The Gates by John Connolly

John Connolly is best known for writing thrillers, though he first caught my attention with his short story collection, Nocturnes, and his first book for younger readers, The Book of Lost Things. The Gates is Connolly's second venture into younger-person friendly fare, and it's got a lot going for it - demons, Satanic rituals, a Large Hadron Collider, and a small, clever dachshund named Boswell. Unfortunately, The Gates also suffers from something that I'm not sure many people would actually mind - the voice of an author who seems to have read Terry Pratchett extensively and wishes to do the same thing. More on that in a moment....

The Gates is the story of young Samuel Johnson, an endearingly odd boy who tries to show initiative by trick-or-treating three days early, and who brings a pin to show-and-tell under the auspices that one cannot prove that there aren't angles dancing on its head. Samuel is a winning protagonist, and his constant companion, Boswell, is one of the most expressive non-talking dogs I've ever had the pleasure to read. Unfortunately, Samuel's adventure, which begins when he sees his neighbor's satanic ritual and it's unfortunate results (they open a portal to the eponymous gates of hell), is regularly interrupted by clever footnotes and charmingly informative, though plot-killing chapters on physics, black holes, and other assorted items of a scientific nature. Granted, a Large Hadron Collider helps open the gates of hell, so a little background information is useful. The information is also presented in a super-charming way, but it's that very charm that distracts the reader from the actual goings-on of the plot.

The Charm (tm) that pervades The Gates is one of those qualities that is fantastically effective in the proper dosage. Terry Pratchett, more often than not, manages to deploy a similar kind of charm to good effect in his Discworld series (though, sometimes, he too hops over the charm-line into the realm of the self-conscious and precious). Connolly slaps Charm (tm) all over everything, cluttering up his prose and wearing the reader down so that it's hard to appreciate it when it's appropriate.

Disclosure: Connolly's particular brand of charm involves the frequent use of something which is an irrational pet peeve of mine. I hate it when an author does this: "She was about to jump off the cliff but, well, she didn't." I really hate that well. Connolly uses it, well, a lot. It might be okay in speech (although I don't like it much there either), but dialogue and narration are not speech, they are the written representation of speech. As such, they leave no room for um's, huh's well's and the like - especially not when used with compulsive frequency. It's just not, well, cute.

That said, The Gates was good fun, and I honestly liked Samuel Johnson. He's a believable boy, despite his carefully chosen idiosyncrasies, and for that alone I think The Gates is worth reading. I would just consider borrowing it from the library instead of, well, paying full price for the hardcover :-)

Solstice Wood by Patricia A. McKillip

This is going to be fairly brief under the auspices of "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."

Let's just say that Solstice Wood is not Patricia A. McKillip's best work. McKillip usually writes highly literate fantasy in a vaguely medieval period, such as Alphabet of Thorn. Quite often, there will be well-placed illusions to Celtic myths and traditional fairy tales, as in Winter Rose. Solstice Wood, unfortunately, is neither terribly literate, nor does it feature anything well-placed. It felt like a hodge-podge of Alice Hoffman's Practical Magic, any number of insipid novels prominently featuring knitting or quilting (and no, I'm a knitter so I'm not knocking fiber arts), and teen fantasy centered on how much someone wants to be a witch/fairy/changeling.

The other problem is simply one of structure. The structure is a hodge-podge too. Though the protagonist is meant to be an oddly unlikable young woman named Sylvia, the story is told in the first-person serial, meaning that everyone, from Sylvia's equally un-likable grandmother to a fairy changeling gets a chapter. Sylvia only gets a small handful of chapters in which to establish her role as the protagonist. The result is that the narrative, which is slender at best, has no core. Pair this with the absolute triteness of the conflict and ending, and you've got a book that it's pretty hard to care about.

And now, I think I'll just leave it at that and say that, in the spirit of niceness, I don't have anything more to say.

A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray

I confess that I actually finished A Great and Terrible Beauty, the first book in Libba Bray's trilogy about her vision-having heroine, Gemma Doyle, about a month ago, but between one thing and another (mostly a series of colds and starting my Masters in library science), I've only just been able to sit down and write anything about it. It is for this reason that my thoughts are going to be pretty general on this one, but I figure that whatever impressions have stayed with me after a month are the ones that are most important anyway.

Impression One: Use of the first person present progressive tense in a novel gets tiresome. While many would argue that sentences like, "I am running down an alley, sobbing," put the reader directly into the action, I would argue that being constantly told that "I am doing this," and "I am doing that," gets distracting - not critically so, but enough that I had to fight the impulse to put the book down in the first couple of chapters.

Impression Two: Libba Bray definitely knew her material. A Great and Terrible Beauty reads like part gothic romance, part Victorian pulp in the tradition of H. Ryder Haggard's She, and Bram Stoker's Lair of the White Worm - there's lots of occult danger and Eastern 'otherness' (both sexy and threatening to a respectable, young Englishwoman), lots of lurid drama. All in all, it's pretty fun.

Impression Three: Libba Bray also really knows young women. Gemma Doyle is a good heroine, as far as teen-age heroines in historical fiction go - she's active, she has agency, she's flawed but passionate. There's a fair amount of conflict and fight in her, which would make her easy for a modern teen to relate to. Gemma's friends are also interesting - the drab, unattractive Ann (who is a cutter, due in large part to her implied depression and alienation), the gorgeous, ornamental Pippa, who just wants to be loved, and Felicity, who, of the four, has the most force of personality and complexity. They're an interesting mix of types and not one that comes together easily (there's a great deal of initial antagonism). Though I found the progression of their friendship to be a little forced, it was also believable in that there are girls for whom dislike is an automatic precursor to respect. The four of them together make a pretty interesting dynamic.

Overall, A Great and Terrible Beauty is quality YA - fun, dark, a little edgy and sexy in a historical way. The thing I liked most about it however, was the fact that all four of the girls, Gemma, Pippa, Ann, and especially Felicity, want autonomy - they want personal power, they want to valued for themselves, they want to be heard and, in their own way, they fight for that privilege in a Victorian world that valued silence in its women and girls. For that alone, A Great and Terrible Beauty is worth reading, though I'm not quite tempted to read on in the trilogy.

Soul Music by Terry Pratchett

I am not a fanatic fan of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. I do, however, enjoy the books, albeit some more than others. Hogfather, for example, is pretty wonderful in my opinion. Some of the others (usually ones that don't feature Death, Susan or Lord Vetinari, but that's just me) can get a little tiresome as they seem to rely more on unrelenting cleverness than actual plot. Soul Music falls somewhere in between.

Soul Music is the story of how rock n' roll came to Discworld and got everyone all shook up. It's also the story of Susan's first time stepping into her grandfather's professional shoes (her grandfather being the anthropomorphic personification of Death). Lots and lots of promise there, and Soul Music definitely doesn't fail to amuse. Rock n' roll, called Music with Rocks In for Discworld purposes because the drums are a set of rocks banged on by a troll, literally infects the residents of Ankh-Morpork from the Unseen University down. Suddenly seventy year old wizards are acting like teen-agers and fashioning robes out of studded leather, and middle-aged housekeepers are tossing their undergarments at the lead singer of The Band.

The lead singer is the connection between the Susan plot and the music plot, and it's a connection that I feel wasn't taken full advantage of. The singer, a young druid named Imp y Celyn, forms a band with a troll and a dwarf, accidentally gets his hands on a magically electric guitar, changes his name to Buddy, and unleashes Music with Rocks In on the unsuspecting populace. Unfortuantely, Buddy was supposed to have died, (enter Susan doing her grandad's job), but the music reanimates him. Her heart then goes "twang" and she spends the rest of the book trying to save him from the music. I think. It gets a little muddy in there. And that's the main problem.

Pratchett tosses lots of fun stuff at the reader, but ultimately, when it comes time to wrap everything up, it all feels rather messy and contrived. In the end, it does all come together, but it does so in a bit of a tangle, so while Soul Music is definitely a fun little ride, it leaves you in a less than satisfying place. I wouldn't go so far as to not recommend it to someone looking for a little light fun, but if you want an ending that satisfies, I might look somewhere else.

The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart

The Mysterious Benedict Society is the first book of what is becoming a series of New York Times Bestsellers. It is a longish "young person's" novel about four extraordinary misfits who take on evil and challenge themselves in the process. It's a charming book in some ways, and Trenton Lee Stewart certainly knows how to work the conventions of children's chapter books (misfit find other misfits to fit in with, children solving problems no adult can, orphans finding some form of family etc) . That said, I was disappointed in the end. Even though The Mysterious Benedict Society does pretty much everything right, the results are pretty ho hum.

The real problem for me, is that while Stewart's story is technically good, it lacks soul, or more specifically, it lacks an understanding of a child's soul. This is an intangible quality that I don't think an author can learn. Take, for example, A Wrinkle in Time, a warhorse in children's literature. Madeleine L'Engle tells a very sophisticated story from the perspective of a cranky, misfit girl named Meg. Meg is the older sister of an extraordinary boy named Charles Wallace (who has more perspective at six than most people have at sixty). L'Engle's Meg never sounds like an adult's idea of a cranky, misfit girl, just as Charles Wallace never sounds like an adult's idea of a six year old savant. They sound like real people, not adult constructions. All of Stewart's extraordinary kids - from Reynie Muldoon, the moral compass and natural leader, to George "Sticky" Washington, the genius beset by nervous ticks - feel like an adult's "Very Clever" conception of very clever kids. There's a fug of grown-upness over the whole thing and it just doesn't work.

The other problem with the story, is that there's a huge bloody build-up to what should be a huge bloody show-down, but the final resolution happens off-screen, AND it's not even the kids who achieve it. An adult, the eponymous Mr. Benedict, mysteriously dismantles the Evil Machine of Doom (tm). This results in an Ok-so-I've-read-and-read-and-read-and-THAT's-the-resolution?!? feeling in the reader. Then we scoot through the denouement, and because of some serious authorial strong-arming, everyone ends up happy. Deux ex Machina is splashed all over this thing. It's as if Stewart got his characters right into the thick of the action, and didn't know what to do next - there's too much machination, and too little imagination to make the thing take off.

All in all, The Mysterious Benedict Society is a great idea, and there is a lot in it that works - obviously, people like it as it's selling like a Bestseller. Still, it missed the boat for me. There are a lot of children's books out there that work (anything by Roald Dahl, Coraline, and The Phantom Tollbooth to name a few), and they work because they are genuine things - stories that appeal to the instinctual fears and fascinations of children. It's not enough to be clever, you have to be genuine, and that's where The Mysterious Benedict Society, which is ever-so-clever failed.

The Magician's Elephant by Kate DiCamillo

I read and finished The Magician's Elephant on flight to Texas for Thanksgiving. It is a lovely little thing. Kate DiCamillo, who wrote the Newbury Award winning, The Tale of Despereux, has a wonderful way with magical realism in children's literature. The Magician's Elephant doesn't read as fantasy, but it does have a whimsical sense of the fabulous which makes you feel like your reading a story much older than it is.

The story primarily concerns a boy whose greatest wish is to know if the sister he lost as an infant is still alive. A fortune-teller reveals that she is, and that if the boy wishes to find her, he must "follow the elephant." Being that the boy lives in a fictional northern-European city, he does not hold out much hope of ever seeing an elephant, let alone of finding one to follow. But then a magician inexplicably conjures an elephant in place of a bouquet, and the boy follows it to his heart.

While the boy, Peter Augustus Duchene, is very much the protagonist, DiCamillo takes full advantage of her omniscient narrator by also presenting the perspectives of the lost sister, the magician (who is imprisoned after the elephant falls on a noblewoman), a kind police inspector, and even the elephant herself. She does so fluidly - the changes in perspective feel very natural to the narrative - and in doing so, allows this simple story to take on a universality that it would otherwise lack.

The Magician's Elephant is not an overly dynamic book (it was made for candles and snowy evenings), but it is absolutely lovely, full of warm shadows and inevitable magic. My only complaint is that it's very satisfying ending arrived too soon.

The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin

I'm on a bit of a YA kick right now. Maybe it's just a perverse rebellion against the Twilight series, but I feel like there's so much excellent fiction out there for young people, and much of it is getting overshadowed by the juggernaut that is vampire romance.

Strictly speaking, The Westing Game isn't really YA lit. It's a "chapter book for young readers, ages 8 -12," but much like The Graveyard Book and Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, The Westing Game more than holds up to adult scrutiny. I remember reading it for the first time when I was about twelve and absolutely loving it, but not being able to fully follow the intricate, quick-moving plot. This time around, I not only loved it for it's quirky characters and perfect comic timing, but I also found myself completely sucked into the mystery at its heart. Seriously, I stayed up late last night because I didn't remember the final solution and I really had to know. Good stuff.

The basic premise is a kind of Who-Done-It. A paper-mogul named Sam Westing is found "dead in bed." In his will, he calls together 16 heirs to play "the Westing game." The heirs are an unlikely group which includes a 65 year old delivery boy, a religious fanatic, a 12 year old financial wizard and narcissistic housewife. They are paired with the perfect person, as one of the heirs (a 15 year old ornithologist with a degenerative disorder) notes. They each receive a set of clues and the directive to find out which of them stole Sam Westing's life. The winning pair then receives the bulk of Westing's multi-million dollar estate. But most of the heirs are not what they seem (there's a bomber, a thief, a bookie, and Sam Westing himself hiding in the mix) and the goal is to find out who is who before it's too late.

Ellen Raskin won the Newbury Award for The Westing Game in 1979, and it's a masterpiece of a mystery. But what really sets it apart, above and beyond the intricate plotting and accessible voice, is that each character undergoes some sort of transformation over the course of the book. This is quite a thing to pull off, but Raskin's hand is light, and her control of the material complete. Each of the heirs gets his or her arc without detracting from the whole - in fact, that quality of personal growth is what makes them work as a group.

The Westing Game is great fun and compulsively readable, but there's much more going on. For a literary mystery with humor and substance, I'm not sure that it can be beat - who cares if you have to go to the kid's section of the library to find it.

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

And next on the Neil Gaiman line-up: The Graveyard Book. I promise I'll write about something by another author next, but I was on a roll, and I'm really glad I was - The Graveyard Book is, for my money, Neil Gaiman's best work. Hands down. I've found that many excellent, prolific authors have one story or one book that transcends everything else they've written (and sometimes everything else they will ever write). A.S. Byatt has Possession, Margaret Atwood has The Blind Assassin, Iain M. Banks has Use of Weapons and Neil Gaiman has The Graveyard Book.

The Graveyard Book is the coming of age story of a mortal boy named Nobody Owens, who is raised by the kind spirits of a graveyard. The book begins chillingly with the murder of the boy's family, then coasts into charming episodic chapters about his life from the age of two to roughly fifteen. The episodes are by turns insightful and quirky and sometimes quite dark. Death is a regular presence in the book, but that isn't the source of the darkness. The darkness comes from the perils of growing up, and from the shadow cast by the man who killed Nobody Owens' family, a man called Jack who, years later, is still trying to finish the job.

Neil Gaiman as said that Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book served inspiration, and Kipling's influence is definitely evident in The Graveyard Book's structure and themes - especially in its themes. Belonging, isolation and the bittersweetness of growing up are foundational to both books, and the episodic pacing keeps the plot moving so that these themes can be touched on without beating an already well-beaten dead horse.

This is really wonderful book and a really scattershot post. Every time I settle into addressing one aspect of the book, I get pulled in another direction, it's just so pitch-perfect, so thoughtful and so bittersweet. This is Neil Gaiman's perfect book. I hope it gets read widely and voraciously because it deserves every award it could get.

Coraline by Neil Gaiman

Coraline is wonderful. I'm not sure if it's an exception to the rule or the start of a trend, but I think that it is by far Neil Gaiman's best work. The reviewer at Locus Magazine was quoted as saying that "Coraline may be Gaiman's most disciplined and fully controlled novel to date," and it is this discipline and control that makes Coraline stand out.

To begin with, it's starts with a wonderful idea - that on the other side of a hidden door, a girl finds an "other" world, where her other mother and other father live and where everything is much more interesting. It's a lovely place. Except for the shiny, black buttons that everyone there has instead of eyes. Coraline is immediately wary, and she is right to be so. But we don't have to wait for her to go through the door for things to get strange - it's creepy right out of the gate. Odd things happen, things that when taken out of context mean nothing. But put them in context, and an air of foreboding quickly settles over Coraline's new house.

I really appreciated the tightness and lucidity of the story - especially because it would have been a cinch to let the material run away with itself (Gaiman was writing on very fertile ground). I loved Coraline's creepiness - as an adult, I was never scared, but I would have been as a kid, and I have to admit to a certain amount of edginess every now and then, even as an adult. But the thing I loved most about Coraline was Coraline herself. She's a wonderful, modern, no-fuss girl, very intelligent and very bored. And she's no easy mark for the evil that intrudes upon her world. Unlike her counterpart in the film adaptation (which was nowhere near as good as the book), the literary Coraline is never seduced by the "other" world, as most children would be. She is wise and brave in the face of frightening things, she wins through cleverness twice, and in a lovely, subtle stroke at the end, she learns not to be bored in the mundane world.

Coraline is everything that it could be, and that's saying quite a lot. Neil Gaiman recently won the Newbury Award for his newest book for young readers, The Graveyard Book. Before reading Coraline, I have to admit I was a little doubtful, but based on the strength of the book I just finished, I'm really looking forward to reading whatever Gaiman writes next.

Postscript: I just started The Graveyard Book (I'm on a roll), and I have to say that it's really wonderful so far. :-)

The Wolves in the Walls by Neil Gaiman

The Wolves in the Walls is Neil Gaiman's second picture book, and it's full of all the things that people read Neil Gaiman for - it's darkly imaginative, charming and a little bit unsettling in an oddly breezy way. It's wonderfully illustrated in a sort of collage / mixed media form by Dave McKean, whose work effectively reflects the aesthetic of Neil Gaiman's prose. The first time I read The Wolves in the Walls, I gobbled it up and smiled. The second time however, when I started to really look at it, I was disappointed. This is not because Gaiman's story did not hold up - it did. In fact, the second reading impressed me insofar as Gaiman's ability to tap into the darker corners of childhood fear. What disappointed me, in the end, was the execution. Let me explain.

The Wolves in the Walls is loooong by picture book standards - over 2000 words, when the average is about 700. This is not necessarily a problem if the writing is tight, clear and efficient. If the writing isn't tight, clear and efficient, the length of the book works against you, so that by the end of it, the reader has ended up having a pretty muddy read. It isn't enough that the prose be tight and clear - the story itself can't have any fat, no areas or episodes or moments that don't drive the narrative forward or in some way feed the rhythm of the book. This is where The Wolves in the Walls disappoints.

The basic concept - that a little girl named Lucy hears wolves in the walls and her family doesn't believe her - is awesome, especially because it turns out that Lucy's right. The beginning starts out slowly, but that's not a bad thing as it built up a sort of mild, creepy suspense. But when the slowness continues through the entire of the story it doesn't work so well - there's little sense of disaster when the wolves do come out of the walls, and little sense of climax when the family reclaims their house. The high stakes and suspense are all muffled under cluttered prose and Lucy's overly talkative family. One severe edit would have done the trick, but without it, The Wolves in the Walls is only half of what it could have been.

I find this with a lot of Neil Gaiman's work. He's brilliant and I love the way his brain works and so desperately want to whole-heartedly gobble up everything he writes, but he's undisciplined. The only reason The Wolves in the Walls got published without the edit it deserved is because Neil Gaiman's name would make it sell. If his craft were as developed as his conceptions, he would be amazing, but it rarely is, so I always end up feeling teased by the book's potential. And that's how I feel about The Wolves in the Walls - it's so damn close I could smell the smoke, but no cigar in the end. :(