews of A Spy in the House can be found at Triple Take.

Filed Under: Books, Historical Fiction, Mystery, Triple Take, YA Tagged With:

In the Presence of the Enemy by Elizabeth George

May 27, 2011 by 2 Comments

Book description:
When a young girl disappears from the streets of London without a trace, her mother, a well-respected MP, is convinced she knows the identity of the kidnapper—the child’s father. But Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley and Sergeant Barbara Havers soon learn that nothing in this investigation is what it appears to be, and that in betrayal and deception, lies death.

Review:
Eleven years ago, at a Tory conference, a young political hopeful named Eve Bowen enjoyed a week-long fling with Dennis Luxford, a tabloid journalist with Labour Party views. There was no love between them, and when Eve found out she was pregnant, she informed Luxford that she didn’t want him to have anything to do with the child. Luxford respected her wishes, but when he receives an anonymous letter instructing him to acknowledge his firstborn on the front page of his newspaper or she’ll be killed, his first instinct is to comply.

Eve, now a Member of Parliament and an Undersecretary of the Home Office, won’t have it, however. Her suspicion of Luxford—he’s the only other person who knows the truth about the child’s parentage, after all—and obstinate refusal to even consider that he might be innocent blind her to the real peril her daughter, Charlotte, is in, and the delay ultimately costs Charlotte her life. Inspector Lynley and Sergeant Havers are called in to investigate, and then Luxford’s son, Leo, is taken.

It’s an intricate plot, with many enjoyable twists and turns, memorable characters, and a satisfying conclusion. Among the cast are two particularly infuriating women, though, whom I wanted to take a moment to describe. The first, Eve Bowen, views all events through the veil of what they might mean to her political career. She’s convinced that Luxford is out to ruin her, experiences essentially no grief when Charlotte dies, and is just thoroughly unpleasant throughout. The other, Corrine Payne, is the mother of the local constable with whom Havers works in Wiltshire. She’s convinced that Havers and her son are having an affair, and refuses to listen to any of Barbara’s denials. Plus, she’s manipulative in a feeble, whiny sort of way. I think what gets under my skin the most about both of them is the way they absolutely refuse to listen to reason. Irksome qualities aside, they’re both well-written characters, so this does not actually constitute a complaint of any kind.

Moving on to everything I liked! Because Eve refuses to go to the police, Luxford hires Simon St. James to do some investigating on his behalf, so a substantial portion of the beginning of the novel is Simon, Helen, and Deborah looking for clues. When Lynley finds out they were involved and could have gone to the police and possibly prevented Charlotte’s death, he is livid. And then Helen tells him off for being self-righteous. Everyone’s so likeable and flawed simultaneously; it’s great.

Also great is that Havers gets a chance to shine. Although Charlotte was kidnapped in London, her body is found in a canal in Wiltshire, so while Lynley—assisted by the increasingly charismatic DC Nkata—heads up the London end, Havers is given charge of the Wiltshire investigation, and performs admirably. George does employ the tried-and-true “female detective finds herself alone in the murderer’s clutches” plot development near the end, but Havers proves far from helpless, as does Leo Luxford.

The depiction of the Luxford family is also one of my favorite things about the book. Here’s a man, the editor of a sleazy tabloid newspaper, whom one would expect to care less about the life of a daughter he never met than her actual mother, but that turns out not to be the case at all. He also faces some unpleasant truths about his motives for attempting to toughen up his son, and realizes near the end of the book the tyrannical figure he’s become in that regard. The final scene concerns this family and it seriously made me cry.

I think this may actually be my favorite Lynley mystery yet!

Filed Under: Books, Mystery Tagged With:

Take My Word for It by John Marsden

May 14, 2011 by Leave a Comment

From the back cover:
Lisa Morris could be the girl next door. She could be your cousin. She could be sitting behind you in class.

She could be you.

But Lisa, cool and beautiful Lisa, remote and private Lisa, has more going on in her life than anyone imagines.

Only her journal knows the truth about her life. Only her journal—and you.

Review:
This short little book functions as both companion piece and epilogue to Marsden’s So Much to Tell You, a (slightly better) book written as the journal of Marina, a silent, traumatized girl attending an Australian boarding school called Warrington. Take My Word for It presents the journal of Marina’s classmate, Lisa, who appears tough and cool in the eyes of others but has her own share of problems.

While I did enjoy reading Take My Word for It, I suspect it was never published in the US (I imported my copy from Australia) because it just doesn’t stand on its own very well. Lisa is a realistic character, and I have some sympathy for her struggle to accept the fact that her parents have divorced (which she believes is her fault) and that, as time goes on, the family is proceeding separately down paths that take them further and further away from the childhood home for which Lisa pines.

But the most interesting parts of this novel for me were the times we got insight into the other novel. Why, for example, did Lisa break down and cry at one point, sending Marina into a tizzy of worry and indecision? What does Marina actually look like? And, best, what happens after Marina finally speaks to her father? I guess I had expected the stories to end at the same point, but upon reflection, why would they conveniently do that? So, Marina comes back to school after seeing her dad over a break, and very gradually begins to talk to her dormmates. It’s nice, though I could’ve done without the dangled thread that Marina might leave Warrington, which Marsden never follows up on.

Like Marsden’s other protagonists, Lisa has a secret that she obliquely references while writing. In Marina’s case, we knew something had happened to her, but not what. Specifics were doled out sparingly and it was at least moderately suspenseful. In Lisa’s case, her secret is pretty obvious early on, so further attempts at cryptic hinting are just kind of annoying. On the plus side, she uses loads of interesting Australian slang, so I’ve learned several cool new words, like “dob” and “bludge.”

I sincerely doubt there’s any such thing as a lousy book by John Marsden, but this one, alas, is not my favorite.

Filed Under: Books, YA Tagged With:

Alanna: The First Adventure by Tamora Pierce

April 29, 2011 by 16 Comments

From the back cover:
“From now on I’m Alan of Trebond, the younger twin. I’ll be a knight.”

And so young Alanna of Trebond begins the journey to knighthood. Though a girl, Alanna has always craved the adventure and daring allowed only for boys; her twin brother, Thom, yearns to learn the art of magic. So one day they decide to switch places: disguised as a girl, Thom heads for the convent to learn magic; Alanna, pretending to be a boy, is on her way to the castle of King Roald to begin her training as a page.

But the road to knighthood is not an easy one. As Alanna masters the skills necessary for battle, she must also learn to control her heart and to discern her enemies from her allies.

Filled with swords and sorcery, adventure and intrigue, good and evil, Alanna’s first adventure begins—one that will lead to the fulfillment of her dreams and the magical destiny that will make her a legend in her land.

Review:
For a period of several years, I was an administrator on an online roleplaying game based on a popular series of children’s fantasy books starring a protagonist with a peculiarly shaped scar. New players to this game would frequently submit applications for characters that read very similar to this:

“Ten-year-old Alanna has red hair, purple eyes, and a twin brother. She is very smart, determined, and brave. Plus, she has a great magical gift, so great that she will one day be able to succeed in curing a deadly sickness where all other healers have failed. She also excels at becoming the best at unarmed combat and swordsmanship (albeit with quite a lot of practice), distrusting bad guys instantly, and conveniently finding ancient, powerful swords with sparkly crystals on them.”

Okay, perhaps that’s a bit better than your average newbie attempt, but there are still some striking similarities. This resulted in me snickering out loud the first time Alanna’s looks—for, yes, that paragraph is describing the protagonist of this book—were mentioned, and in rolling my eyes every time her awesomeness was further established. The action in the book covers several years, and Alanna’s plan is to divulge her secret on her eighteenth birthday, after she is made a knight. It’s certainly welcome to see a female proving herself in that environment so adeptly. I don’t mean to suggest that awesome women cannot exist, but after a while I started asking myself, “What next?”

Perhaps such a heroine appeals more to young adults, the intended audience for this book. There are some good messages here about applying oneself when the things you want to do prove challenging and not letting anyone’s idea of your limitations get in your way. It’s just that everything kind of happens too easily. Even though we know Alanna is spending hours and hours practicing, her evolution from fumbling beginner to “a matchless swordsman” doesn’t seem to take very long. The climactic battle at the end against an immortal race of evil beings living in “the black city” also seems too simple.

In the end, I liked Alanna: The First Adventure enough to continue with the rest of the quartet. It appears to be the first book Pierce published, so it’s no wonder it doesn’t match up to my favorites amongst her works.

Filed Under: Books, Fantasy, Gender Hijinks, YA Tagged With:

So Much to Tell You by John Marsden

April 5, 2011 by Leave a Comment

From the back cover:
Fourteen-year-old Marina didn’t know why she was sent away to school. Actually, that wasn’t completely true. She knew it had something to do with the progress she hadn’t made in the hospital. After all, she still didn’t talk. And Marina knew her mother didn’t want her at home.

Then Marina started writing in a journal for English class. Bit by bit the trauma of her silence began to unfold as a shocking nightmare that continued to haunt her. But Marina refused to talk about it or to feel anything. Still, before she realized it, Marina began to feel a little—to reach out to some of the girls at school, to her favorite teacher, to her family—if only she could find the words…

Review:
I have been in a serious John Marsden mood lately, and this is the first of several of his books that will be coming down the pipeline in the near future. This was his first novel, published in 1987, and it’s set in Australia.

It’s February 6, the start of a new term, and an unnamed fourteen-year-old girl has just been assigned journal-writing as homework by the English teacher at Warrington, the boarding school she’s been sent to to learn to talk again. She promises herself that she won’t write in it, but almost immediately begins saying more than she intended to.

As the girl describes life at school and chronicles her observations of her fellow boarders, we begin to pick up hints about what has happened to her. Her face is terribly scarred, for one thing, and she’s spent time in the psych ward of a hospital without much improvement. As she gradually learns to trust her classmates and makes tentative efforts at communication, the truth of what happened to her becomes more clear.

What I really like about So Much to Tell You is that it isn’t a suspense novel. One’s not (or at least I wasn’t) on the edge of one’s seat, frothing to know exactly what happened to the girl (whom we learn at the very end of the novel is called Marina). Instead, what we’re really witnessing is her beginning to heal. Scarred mentally and physically by the family she happened to be born into, with a workaholic father who snapped when his materialistic wife tried to take everything he’d worked so hard for, she begins to realize that most people are fundamentally good, and are more acquainted with feelings of loneliness and ostracism than she expected.

Gradually, Marina finds herself wanting to reach out to her classmates, toward whom she feels no bitterness. Indeed, she is able to praise them quite freely. This, in turn, helps her to reach out to her father, who more than anyone could understand what she’s been going through. Although we aren’t privy to her full recovery, the novel concludes at a point where Marina is clearly going to be okay. Still, I was sorry it was over. Happily, my copy of the companion novel—the journal of one of Marina’s classmates—arrived yesterday, so I will be devouring that promptly.

Lastly, a word of praise for narrator Kate Hosking. I listened to an unabridged recording, and Hosking’s narration really elevated the book for me. She brings Marina to life—and has a cool Australian accent to boot!—and sells Marsden’s prose, which is occasionally a bit too on-the-nose, beautifully. I would happily listen to her read anything.

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The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

April 1, 2011 by Leave a Comment

From the back cover:
Welcome to a surreal version of Great Britain, circa 1985, where time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem, militant Baconians heckle performances of Hamlet, and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense. All this is business as usual for Thursday Next, renowned Special Operative in literary detection, until someone begins kidnapping characters from works of literature. When Jane Eyre is plucked from the pages of Brontë’s novel, Thursday must track down the villain and enter the novel herself to avert a heinous act of literary homicide.

Review:
The Eyre Affair takes place in an alternate version of 1980s England wherein Winston Churchill died as a teen, Wales is a socialist republic, and technology allows for time travel but not recording security-camera footage on anything more advanced than a videotape. (Fforde can dream big but not dream medium, it seems.) Literature is a very big deal in this universe: original manuscripts are kept under armed guard, kids trade Henry Fielding cards, ardent fans of John Milton abound, and literary crime (frauds, forgeries, etc.) is rampant. To combat this last, the Literary Detectives division of the Special Operations Network was formed.

Thursday Next has worked in the London office for eight years, handling mostly routine cases. When the original manuscript of Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit is stolen and master criminal Acheron Hades suspected, Thursday is called in because she was once a student of Hades and can identify him. Through a long and winding road that involves a transfer to Swindon, a bizarre detour into vampire-fighting, and attendance at an audience-participation rendition of Richard III, Thursday pursues Acheron, eventually into the pages of Jane Eyre, where their confrontation changes the outcome of the novel (into the version we know).

My list of complaints is longer than my list of compliments. I didn’t like the alternate universe very much, nor the ubiquity of cloned dodos, nor the silly names for some characters, nor the plot about the corrupt weapons dealer attempting to extend the Crimean War (already in its 131st year). The main problem, though, was Thursday herself, who is irritatingly perfect. She’s practically revered by the general public and every man wants her. Her former beau is willing to ditch his new fiancée if Thursday will just give the word. Her new partner is instantly smitten. Acheron Hades is impressed with her and declares her his greatest adversary. Hell, even Edward freakin’ Rochester from Jane Eyre has taken a shine to her!

On the brighter side, parts of the story that seem random do come together in a reasonably clever way (even the supernatural excursion into Slayerdom was eventually relevant) and I found Acheron quite amusing. He’s gleefully, hammily evil, so his appearances are quite fun, though I wonder how Thursday was privy to what was said in meetings at which she was not present (this being a first-person narrative and all). One baffling point is that, once he makes it into Jane Eyre, Acheron sort of sits around docilely for quite some time. It’s puzzling, but by that point in the novel I was just shaking my head and saying “whatever” whenever such things occurred.

Ultimately, I am torn. You’d think that with my general meh feeling about the world and decidedly less positive view of its protagonist, I would be firmly opposed to continuing the series, but that is not, in fact, the case. I’m willing to give it one more shot, at least. Maybe it will grow on me.

Additional reviews of The Eyre Affair can be found at Triple Take.

Filed Under: Alternate History, Books, Sci-Fi, Triple Take Tagged With:

Witch Way to Murder by Shirley Damsgaard: C

March 20, 2011 by Leave a Comment

From the back cover:
Ophelia Jensen wishes she was just your typical, thirty-something librarian. Unfortunately, she’s been burdened with psychic powers—an unwanted “gift” she considers inconvenient at best and at worst downright dangerous. Her kindly old grandmother Abby, however, has no compunctions about the paranormal, being a practicing witch with unique abilities of her own.

And sometimes the otherworldly arts do come in handy—like when the arrival of a mysterious, good-looking stranger to their normally tranquil corner of Iowa seems to trigger an epidemic of catastrophes, from the theft of bomb-making materials to a murdered corpse dumped in Abby’s backyard.

Luckily Ophelia and Abby are on the case and determined to make things right. But it’ll take more than magic to get out of the boiling cauldron of lethal trouble they’re about to land themselves in.

Review:
When a friend of mine mentioned on Twitter that she was indulging in some “fluffy fiction,” I—book fiend that I am—had to inquire. This ultimately lead to me borrowing a copy of Witch Way to Murder, which I believe was described as “chick-lit paranormal mystery” or words to that effect.

The basic plot is that Ophelia, a thirty-something librarian, has moved to the small town of Summerset, Iowa to escape the grief of her best friend’s murder four years ago. She eschews human contact, partly because of her past and also because she is trying to avoid acknowledging that she has inherited her grandmother Abby’s psychic abilities. Into Ophelia’s life intrudes Rick Delaney, a persistent reporter investigating a string of chemical thefts, which leads to Ophelia’s involvement in ferreting out a major drug ring as well as solving a murder, making a friend, and finally embracing her magical abilities.

Damsgaard’s writing was a major obstacle to my enjoyment of the book. Her sentences are often choppy, and dialogue is stiff and unrealistic. Like, for example, this bit in which Abby is talking to her granddaughter, Ophelia:

I’ve lived in this town fifty-three years and realize it isn’t the same here as in the mountains where I grew up.

Who would talk like that to their own granddaughter? My grandma grew up on a farm in Wisconsin, and if she were the one speaking, she’d say “it isn’t the same here as it was back on the farm.” And then of course we would all know it was the farm in Wisconsin on which she grew up ‘cos, like, she’s our grandma.

The book is also poorly edited, featuring a “picture perfect” without the hyphen, a “base” instead of “bass,” a “there” instead of “they’re.” There are some repetitive turns of phrase, and even some repeated actions, like when Ophelia is twisting a napkin back and forth on page forty-eight and then someone else is doing the same thing on page fifty. Maybe there’s so little to do in Summerset that napkin-twisting is all the rage!

Lastly, the mystery is not really that great, though at least it held my interest, and I was able to peg the culprit from his very first appearance. That said, though, I did like Darci, Ophelia’s new friend, whose intelligence is constantly being underestimated because she’s blonde and shapely, and it was unexpected that Ophelia and Rick did not get together in the end, despite the many, many, many scenes of him pestering her (we are informed he is charming, but he mostly comes across as annoying) and her responding in spite of herself.

Ultimately, even though this book was far from great, I still ended up borrowing the second book in the series. Maybe it’ll be better than this one.

Filed Under: Books, Fantasy, Mystery

Five Children and It by E. Nesbit: B+

March 17, 2011 by Leave a Comment

From the back cover:
‘It’ is a Psammead, an ancient, ugly and irritable sand fairy the children find one day in a gravel pit. It grants them a wish a day, lasting until sunset. But they soon learn it is very hard to think of really sensible wishes, and each one gets them into unexpected difficulties. Magic, the children find, can be as awkward as it is enticing.

Review:
After reading and really enjoying The Railway Children, I decided that I definitely needed to read more by E. Nesbit. Five Children and It was my first pick, because I’ve been curious about the book for ages. Expect to see more Nebsit after this one!

Five Children and It (1902) actually has some things in common with The Railway Children (1906). It’s obvious from the titles that both feature kids, but more specifically these kids are siblings from the city who are moving into a new house in the country. Both stories are told by a companionable and amusing narrator. In the case of the latter book, the kids meet and help a lot of new people, and a warm, feel-good tone is the result. There is, alas, less of that feeling in Five Children and It, though it’s still an imaginative and entertaining tale.

Cyril, Anthea, Robert, Jane, and “the Lamb” (the nickname for the youngest, a two-year-old boy whose given name is Hilary) have just moved into their new house, and are keen to explore. One day, when their mother has gone off to tend to her ailing mother, their wanderings take them to a nearby gravel pit, where they dig and find a strange creature called a psammead, or sand-fairy. The psammead agrees to grant the children one wish per day, the results of which will disappear at sunset, and the majority of the book is made up of their wishes and the usually unpleasant repercussions thereof.

Nothing ever seems to turn out like they hope. When they wish for money, it comes in a form unrecognizable and unaccepted by local merchants. When they wish for wings, they fail to account for how hungry the exertion of flying will make them, and end up stranded on a rooftop after stealing someone else’s dinner. When they wish they lived in a castle, it’s ill-defended and in the midst of a siege. Each time, they attempt to learn from what went wrong and get the best from their next wish, but by the time their mother returns home they’re quite ready to quit with the wishing altogether. If I had to pick a theme for the book, I’d say it’s “be content with your lot.”

What’s really nice about the story is that the kids aren’t idealized at all. In fact, Nesbit says up front that they can be tiresome, and they’re shown being disagreeable often enough. They’re also, however, shown being clever and level-headed, particularly Anthea, the oldest girl. It takes a while for them to emerge as individual characters, though, and I’m still not really sure how to describe Jane, the youngest girl. This is another aspect in which The Railway Children is the superior book, since each of those characters is memorable and distinct. I do think, though, that Anthea and Railway‘s Roberta would like each other very much. In fact, now I kind of want to read fanfic in which they hang out and are sensible together.

In the end, I definitely enjoyed Five Children and It and look forward to reading its two sequels, but it doesn’t supplant The Railway Children as my favorite Nesbit so far.

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