While Mal and her three sidekicks have been having fun in the happy land of Auradon, the rest of the reprobates on the Isle of the Lost have been reseWhile Mal and her three sidekicks have been having fun in the happy land of Auradon, the rest of the reprobates on the Isle of the Lost have been resenting them. None more so than Uma, daughter of Ursula the Sea Witch. When Uma and Mal were little, they were best friends. But one day, their childish pranks on each other went a little too far and neither girl was able to forgive the other. Since then, they've kept out of each other's way--and recently Mal's life took a turn involving a nice new school and a handsome prince.
Uma, meanwhile, has been stuck in her own ramshackle neighborhood, helping her mother run a seafood shack. (Raising the question, who would buy food from Ursula?). Uma's only allies are Harry, Captain Hook's swaggering son, and Gil, a son of Gaston who's too dumb to live even by Disney Channel standards.
When a disturbance occurs in the kingdom under the sea, Uma senses it and pulls together a pirate crew to find her mom's old magic shell necklace and generally wreak havoc. It's up to Mal and her posse to stop Uma's plan...
Content Advisory Violence: Little Uma and Mal play pranks on each other and everyone else, some of which resort in very minor peril. The young pirates are menaced by dancing skeletons at one point, but the combat between the two groups doesn't even result in any injuries. Why.
Sex: Uma grudgingly offers to make Harry first mate and he replies "First date if you're lucky." I'm kind of confused by the content standards of these books. I figured that we never see Ben and Mal kiss because the Disney higher-ups consider it too risque for a middle-grade book (let's hope they never find out about Artemis Fowl: The Time Paradox), yet this line is allowed to stay in.
Language: Nada.
Substance Abuse: Nothing.
Nightmare Fuel: I suppose very young children might find the skeletons frightening, although all they do is move around in a vaguely menacing way. Anyone over the age of eight is probably just wondering what Ursula looks like in this universe, and what poor human man wound up fathering Uma.
Politics and Religion: At one point, Mal is forced to work her magic and utters a spell which neither makes sense nor even rhymes. That's it.
Conclusions on This Book This series should probably have been a trilogy rather than a quartet, with the second installment combining elements of this book and Return to the Isle. As is, this book is largely a retread of the second one, with the main characters drawn back to the Isle to deal with an old frenemy of Mal's who wants to cause chaos on the mainland.
Uma's a much stronger character than Maddy from Return, not that that's a high bar to clear. Harry has potential--under all that swagger and guyliner, he's so insecure he wears a hook like his dad's even though he has both hands. Is the book, or the movie that follows it, remotely interested in exploring either of them? Hahaha, of course not.
There's one moment that's actually kind of insightful. Ben has to settle a dispute between two bordering city states because the olive trees in the one city keep shedding over the barrier wall into their neighbors' yards. What a petty reason to waste the high king's time! But it makes sense because they've exiled all the real criminals. Silly annoyances like this are all they've got left to complain about.
I continue to be amazed at how a franchise with no real story became so popular. Disney has all these fairytales, legends, myths, nineteenth-century literary adaptations, and their own creations together in one place. The resulting series was never going to be Lord of the Rings, but it could have still provided memorable characters, heartfelt messages, and all manner of adventures. In fact, that's what I thought I was getting with the first book.
But this is not an adventure series. It's a series about nothing, an increasingly common phenomena. These franchises set up a story that seems fun, but then become paralyzed with fear of the fandom. Killing off a character might enrage that character's fans, pairing off two given characters might infuriate the people who shipped them with others, and a big twist will upset people who didn't see it coming even if it was hidden in plain sight.
Writers used to accept that and write what they wanted anyway. There are people who liked the first Star Wars who bailed after "Luke, I am your father." After M*A*S*H(view spoiler)[killed off Henry Blake, the producers were inundated with annoyed viewer responses, including one claiming that the fictional character had been found alive in a raft on a lake in Texas (hide spoiler)]. The majority of viewers stayed with these franchises. Many even liked the stories better now that the stakes were higher.
But nowadays it seems that writers are terrified of getting these reactions, so they produce story-less content where the characters just kind of hang out until the end. Fights end in draws, established pairings are locked together while single characters aren't allowed to pick up a love interest, action scenes have no stakes, redemption arcs are mandated for some characters and forbidden to others, the rules governing the story's universe change on a dime, and any death or major revelation will be undone either immediately or in the next installment. A lot of stories are now confined to a single setting, like a castle or a school, so even the travel element of an adventure story has been abandoned. Everything immediately reverts to the status quo, which is fine if you're writing a comic book, comic strip, sitcom or soap opera. But any other form of story really ought to have a point--a beginning, a middle, an end, and a takeaway.
I don't understand why the Descendants universe contains so many interesting possibilities and is so determined not to use any of them. I get that TV movies don't have the massive budget of theatrical releases--and the CGI on even big movies is starting to look spotty. But strong character development and resonant themes can make a great story even with the fakest sets and effects. And those budget constraints don't apply to books. Like I said, this series was always going to be goofy, but it could have been excellent in its goofiness. Disney has more than enough resources to achieve that. I don't know why they would chose not to.
None of these problems are the fault of Melissa de la Cruz, who writes these books. She tries her best to render the material readable, but she could probably accomplish a lot more if the publishers didn't have such a stranglehold on the writing process. ...more
Rose and her younger sister, Snow, grew up in a splendid mansion. There they had a garden, a vast library, a statue gallery - and most importantly, twRose and her younger sister, Snow, grew up in a splendid mansion. There they had a garden, a vast library, a statue gallery - and most importantly, two parents who loved them.
That's how they lived until their architect father took a journey into the woods, from which he never returned. After a year, he was presumed dead. Their mother, a noble cut off from her family for marrying an untitled man, no longer had the means to stay in that wondrous house. So now she, her daughters, and the family cat live in a drafty cottage, right on the edge of the wood that took her husband.
Rose has accepted her father's death but wants to know why it happened. Snow won't even acknowledge the likely truth and watches for his return. Their quest for answers will lead them into the woods, where friends, enemies, and mysteries wait...
Content Advisory Nothing. This book contains nothing inappropriate for the target audience. It's fine for independent readers ages 8 and up. Younger kids can enjoy it as a family read-aloud.
Conclusions Snow and Rose is a charming retelling of the Grimms' "Snow White and Rose Red." While most novelizations of this story age up the girls, this one keeps them as children, because the Bear is (view spoiler)[actually their father, not a prince seeking a wife. (hide spoiler)] I love fairytale romances, but family also makes a good emotional core for a story. Considering this is a middle-grade book, family is a better theme anyway.
Other than that rather noticeable but justified change, the book does an excellent job capturing the mood of the Grimm Brothers. The prose does a fine job evoking the eerie, secretive darkness of the wood, and the contrasting coziness of the family's cottage. Martin's illustrations compliment the text perfectly.
The girls, their mom, their cat, their friend Ivo, and the Bear are all pretty likeable and lively. Quiet, mature-beyond-her-years Rose was my favorite of the group.
The one thing that bugged me a bit was how all the nice characters (except Ivo's somewhat Gaston-ish uncle) have an aversion to eating meat, or even to killing dangerous animals who were clearly trying to kill them. (Granted, many of those ferocious beasts turned out to be enchanted humans, but still).
I remember being a bit shocked as a child by all the wild critters who got shot over the course of the Little House books, but the books themselves taught me that the characters' fears regarding those animals were entirely understandable, even if occasionally misinformed. Those who lived in wild regions like that had to fight for survival. Fretting over the ethics of killing and/or eating animals seemed anachronistic and jarred me out of the story whenever it happened. Luckily it was only brought up two or three times.
Overall, this is a fine middle-grade book that even younger kids will enjoy listening to. A great choice for a kid who wants a fantasy adventure but isn't quite ready to tackle the Chronicles of Narnia or The Hobbit. Recommended, especially for fans of the Little House series, A Little Princess, and Frozen. ...more
Sophie Foster hit her head when she was five years old, and ever since, she's been able to hear other people's thoughts. She also has academic skills Sophie Foster hit her head when she was five years old, and ever since, she's been able to hear other people's thoughts. She also has academic skills far beyond her years - she's twelve now, already in twelfth grade and with an invitation to attend Yale next year.
Being a child prodigy has made Sophie's life miserable. She doesn't understand her gifts and can't put them to a useful purpose. Her older classmates resent her. And the constant feed of others' thoughts threaten to drive her mad.
In the course of one day, everything changes. On a field trip, Sophie meets an older boy named Fitz, who knows who she is and claims to have the same abilities she does. At first, Sophie is afraid of Fitz, not only because he knows all about her, but because he's the first person she's ever met whose thoughts she can't hear.
Fitz and his strange revelations are only the tip of the iceberg. Sophie soon finds herself in a world of elves, magic, lost cities, and conspiracies. And she is given no choice but to leave her adoptive family behind...
Content Advisory Violence: The sort of perilous mayhem that goes with this genre. No gore, and not too many action scenes either. The characters often discuss what appears to be a rash of arsons.
Sex: No actual sexual content, although I find it interesting that both boys vying for Sophie's attentions are three years older than her. (Dex and Jensi are her age, but neither of them has a shot, so they don't count). If she were sixteen and they were nineteen, this wouldn't be an issue for me, but she's twelve and Keefe and Fitz are fifteen. One would think that they're a lot further into puberty than she is, and one would also think that she's much more innocent than they are. Maybe I'm overthinking this.
Language: Nothing.
Substance Abuse: Nothing.
Nightmare Fuel: Two preteen children are kidnapped, sedated, and threatened with death. One kid is also psychologically tortured to prevent her from using her telepathy to get help.
Politics and Religion: The elves are all vegetarians and eat various plant-based glops that manage to taste good and provide protein. I'm okay with that, but they have TRAINED THE DINOSAURS AND SABER-TOOTH TIGERS IN THE MAGICAL NATURE PRESERVE TO BE VEGETARIANS TOO. WHY.
Conclusions Keeper of the Lost Cities has an entertaining premise. It starts out iffy, wanders aimlessly for several hundred pages, and pulls it all together rather nicely in the last third. It's not a bad book in its own right, and most of its flaws are flaws in the MG/YA fantasy genre as a whole these days.
I find it rather interesting that the blurb on my library's copy mentioned Sophie's telepathy and the safe-haven school she winds up attending, but says nothing about elves.
Poor elves. The elves in Tolkien seem flawless, but they all struggle with pride. And the elves are supporting characters in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, not the leads. Hobbits, Dwarves, and the Men of Gondor and Rohan have more relatable weaknesses, and therefore make better protagonists.
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In recent times, though, the elves (and their close cousins the fae folk) are becoming increasingly both more elitist and more central to the story. In this series, every main character is an elf - each one of them has supernatural abilities, is ridiculously good-looking (except for Stina and Jensi's dorky friends, who will all probably grow up nicely), and both so enlightened and so powerful that they have not only preserved dinosaurs and saber-tooth tigers, they have trained those animals to be vegetarians. They can even control the weather of their lost cities through magic. The kids squabble believably, but the rest of their lives and environments are so perfect that it's nigh-impossible to relate to them.
Messenger doesn't include any normal people with no powers in this story--except for Sophie's adoptive family, whom I hope show up again in the later books because they were really wronged by everyone in this volume. The closest we get to ordinary in the main cast is Dex, whose family is looked down upon because his parents weren't "genetically compatible." (The fact that the elves try to control who marries whom based on genes is downright dystopic, but the book only treats it as an afterthought. I also want to know why these magical beings put any stock in human science, since their abilities can work around it anyway).
The book can't seem to pick a lane between sci-fi and fantasy. The elves fret about genes and do DNA tests, but they also catch starlight in bottles. At one point, when Sophie mentions Einstein and the Theory of Relativity, Fitz claims to have never heard of Einstein and blithely concludes that the greatest mind of the twentieth century "didn't know what he was talking about."
[image] *I know I used this GIF in the updates, but it's too good to only use once*
Also, despite having cloistered themselves away from humanity for millennia, all but the very oldest elves use our slang and terminology. The kids wear preppy school uniforms, store their supplies in lockers, and panic as the midterms approach. If they've had no contact with humans since the pyramids were built (which they helped with, of course, because humans can't take credit for anything good in this fictional universe), then how are they aware of modern education? And since they're better than us in every way, why would they emulate our dumb system instead of coming up with a better one?
Sophie is more of a wish-fulfillment character than a relatable one. Her powers multiply exponentially as the story goes on. She's also kind enough to befriend nearly everyone at school, and pretty enough to have two handsome older boys flirting with her, while at least three dweeby younger boys salivate in vain from a distance. Her elvish foster family owns a nature reserve full of friendly prehistoric and magical critters.
The moments when Sophie comes alive are when she actually acts like a twelve-year-old girl whose world was just upended - when she's tearful, angry, mistrustful, and demanding answers. I really felt for her in those moments, and I wish that Messenger could have found some way to keep Sophie a wee bit grounded for the rest of the story.
Most of the other characters are likeable enough - at least, none of them made me want to throw the book. Fitz is very much the Tall, Dark, Handsome, and Moody type, while Keefe is a sunny, golden-haired charmer. As a team, they remind me of Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley. They seem very idealized, though, and I know some of that comes from Sophie's biased view of them. But real fifteen-year-old boys would probably be more prone to boorishness.
It's also a bit weird that they seem more interested in Sophie than the girls in their own grade. Wouldn't they vacillate between flirting with her and treating her like an annoying little kid? When I was in middle school, that was pretty much how the nice older boys treated me.
That said, the deep telepathic bond that Fitz and Sophie have is fascinating, and the scene where (view spoiler)[she reaches out to him through her mind and he tells her in a heartbroken voice that he attended her funeral (hide spoiler)] was moving and effective. I hope there's a bit more of that in the sequels.
Dex at least acts something like a real kid his age, but all he does is act possessive of Sophie (you don't have a chance, dude) and whine about the rich people. It's painfully obvious why he hates Fitz and Keefe so much. I have a feeling his dislike of Biana will be revealed as quite the opposite, although I doubt he'll get her to fall for him either because Keefe exists. So while his emotions are believable, Dex is hard to like, and I didn't really find him that funny.
Biana is fairly interesting, quiet and seemingly aloof but really not bad at all once you get to know her. Marella didn't do much of anything. Stina is only there to be a cartoon bully and the token homely kid, much like Clarisse in The Lightning Thief. Of course, Clarisse actually got some development in the later Percy Jackson books, so maybe Stina will likewise prove a worthwhile addition to the cast.
Alden is a very likeable, trustworthy adult character, which is rare in this genre and much appreciated. I liked Grady and Edaline, too, but found their secret-keeping unnecessary and infuriating. No wonder Sophie got angry at them!
In the unintentional hilarity department, I couldn't help but notice that Sophie and Fitz: - have a telepathic bond of unprecedented strength that can reach across thousands of miles
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- got in a telekinesis fight where they accidentally broke something and at least one of them was rendered unconscious
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- early on, he told her not to be afraid and only succeeded in making her more afraid
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- she passes out and he bridal-carries her, while her male best friend runs around being unhelpful
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Was someone at Disney Lucasfilm cribbing from this for the Star Wars sequels? If so, why? On a related note, I sincerely hope that Fitz doesn't murder any family members, nor die himself. This is not the sort of series where such things usually happen, but you can't be too sure these days.
Despite the goofiness of the book, it's smoothly written with a fantastic pace, and the characters are likeable enough that I want to see where the journey takes them. ...more
”Who ever heard of a witch who really died? You can always get them back.” ~a Narnian hag, Prince Caspian
A teenaged resident of South Wood, Wildwood, d
”Who ever heard of a witch who really died? You can always get them back.” ~a Narnian hag, Prince Caspian
A teenaged resident of South Wood, Wildwood, decides to horse around with parlor necromancy one night and inadvertently summons a spirit far beyond her powers. At first young Zita thinks she’s summoned a primordial being from the deep past, but the true identity of the spirit is tied to the bloody recent history of Wildwood. Zita is no great hero. Her sole claim to fame till now is having marched in the South Wood parade as the May Queen.
She also has to deal with the mysterious new cult that her father just joined, the Synod of the Blighted Tree, whose acolytes all wear blank masks, and who seem to be planning for something…
Across the magical divide in Portland, Prue McKeel promises her parents that she will at least aim to come home safe after saving the Wood. Then she and Esben Clampett, the clockmaker bear with hooks for hands, head back into the forest as a shadow falls on it. Prue has been told that she has to bring Prince Alexei back to life or the whole Wood will collapse.
In the hazy land between the Wildwood and Portland, the Industrial Wastes, the Unadoptable escapees of Joffrey Unthank’s ruined orphanage/child-slave-labor-factory-hellhole have just crossed paths with a team of anarchist men known as the Chapeaux Noir, who spout a lot of fine rhetoric about workers’ rights and the environment, but readily admit that their only actual plan is to (I quote) “blow stuff up.”
The two groups realize they have a common goal in bringing down the Industrial Titans, and soon get embroiled in the chaos deeper in the Impassable Wilderness. Curtis Mehlberg was last seen searching for his fellow Bandits, who have all vanished without a trace.
And the forest is being overrun with ivy that chokes and drowns everything in its path. Zita suspects the spirit that haunts her has a hand in it. There’s a bustle in this May Queen’s hedgerow, and she’s very alarmed…
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Content Advisory Violence: There’s allusions to heavy violence, although the stuff that’s actually shown isn’t that bad. The people of South Wood have erected a guillotine on the grounds of the Governor’s mansion, and while we don’t see it used, the characters are quick to tell Prue (and us) that the thing is in no danger of gathering dust.
We do see the Chapeaux and the Unadoptables lobbing explosives at various buildings, but the carnage left by these explosions is largely left unexplored.
Sex: Nothing.
Language: One use of “damn”—Curtis remembers his little sister is present and ostentatiously corrects himself, “I mean shoot.”
Substance Abuse: Nothing.
Politics and Religion: The Synod is the archetypal creepy cult, but Meloy uses mainstream religious lingo to describe them. Individual members are called Caliphs, a name that actually refers to an Islamic authority figure, and the term synod refers to a council of Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox bishops convened to decide on doctrine. I understand why Meloy would use established religious terms to give his fictional cult some credibility, but if you’re reading the book with younger kids, you might want to clarify that Caliphs and Synods are not sinister entities in the real world.
The cult members also ingest a fungus as part of their ritual, which was described in terms reminiscent of Catholic Eucharistic rites. As a Catholic, this made me a little uneasy, but I couldn’t tell how much of the resemblance was intentional. At any rate, this is hardly The Golden Compass.
Crude Humor: The only way to extract the Spongiform is by pulling it out of the victim’s nose; once removed, the narrator tells us that the stuff looks like grey spaghetti. When Nico, Rachel, and the kids get caught in a net, some poor boy winds up with his face right against Elsie’s butt.
Conclusions I wasn’t impressed with the first Wildwood book, but the second one was a marked improvement on the first and made me care just enough to see how the whole thing ended. I’m glad I stuck around.
Meloy ties his whole story together quite nicely here. All the plotlines are addressed and resolved (except for a tiny unanswered question at the end that might be a tentative sequel hook). The many main characters all get page-time and moments of heroism. I feel like the strongest and most memorable of the group turned out to be Rachel when it should have been Prue, but your mileage may vary.
These days it’s commendable when an author focuses on the conflict they created rather than getting tripped up by inane shipping wars. The main relationships in this book are those between parents and children, and those between siblings, which is exactly how it should be in a middle-grade book. There are light hints that the friendship between Alexei and Zita, or Nico and Rachel, might deepen down the road, but they’re only hints. It was quite refreshing to read a MG book that stayed age-appropriate, and didn’t force its younger characters to grow up too fast. Kids have the rest of their lives to worry about dating.
The final showdown reads like the battle at the Black Gate in LOTR combined with the battle of Manhattan from The Last Olympian (can’t say why without giving the whole thing away), with a touch of Sleeping Beauty and what might have happened in Prince Caspian if Nikabrik and his buddies had successfully resurrected Jadis.
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So while these images have been used before, they’re still stirring and effective. Ellis brings them to life beautifully in her illustrations, which have never been better.
While the literary ancestors of this series have always been fairly obvious—Grimm’s fairytales, LOTR, Narnia, Tiffany Aching, the Spiderwick Chronicles, and maybe Labyrinth —this installment made me realize its musical influences for the first time. I think there must have been a lot of Led Zeppelin playing in the Meloy-Ellis household during the writing of these novels. Much of the imagery in this particular installment seemed inspired by “Stairway to Heaven.”
I know classic rock connoisseurs mock that song now because it’s been played to death, but the reason it was overplayed in the first place is because it’s so evocative. The melody is a haunting sister to “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and the lyrics, while they have no clear meaning, borrow just enough from Dante and Tolkien to create their own spooky little realm, where pipers lead perceptive souls through tangled forests and down long roads, towards an enlightened age where everything is revealed to be golden and beautiful.
This sort of hippie daydream has become hackneyed now, but it’s reaching for something truly magical, the kind of feeling Frodo gets while listening to Elvish songs in the hollowed halls of Rivendell:
Almost it seemed that the words took shape, and visions of far lands and bright things that he had never yet imagined opened out before him; and the firelit hall became like a golden mist above seas of foam that sighed upon the margins of the world. Then the enchantment became more and more dreamlike…and it drenched and drowned him.
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I always felt like that passage described how it felt to read The Lord of the Rings itself, to read other great fantasies (like the Chronicles of Narnia or the works of Robin McKinley), to listen to those ethereal Celtic-inflected classic rock songs, or to gaze upon a painting by Botticelli or one of the Pre-Raphaelites. These things make you feel as if the boundaries between the real world and the infinite realms of Faerie will dissolve at any moment.
There are few books (or songs) written today that stir this feeling in me. Today’s culture is sedentary and sanitized to a fault, immured with our tech far from the natural world—and note that fantasy comes from mythology, which came about to explain the savagery and beauty of nature. I remember reading the part in Throne of Glass where the main characters are riding through the forest on their way to the castle, and being a little startled at how phony the whole scene felt. I actually asked myself, “Has this author spent any quality time in a forest before?” (I don’t think she has, but enough about her).
Suffice that in this case, though, the answer to that question is an emphatic yes. Meloy and Ellis have clearly spent lots of time in forests very much like the Wildwood they created. They’ve also studied folk art and ballads from medieval times through the nineteenth century. They’ve listened to, and made, a lot of good music. And they’ve read all the right books. The last fifty or so pages of Wildwood Imperium brought back a bit of that drenching, drowning enchantment that all the best fantasy stories can bring.
The first book in this series still has a lot of flaws, and given how long it is, I don’t blame people who give up on the series there. But if you slog through, and slog through Under Wildwood (which is much less of a slog), your efforts will quite possibly be rewarded here.
The series lacks the sparkling originality of LOTR and Narnia, or the deep spiritual grounding that those share with the Land of Elyon books. It doesn’t have the innovative creatures of the Spiderwick Chronicles, the twists and character depth of Over the Garden Wall, the wit and world-building of the Artemis Fowl novels, the layers of meta-meaning in A Series of Unfortunate Events, the gothic romance of Labyrinth, or any single character as powerful and memorable as Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching.
But it does have a compelling plot and a fantastic atmosphere, and in this installment, it even grows a heart. Overall, I’m glad I read it. ...more
So Disney is now writing their own fan fiction. This wouldn’t bother me if only the fan fiction in question were consistent with the films that they tSo Disney is now writing their own fan fiction. This wouldn’t bother me if only the fan fiction in question were consistent with the films that they themselves release.
The Beast Within is an entry in a series by Serena Valentino examining how the iconic Disney villains turned bad. Given this information, the book already has a strike against it—the villain of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast isn’t the Beast, it’s Gaston.
But the Beast is the more interesting of the two characters, being the only Disney Prince who’s an antihero. (At least the only animated one. Allowing for characters from their live-action franchises, he’s joined by Edmund Pevensie, Loki Odinson, and Kylo Ren. And I totally bring them up because they're relevant, definitely not because I'm infatuated with any of those characters. What do you take me for, a fangirl?) *clears throat*
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Anyway…what was I saying? Oh yes, the Beast is an antihero of sorts—he starts out a rotten pretty person, loses his looks and status, becomes a decent chap when a girl is kind to him in spite of his ugliness and temper, and finally transforms into a hero when said girl (and his loyal servants) are threatened with violence and death. He’s one of the most dynamic characters in the Disney animated canon. Whereas a book about Gaston would have consisted solely of hunting and killing things. So even though the Beast/Prince technically does not belong in the lineup with Maleficent and Ursula, I was more than willing to read his story anyway.
And Valentino has some promising ideas. There’s a lot of evocative imagery in this little book. I especially liked those creepy statues that move through the gardens when the Prince’s back is turned. This is a nod to the original tale by Gabrielle de Villeneuve, and I salute Valentino for putting it in. She did her homework!
But I don’t think she was given much time or freedom for this project. The pieces never seem to coalesce and the mood is all over the place, ranging from deliciously spooky and mature to kiddie-table slapstick. Don’t take this as a slight to slapstick comedy, I love the stuff when it’s done well. But it’s never been a strong point of Disney’s, and it really does not mesh with the story or vibe that this book was going for.
The metamorphosis of the Prince happens in an instant in most versions of this story, including the original, Disney’s 1991 version, and then the 2017 live-action remake of the ’91 animated film. In this book, it takes a few months, and the Prince starts to lose his mind along with his handsome body. He starts avoiding mirrors, but his official state portraits still show his evolution into a hideous beast—perhaps this plot point is a nod to The Picture of Dorian Grey. This is effective characterization. It made me pity him even as I rooted for him to learn his lesson, the narcissistic swine.
Unfortunately, the application of the curse is pretty silly. The Enchantress in this version is the Prince’s old girlfriend, Circe, whom he publically abandons when he finds out she’s a farmer’s daughter. (Um, Disney? Farmer’s daughters didn’t have a whole lot of free time for hanging out with royalty. This is kind of far-fetched). Circe has three older sisters—Lucinda, Martha, and Ruby—who then show up at the castle and lay the famous curse upon the Prince, cackling that he’ll never break it in time.
These three are exactly what I meant earlier about the uneven tone. They can be menacing occasionally, but mostly they’re a trio of silly cartoon characters. They squawk rhyming incantations while clobbering each other with household objects and falling out of their chairs. Like a production of Macbeth where the role of the Three Witches is played by the Three Stooges. They don’t belong in the same story with a cruel, beautiful young man who thinks his garden statuary is trying to kill him.
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A few other problems in brief:
1). Gaston is here portrayed as the son of the Prince father’s steward (or butler or something) and the Prince’s best friend from early childhood. He actually tries to help the Prince on several occasions. While I think this is a nod to Darcy and Wickham in Pride & Prejudice and therefore enjoyed it—and there’s a great scene when the Beast finally transforms and tries to kill his friend—it’s not in character for Gaston AT ALL. The thing about narcissists is that they repulse each other. They can only be friends with docile, enabling persons.
2). Once Belle shows up, the whole story feels like it’s on fast-forward, with occasional inane commentary from those three goofy witches. The writing in these scenes is patchy at best, especially compared to those fun creepy passages in the earlier half of the book. This makes me think that Valentino just ran out of time. There is zero development of Belle’s character, or her relationship to the Beast.
3). The book insists that the story takes place not in France, but in an imaginary kingdom that has contact with France. The narrator even refers to Lumiere as “the flirty fellow with the French accent” even though we know that in-universe, they all have French accents. “They can sing, they can dance/After all, miss, this is France,” state the lyrics in “Be Our Guest.” Circe and her sisters make references to a mad queen who flung herself off a cliff to her death many years ago, implying that this is the same kingdom where Snow White and the Seven Dwarves took place. The shared universe idea is cute, but there’s nothing in the movies themselves to suggest that it’s the same country.
4). Finally, can we get this poor man a name? He is referred to in this book solely as “the Prince” or “the Beast”, even in the passages narrated from his perspective. I can understand if he forgot his name after years of enchantment, but then he and Belle should have figured it out at the end. On the interwebs, this character is sometimes referred to as Adam. Adam is not a particularly 18th century French aristocrat-type name, but it is a very nice name, that might be a literary reference in this context (Frankenstein’s Creature was also occasionally called Adam). So I’ll continue to call him Adam, but ANY NAME AT ALL IN CANON WOULD BE NICE.
At any rate, this isn’t horrible for a media tie-in, but it doesn’t quite reach its potential either. A short and harmless read, perfectly appropriate for ages ten and up. The flaws in the book appear to come from Disney rather than the author. I would happily read more of Serena Valentino’s work. ...more
Congratulations, Colin Meloy, for producing a second installment that was noticeably better than the first!
A few months after Prue McKeel and Curtis MCongratulations, Colin Meloy, for producing a second installment that was noticeably better than the first!
A few months after Prue McKeel and Curtis Mehlberg entered the Impassible Wilderness to rescue Prue’s baby brother from an evil sorceress, life has returned to mostly normal for the McKeel family, although Prue is struggling in school and her parents don’t know why. The Mehlbergs have had no such luck. Curtis is still missing, and the parents are so desperate to find him that they flew to Turkey, leaving their two daughters, Rachel and Elsie, at the decidedly creepy Unthank Home for Wayward Youth.
Meanwhile Curtis has been happily training as a bandit in the Wildwood, almost never remembering his parents and sisters. The mad Dowager Governess was defeated (although we all know the drill with fantasy “deaths” without a body to show for it) leaving chaos in the wood. Warring factions have sprung up and no one seems to know who the leader should be. Iphigenia, Chief Mystic and priestess of the Great Tree, insists that Prue needs to come back if the Wood should be saved. The girl’s destiny has not yet run its course.
Back in Portland, Prue confides in a concerned new teacher, Ms. Thennis. Prue suspects the Wood is calling her back, but what’s wrong now?
Content Advisory Violence: Like the first book—not much, but what’s there is startlingly bloody for a middle-grade book. We see a shape-shifter get stabbed, and her shape changes from her human to animal form as it dies. Assassins are sent after children, and while they are unsuccessful, that’s not for lack of effort or menace on their part. Joffrey Unthank forces children to labor in his factory, and some have been maimed or terribly injured in said factory. Some rebellious kids burn down a building.
Sex: Prue notices that Curtis’ shoulders are starting to broaden. That’s it.
Language: None.
Substance Abuse: None.
Nightmare Fuel: The aforementioned shape-shifter is described in a frightening way, and one of the illustrations portraying her in mid-morph gave me the willies. That said, it’s a lot less scary than the first book. Know your kids. Kids, know yourselves.
Miscellaneous: There’s a villainous Ukrainian character who speaks in a stereotypical accent and generally acts like an evil agent from the Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoon. She’s not super offensive, but she still comes off as a product of accidental xenophobia.
Conclusions The first volume in the Wildwood series, simply entitled Wildwood, really rubbed me the wrong way for a variety of reasons. The characters were hard to empathize with, the story took too long to get where it was going, and the whole thing was so hipster it had never heard of itself. Not to mention that the narrator’s fondness for obscure vocabulary words made it hard to picture what was happening at some points.
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However, the book had a lot of potential. It stole from the best—C.S. Lewis, Terry Pratchett, Jim Henson, and a wee dash of J.R.R. Tolkien at the end—while bringing its own Old Americana aesthetic and an agreeably spooky mood. The illustrations by Carson Ellis (who happens to be Meloy’s wife and album-cover artist) were charming pieces of folk art. The first book dashed my hopes, but for some reason the second one called to me. And while not the greatest general-audience fantasy novel ever written, it’s actually quite agreeable.
The addition of Joffrey Unthank and his orphanage/factory is straight outta Lemony Snicket, which both is and isn’t an improvement on the first book. It’s an improvement because a lot of the weirder “real world” parts make sense if the “real world” in this universe is a Snicketesque realm of absurdism. Yet it’s also a step back because there was no indication in book one that this world was like that. It’s a good ret-con, but still a ret-con. And even in such a surreal place, Mom and Dad Mehlberg leaving their two remaining children in such a place while they go to search for their son doesn’t jive with what little we know about them. Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire wound up in situations this bad and worse, but their parents were dead. Big difference.
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On a related note, the almost bloodless battle between the kids and the Industrial Titans’ goons was underwhelming after the spectacle at the Plinth in the first book, wherein people actually died and there were fantastical creatures. This one felt a little too much like the end of a '90s family comedy. It just did not go with the tone of the previous book, or this one up until that point.
As for the Titans themselves, Big Business being the villain has become cliché, but it usually doesn’t share antagonist duties with faceless magical forces, so watching the heroes battle both in Wildwood Imperium should actually be interesting.
The hipster milieu from the first book has also been greatly toned down. It has receded to the background, where it’s just fine. Prue and Curtis no longer try to wriggle out of their destined duties, and they certainly aren’t ranting anymore about emotional support while everyone else is marching off to die. They have figured out that pacifism is a good policy in Portland, but will not save you from an evil sorceress or a shape-shifting assassin. When one lives in two different worlds, one can accommodate two different worldviews.
Also no more posturing about expensive jeans or coffee. They were actually believable twelve-year-olds this time around. And Curtis got called out for being selfish and oblivious—by Prue, by the narrator, and by his own conscience. Character development. It’s a good thing.
Rachel and Elsie, Curtis’ sisters, are not terribly unique—Rachel is a typical sulky goth teen, Elsie is a typical bright-eyed little girl who brings her doll everywhere—but they were believable and likeable enough. They reminded me of both Susan and Lucy Pevensie from Narnia, and Wirt and Greg from Over the Garden Wall. Both very nice sets of sibling characters to be reminded of.
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The most interesting new addition to the ensemble hasn’t even shown up yet. Remember Alexei, son of Alexandra? When he died, she went mad with grief and forced two Daedalus-like geniuses to rebuild him as an automaton, only for Alexei to figure out what he really was and destroy himself. Well, Prue has been told by the Great Tree that her task is to revive Alexei somehow, that only this can save the Wood.
Some reviewers think this refers to an act of dark magic, and while it might, I can see another possibility: Prue must descend into this universe’s Land of the Dead, find Alexei, and help him “return to the Sunlit Lands” (h/t The Silver Chair). I really hope this is what Meloy means: the descent and return of figures like Persephone, Dionysus, Orpheus and Psyche are some of the most potent stories in all of mythology.
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All told, this was a decent book, much better than I expected one in this series to be, and my curiosity is piqued for the third and final installment....more
Twelve-year-old Prosper and his little brother, Bo (short for Boniface), live with their friends in an abandoned movie theater deep in Venice. The broTwelve-year-old Prosper and his little brother, Bo (short for Boniface), live with their friends in an abandoned movie theater deep in Venice. The brothers are fleeing from an uncaring aunt who would keep Bo at her side like a lapdog and send Prosper to a faraway boarding school. Their roommates—Hornet, Mosca, and Riccio,—are homeless kids with nowhere else to go. They survive by stealing food and picking pockets.
The leader of their little group is named Scipio. His living quarters are unknown. He provides the others with blankets and other necessities, and delights them with the treasures that he steals. For Scipio is a thief—the self-proclaimed “Thief Lord” who has developed a fearsome reputation for himself in the city’s underworld. Everyone also assumes that the Thief Lord is an adult, not the scrawny twelve-year-old mincing about the rooftops in a plague doctor mask.
One fateful day, a mysterious Comte offers Scipio a job that would make him a legend, with ramifications that neither he nor any of his crew have any idea of. When the heist collides with Aunt Esther’s quest for Bo and the crisis Scipio is running away from, some of these children will be faced with choices that will determine the rest of their lives.
Content Advisory Violence: Characteristic of Funke, there’s some startling violent images here—i.e. the kids threatening to shoot Victor with his own gun, or Morosina pondering having her dogs tear the boys to pieces. No actual gore. (view spoiler)[Scipio’s father is emotionally abusive, but does not appear to be physically abusive. His apparent cruelty still takes a terrible toll on his son (hide spoiler)].
Sex: Absolutely nothing.
Language: Squeaky clean. This is a book where supposedly gritty adult characters say “darn” and “heck” with no children present. (I wonder if this was license on the translator’s part. This translation is by Oliver Latsch, not Anthea Bell, who translated the Inkheart series, where the word “damn” was used as punctuation).
Substance Abuse: Ida smokes. Everyone thinks it’s gross, including the characters living in an abandoned building which cannot have been particularly clean.
Nightmare Fuel: (view spoiler)[The legendary magical item on the Isola Segreta turns out to be an enchanted carousel—ride the Lion of St. Mark and you’ll become younger, perch on the merman’s tail (or was it one of the other magical critters?) and you’ll age as many years as rotations you made round the carousel.
The Comte and his sister, who appear emotionally frozen at about age nine, ride the winged lion until their bodies match their childish minds. Scipio takes the age-up creature and jumps off when he’s old enough to shave—considering he’s Italian he can probably shave already, but that’s beside the point. Barbarossa wants to be a young adult again, but loses the machine and emerges a sniveling five-year-old. Scipio’s psyche hasn’t caught up with his body, while Barbarossa’s adult mind and memories are caught inside a child’s body. (hide spoiler)]
Politics and Religion: Riccio offers to disguise Prosper by “painting [him] black like Mosca” (this does not happen and I don’t think any larger statement was meant, but still, as an American it’s a bit cringey).
Conclusions The Thief Lord features a strong atmosphere, a fascinating supernatural element, and an intriguing title character. Unfortunately, the atmosphere doesn’t always match the plot, the supernatural element isn’t even hinted at until halfway through the book, and the title character plays second fiddle to a rather bland protagonist and a colorful supporting cast member who doesn’t fit the mood of the piece.
A Venetian setting will always make a book interesting. There’s something about winged lions and mermaids and masques and gondolas and canals full of deep, dark water that draws me in every time. In The Thief Lord, the setting is a character, and this definitely works in its favor. The movie theater where the kids live is like Venice itself in miniature: ancient, grimy, secretive, and somehow still starry and magical.
Scipio fits into this environment seamlessly for most of the story. He’s like a cat, charismatic and glamorous and self-sufficient and disappearing for long periods of time. Yet like all characters who wear a mask, we know that he struggles with self-loathing, and the part of his life hidden from his friends is probably highly disagreeable. All this turns out to be true about him; Funke never examines his dysfunctional home life in any great depth, but that’s forgivable in a middle-grade book, especially one like this with one foot in reality and the other in the land of magic.
(view spoiler)[What bothered me about Scipio was that all his problems seemed to evaporate once he took a spin on the carousel and emerged as a young man. These wishes, in myths and fairytales, tend to backfire spectacularly on the wisher. Scipio’s wish was completely understandable, but again, there’s usually a punishment for willfully disrupting the cycle of things like that. It was annoying that, to paraphrase Florence and the Machine, his gift didn’t come with a price (hide spoiler)].
This whole theme of youth and age is pretty deep. I found it intriguing that the Comte and his sister apparently never got over watching their employers’ children playing while they had to work—they find the key to regaining their youth and the first thing they do is take over the old manor. They play with the rich-kid toys they used to envy, and even that doesn’t make them happy. There’s Barbarossa, who seems to have been stuck in the intense selfishness of a five-year-old. His punishment is pure nightmare fuel, but fitting. Then there’s Aunt Esther, who wants Bo to stop aging at six, and has no use for Prosper because he needs guidance more than hugs and is no longer cute.
I just wish that the first half of the book had featured these themes, and the element of magic. As is, the first half was mostly Victor donning bad disguises, walking into obvious set-ups, and fussing over his tortoises. I found Victor adorable, by himself and with his perfect match, Ida. But starting the book off like that makes it seem goofier and lower-stakes than I think Funke intended.
The magical element also sprang up out of nowhere, without even a hint. All we needed was a brief flicker of it—one of the St. Mark’s Lions around the city could come to life for a few seconds, or one of the kids could glimpse a mermaid or merman in a canal. Maybe there’s a location in the city where time freezes or accelerates or goes backwards, foreshadowing the pivotal event of the novel. The way it was executed, it was jarring—like if the Baudelaire kids in A Series of Unfortunate Events had learned that that Sugar Bowl everyone was fighting over could make its owner invisible. I don’t mind surprises, but it’s nice when the genre of a book is clear and consistent throughout.
Finally, I found the lack of empathy displayed by the children (and some of the adults) in the book downright alarming—understandable, but still not the traits you’d want in a hero. The kids, Bo and Mosca largely excepted, are all rotten to Victor when they first meet him—much more rotten than their situation actually requires. And while I can’t blame them for this, everyone seems delighted with what happened to Barbarossa. He’s horrid, but it’s still bad form to jeer at him in his reduced state. I had this problem with Inkheart, too—even the usually good kids have many moments of being startlingly bratty.
This book is harmless fun. This is the first time I’ve read it, but I know that the eleven-year-old me would have been beguiled by the Venetian setting and fallen in love with Scipio, the pre-teen Byronic hero. It flew by and kept me up late turning pages. I think many of you will like it too. ...more
The three Anderson children’s parents are going to France for a week’s vacation. With the usual babysitter out of commission, the kids are left in theThe three Anderson children’s parents are going to France for a week’s vacation. With the usual babysitter out of commission, the kids are left in the care of their Aunt Sally, whom they have never met before.
Melissa (age ten), Amanda (age eight), and Frank (age six)—called Pee Wee by his sisters—know very little about their father’s large, eccentric, Canadian family. They’re familiar enough with their Aunt Lyla, and they know that Uncle Edward drowned at sea on his honeymoon years ago, but that’s about it. They’ve never even seen a picture of their Aunt Sally; the only proof of her existence till now has been the card, featuring a moose with tree lights strung in his antlers, that she sends them every Christmas.
So they’re quite unprepared for the charismatic and whimsical figure that arrives, with her towering blonde beehive of hair, her fondness for green beans and surprise meat loaf, her talent for drawing, and most of all her storytelling abilities.
For Sally’s stories so transfix her nieces and nephew that they’d rather listen to her than watch TV. They’re the stories of growing up on Vancouver Island in the late sixties and early seventies that their father has never told them. The tales are full of witty observations, sometimes uproariously funny, but there lurks an undercurrent of darkness. Pee Wee is too young to notice, but his sisters do, and are drawn to it even as they dread it…
Content Advisory Violence: Sally’s Uncle Louis claims that the woods along the beach on Vancouver are inhabited by nocturnal trolls. People who want to get rid of something badly sometimes leave that thing on the beach for the trolls to find.
Unfortunately, the “thing” in question is usually a person, and once you give something to the trolls, you can never get it back. What do the trolls do with the people and animals they claim? No one knows—and there’s quite a few jokes earlier in the book about critters eating people, so we can strike that off the list. This technique allows the reader to fill in the blanks with the scariest thing they know, depending on their maturity level.
Uncle Louis and Sally’s brother John conclude that a neighbor mortally injured her own beloved dog to leave it helpless for the trolls. Louis also claims that he saw a little girl get left on the shore for the monsters by her babysitter, then the child’s parents retaliated by leaving the babysitter, which prompted the teenager’s parents to hand over the child’s parents….nearly the whole town had been taken by the trolls, so he says, when the grocers started carrying fresh asparagus at a low price, which saved the day. Louis is a health fanatic and he manages to bring every conversation back to the subject of eating one’s greens.
There’s also the Vancouver Andersons’ neighbor, Maud, who claims to have shot eighty cougars. One day she takes Edward, John and Sally on an expedition and happily shoots a number of small animals out of their perches, insisting that each one is a cougar. She also believes the mailman to be a cougar and shoots him, although luckily she only grazes his arm.
A boy jumps out of a window and hops frantically into a boat, followed by his demented uncle, and they are both attacked by the raccoon family that has taken up residence in that boat. Another kid gets his fingertip bitten off by a clam.
Sex: There’s a hint that the mother of a neighborhood kid, whom Sally cruelly dubs “Fat Little Mean Girl” had a scandalous past, at least by small-town 1960s-70s standards. Likewise, one wonders how exactly FLMG/Marianne herself got Edward Anderson to marry her, the event which led to both of them dying young. Like the activities of the trolls, this is left almost completely blank, and what the reader comes up with to fill it in depends entirely on the worldly knowledge of the reader.
Language: Melissa and Amanda are cutting and a bit rude to their little brother, constantly telling him to shut up and that he doesn’t know anything. Sally has no patience for this. One could argue that the girls learning to treat Pee Wee well is the whole point of the book, so their unkindness is there to teach a lesson.
Substance Abuse: Marianne was an overeater, hence her mean nickname.
Politics and Religion: Louis accuses a local pastor of leaving four consecutive wives for the trolls.
Sally and her brothers buy a product from a friend’s mom, who’s a Wiccan, hoping to cast a spell to make FLMG/Marianne stop bullying their sister. They sprinkle it on her school lunch, but all it accomplishes is making her barf all over herself.
I don’t think Horvath’s opinion on either Christianity or Wicca can be inferred from these incidents, but your mileage may vary.
As you might have noticed, some of the humor in this book is not politically correct. I first read this book in second grade and was never tempted to call anyone “Fat Little Mean Girl” or anything close to that after reading it. But if your young reader is the type to repeat whatever they hear, take note.
Nightmare Fuel: The trolls are almost impossible to see, because they always stick to the shadows, but Uncle Louis states that they have stony skin and craggy shapes. They make no noise, they have no mouths, and their eyes are little pinpricks of electric green on otherwise featureless faces.
(view spoiler)[Three kids leave their spoiled little brother for the trolls on Halloween night. The parents realize that the child is missing, and eventually a search party finds him. He never speaks of what happened to him that night, but he’s never able to bond with those siblings again either (hide spoiler)].
Maud’s house is full of taxidermy animals.
There’s a few anecdotal stories about people getting drowned, burned in their house as they slept, swept away by rogue waves, or being mauled and eaten by cougars and/or bears. Cheery stuff.
Conclusions
The week before Mr. and Mrs. Anderson were to leave Tenderly, Ohio, for the somewhat more bustling metropolis of Paris, their babysitter…came down with a minor case of bubonic plague and called tearfully to say she didn’t want to spread the buboes around.
This is a brilliant opening sentence, establishing both the surreal black comedy of the book, and that the Anderson children must be really unpleasant. Somewhere, Rosalyn from Calvin & Hobbes is slapping her forehead and asking “Bubonic plague! Why didn’t I think of that?!?”
I remember how that first sentence hooked me, carpooling with a friend in second grade. That family always travelled with audio books. I don’t remember the name of the narrator but she was outstanding, with this very clean, sharp line delivery and perfect diction that sealed each line in your memory. It’s been in my head ever since.
Within such a short novel—136 pages—Horvath conjures all these larger-than-life characters and makes them more real than some folks I’ve suffered through series of thick books with. They’re as bizarre as the dramatis personae of the Lemony Snicket novels, but somehow believable too—and the stories feel like real family stories, some exaggerated to comic strip proportions, others related almost exactly as they happened. I particularly liked how Aunt Sally tapped into the tradition of ancient oral storytelling by fixing descriptive epithets to her characters (“grey-eyed Athena” “swift-footed Achilles”)—“Maud who shot eighty cougars”, “Great Uncle Louis who came for two weeks and stayed for six years.”
The stories start out boisterous and slapstick, and become stranger and darker as they go, although the humor doesn’t disappear entirely (view spoiler)[until the very end (hide spoiler)].
The ending ties the present-day frame story to the main one in the past. You thought you were reading an episodic chronicle of family life, and all along it was building to a retelling of (view spoiler)[Joseph of the varicolored coat and the brothers who left him for dead.
With one crucial difference—Joseph forgave his siblings. Robbie never quite could. Even at the end of the book, he refuses to look Sally in the eye. (hide spoiler)]
I would classify this book as upper middle-grade, even though it’s short, due to the advanced vocabulary/sentence structure and the subject matter. If your kid can handle Inkheart they can definitely handle this. And it’s witty, poignant, and surprising enough that teens and adults reading by themselves can still be caught up by it.
Warmly recommended for anyone who likes a little depth with their humor and a touch of the supernatural in their family tall tales—especially fans of Over the Garden Wall. Speaking of OGW, if any of its creators are by some chance reading this review: ADAPT THIS BOOK. IT WOULD BE AMAZING.
We all know this story: Dorothy Gale is an orphan girl, living in a desolate part of Kansas with her Uncle Henry and Aunt Em. A cyclone carries off thWe all know this story: Dorothy Gale is an orphan girl, living in a desolate part of Kansas with her Uncle Henry and Aunt Em. A cyclone carries off their farmhouse with Dorothy and her beloved dog, Toto, trapped inside. The house lands in the colorful and whimsical land of Oz, right on top of the Wicked Witch of the East. The people whom that Witch terrorized hail Dorothy as a hero, even though the killing was an accident and the kid has no idea where she is. Her only way back to her family and Kansas is to seek the aid of the great and powerful Wizard of Oz, who lives in a marvelous Emerald City. On the way, she joins forces with a sentient Scarecrow, a Woodman made of tin, and a Lion, all of whom have their own requests for the Wizard. Meanwhile, the Wicked Witch of the West plans trouble in her dark castle...
Content Advisory Violence and Nightmare Fuel: Parents reading this aloud to little kids should know that the skirmishes in the book are a lot more violent than they are in the classic 1939 movie. The Witch of the West sends wolves after the travelers, and the Tin Woodman decapitates them with his axe. She then sends crows, who get their necks wrung by the Scarecrow. At one point our heroes are menaced by huge tiger-bear hybrids called Kalidahs. There's also a giant spider prowling the woods (guess we finally know where Ungoliant wound up after fleeing Middle-earth).
Surprisingly, the Witch of the West is slightly less scary in the book, and the Flying Monkeys are neutral creatures with no malice of their own, but bound to a magical item and its current bearer, rather like djinn. The evil trees are the same amount of scary that they are in the film. The Tin Man became what he is because his axe was cursed to kill him – chopping off each of his limbs, then his head, and finally burying itself in his heart. He had a tinker replace every missing appendage with a tin one until he was all tin.
Conclusions Even if you think you have this story memorized thanks to the classic movie and pop-culture osmosis, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is well worth reading.
On its own merit, it's a charming and well-written novel that would be a great read-aloud for little kids. It's also a great choice for school-aged children to read on their own. Baum's narration paints evocative word-pictures and incorporates graceful turns of phrase, without getting verbose or throwing obscure vocabulary words at young readers. Some of the descriptions and dialogue get repetitive, but this actually enhances the bedtime-story feel of the prose.
Dorothy is one of those unstoppable child heroines of nineteenth and twentieth-century literature – along with Alice, Heidi, Sara Crewe, Mary Lennox, Laura Ingalls, Lucy Pevensie, and Scout Finch. Most of the original American Girl characters had that personality too. Strangely and sadly, we don't meet many new examples of this archetype in books these days. While Dorothy feels the stress of her adventure keenly and often cries, she never gives up on her goal. Compassionate and flexible, she'll also drop everything to help anyone in need, and takes great care of her three friends, always making sure that the Scarecrow isn't leaking straw and the Tin Woodman's joints are adequately oiled. Her age is never stated, but she's implied to be much younger than Judy Garland's portrayal in the movie, maybe nine or ten.
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The Scarecrow and Tin Woodman are very close to their film counterparts. Baum subtly shows the Scarecrow's intelligence and the Woodman's big heart throughout the story. They have some clever comedy moments too, like the Woodman needing his joints oiled whenever he (frequently) cries, or the Scarecrow being fearless in battle because his straw body can't feel pain.
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The Lion is less comical than he is in the film; he's actually somewhat fierce and intimidating from the beginning here. He's still a lovable character who doesn't realize how brave he is.
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The Wicked Witch of the West has a surprisingly small role, considering what a huge presence she is in the film. She stays in her gloomy castle for most of the book, only sending her minions after the travelers once they show up in her territory on the Great Oz's orders. Their intervention is justified, given how tyrannical she is to the Winkies, but her lack of page time makes her feel like a weak villain compared to her film equivalent. The movie actually utilized her better than the book did, making her the stuff of children's nightmares for generations.
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In the preface, Baum explains his intent to tell a “fairy-tale” without the grim (Grimm) life lessons and Old World aesthetics that had been embedded in the genre until that point. He succeeded at this, although the book feels much more like the stories that came after it than the fairy-tales that came before. He even invented a few new archetypes in the process – he was one of the first authors to feature good witches as well as bad ones, and the Tin Woodman is essentially a robot before robots became stock characters.
Unfortunately, sometimes Baum's commitment to escapism and novelty sometimes made the world he envisioned a little too bright and happy, lacking the spookiness of the Alice books or the melancholy of Peter Pan (its two closest competitors).
This might have do as much with cultural differences of the time as it does with the authors themselves. The Victorian era (in which Lewis Carroll lived) and the Edwardian era (in which J.M. Barrie and L. Frank Baum lived) found the British in a bleak mood, realizing the consequences of the Industrial Revolution at home and imperialism abroad. Meanwhile Americans were ambitious and optimistic, inventing marvels like the telephone, airplane, and automobile. Thus Wonderland and the Looking-Glass are pretty much stuck in medieval times with the card deck and the chessboard, and Neverland is a wilderness populated with Cavalier pirates, Fenimore Cooper Native Americans, and Midsummer Night's Dream fairies – while Oz has bejeweled skyscrapers and hot-air balloons. Baum's America is the America of Alexander Graham Bell and the Wright Brothers. Carroll and Barrie's England is the England of Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites.
Like Alice and Peter, The Wonderful Wizard is best-known through its adaptations. Most of us are familiar with the hugely influential 1939 movie. The film is largely faithful to the book's simple storyline; most of the changes are aesthetic and some are arguably improvements.
For instance, the movie combines Glinda, the Good Witch of the South, with the unnamed Good Witch of the North, which helps introduce Glinda as a powerful person early on in the story, while changing nothing of the plot itself. The screenplay also eliminates the lengthy journey back to the Emerald City and then on to Glinda's castle, which contains some interesting episodes in the book but nothing that effects the main storyline. It is probably best that these chapters were omitted, as there's no way they had the special effects to pull off creatures like the giant spider back then.
The screenwriters also saw the potential of the Wicked Witch of the West, who's scary enough in the book, to be genuinely terrifying. Thus they incorporated her throughout the film, where her constant hounding of the travelers loans the story a sense of urgency that the book didn't have. The movie also decided to make the Flying Monkeys simply menacing and dispenses with their complicated backstory, which would have been hard to convey without lots of exposition.
Aging Dorothy up is mostly fine, although her righteous declarations (“You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” “You're a very bad man!”) would probably sound better coming from the eight-or-nine-year-old Baum pictured rather than a teenager. It's still plausible enough, given what a simple sort of character she is and how little human interaction she gets.
Given the limitations of special effects then, they couldn't have the Scarecrow doing all the crazy stunts he pulls in the book. Likewise the Cowardly Lion automatically becomes a bit sillier as a human in a lion suit. In the book he walks on all fours and looks as scary as any other lion (the famous bow in his mane seems to have been a cutesy touch from an illustrator; I don't remember it being mentioned in the text). That said, those characters are livelier and more lovable in the movie. I also liked that the film Scarecrow and Tin Man are clearly the size of adult humans – the book never clarifies whether they're scaled like humans or Munchkins, which makes some scenes difficult to visualize.
A change that bothered me a bit was having it all be a dream in the end. That works for something as surreal as the Alice books, but this story actually has a plot and the characters develop, making it a highly improbable dream. Apparently the studio execs at MGM thought that the filmgoing audience could only suspend disbelief for a fantasy world if that fantasy world was treated as imaginary in-universe. I would love to hear if Tolkien and C.S. Lewis had any thoughts on the subject.
One change that apparently bothers book fans, despite having zero effect on the plot, is Dorothy's silver shoes being changed to the iconic ruby slippers. Supposedly this happened because the producers wanted to show off their new Technicolor and needed a vivid red object to match the green of the Emerald City and the yellow of the road. Or perhaps silver just didn't show up well against dandelion-yellow bricks. I'm okay with both colors. Silver is more ethereal but the ruby slippers are stunning.
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The influence of this book and film cannot be overstated. Stop me if you've heard any of these before:
A farm kid, raised by an aunt and uncle in the middle of nowhere, saves the day with the help of some friends, including a big hairy beast and a man made of metal:
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A little girl from the real world stumbles into a magical one, where she and her companions (including a Lion) must defeat a cruel Witch who commands wolves:
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An ordinary girl is attacked by a Wicked Witch of the West Waste, and her only hope is a flashy Wizard with imposter syndrome. There's also an animate scarecrow, a dog, and a man magically grafted from bits of other men by a crazed magician (which apparently happens in a later Oz book):
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An American girl is swept away to a magic country ruled by an enigmatic mage, with whom she must negotiate. She befriends three of the strange creatures she meets on her quest, and they must follow a specific path to their destination or face certain doom. She had the power to go home the whole time but didn't realize it until the end:
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I could do this all day – the influence of this story is just that vast. While Alice came first and was clearly an influence on Wizard, Wizard took a step beyond the Carroll books by having a coherent plot and not being a dream in the end. It was an essential innovation to the fantasy genre as we know it now.
This book is the basis for one of the most important movies in film history, and itself an underrated but no less important cultural touchstone. It's an enjoyable read at any age and I heartily recommend it....more
Inkdeath is the epic adventure I expected Inkheart and Inkspell to be—and as much as I complained about the slow pace, plot meandering, and inInkdeath is the epic adventure I expected Inkheart and Inkspell to be—and as much as I complained about the slow pace, plot meandering, and innumerable characters in the first two books, I can tell you now that all the buildup was worth it.
Funke was juggling so many different plots by the end of Inkspell that I was seriously worried that many or all would be dropped or mishandled in the third act, but she surprised me by keeping all of them going until their natural conclusions, and also resisting the temptation to add new ones. Not every writer can do that.
(view spoiler)[Dustfinger is dead, Orpheus is abroad in the Inkworld, the Adderhead is immortal but frozen in the death process, Meggie is angry, Resa is pregnant, Fenoglio is racked with guilt, and Mo can’t tell whether he’s himself or the Bluejay these days. Can the Adder be stopped? Can Death itself be undone? Can anyone achieve peace in the Inkworld? Can the people from our world ever return here—or should they? (hide spoiler)]
I can’t say much more than this without ruining all the surprises.
Content Advisory:
It might help to think of this as a very clean book for adults that happens to have a few teens among its many protagonists. Young kids might find it inaccessible and hard to follow—I remember a lot of younger friends who loved the first two books hated this one—and it avoids the melodrama of a typical YA offering. (There is a love triangle, but it’s minor. It is treated like a teen relationship should be, gently but not too seriously, and not given any undue importance).
Violence: Various warlords enjoy brutal executions, including flayings and disembowelments. These are never shown, only mentioned. We do, however, see a handful of stabbings. There’s a few non-graphic torture scenes. The Adderhead has fairies killed en masse, thinking that bathing in their blood will alleviate his pain. A warlord threatens to cut out a man’s tongue; a magician sends a prisoner horrifying visions, hoping to drive him to suicide. Orpheus reads a unicorn into being for one of the warlords—so said warlord and his friends can hunt the animal, brutally butcher it, and parade its bloodied corpse through the streets of Ombra City. A dead man lies unburied outside castle walls, and his daughter is put in a cage hanging from a window above him in an attempt to break her spirit. The Piper forces children to work in the silver mines. There’s a panic in the marketplace and three little kids are trampled to death.
Sex: Farid walks in on Orpheus yanking a serving-girl onto his lap, and the narrator adds that Orpheus molests all his maids, becomes enraged if they reject his advances, and might spend some of his money on prostitutes. Brianna’s past affair with Cosimo (or his doppelganger) is mentioned a few times. Violante has an obvious crush on Mo—or the Bluejay, rather—and sulks when she finds out he’s already married. Meggie gets a few chaste kisses in with both Farid and the new boyfriend, Doria.
Language: A few emphatic “damns!” from Fenoglio and Elinor, usually directed at each other. They’re madly in love, they just don’t know it yet.
Substance Abuse: Fenoglio and Orpheus are both described as heavily hitting the booze, the former because he’s depressed, the latter because he’s debauched. Elinor has no patience for Fenoglio’s drinking and tells him so on several occasions.
Anything Else to Worry About: The Adderhead’s flesh is rotting on his body even while he lives. No one can bear the stench well enough to go near him—except the Piper, thanks to his fake silver nose.
Overall, this is one of the most satisfying conclusions to a fantasy series that I’ve ever read. Warmly recommended. ...more
Inkspell picks up a year after Inkheart left off. The Folcharts—Mo, Resa, and Meggie—are reunited in Elinor’s house. They have been joined by Darius—aInkspell picks up a year after Inkheart left off. The Folcharts—Mo, Resa, and Meggie—are reunited in Elinor’s house. They have been joined by Darius—another “Silver-tongue” who can read things out of books but isn’t nearly as good as Mo—and a number of fantastical creatures who escaped from Inkheart, the book that Mo read aloud from thirteen years earlier that has dogged his footsteps since.
All should be well, but meanwhile in another part of Italy, Dustfinger has found a sinister Silver-tongue, using the prideful stage name of Orpheus, who reads him back into his story. The fire-breather leaves behind Farid and Gwin the marten, believing that Gwin is predestined to bring about his death in the Inkworld. Farid, devastated at being abandoned by the closest thing he’s ever known to a father, turns his steps towards Elinor’s house…
…meanwhile, Meggie is catching up on all the angst and anger she never directed at her secret-keeping father all these years. She’s also rapidly sprouting from a scrawny little girl into a pretty young woman, and when Farid shows up he NOTICES.
Farid wants to follow Dustfinger. Meggie wants to test her Silver-tongue powers. Unlike her father, the girl has a gift for storytelling, too. First she writes herself and the boy into the story, then she reads them in.
Mo is horrified when he figures out what his daughter has done—and has only himself to blame, as usual, since this all could have been cleared up with a conversation. Soon the Magpie, mother of the late Capricorn, shows up at the bookish house, accompanied by Orpheus, who proceeds to read her and Mo into the book—Resa refuses to let go of her husband’s hand and is dragged back to the world where she spent years as a foreigner.
In the Inkworld—a Renaissance faire fever dream of Boccaccio’s Italy and Chaucer’s England—Dustfinger reunites awkwardly with his wife, Roxane, who has believed him dead for years and reluctantly remarried in his absence (luckily for him, her second husband has also died). She is immediately suspicious of Farid, believing him to be Dustfinger’s son by a woman of our world. Farid fears being separated permanently from his pseudo-father and returns her suspicion with outright hostility.
Also, Fenoglio is somehow pottering about in his own book, both delighted to the point of megalomania and hubris at seeing his creation spring to life, and dismayed that he can’t stop bad things from happening to his favorite characters.
Casualties include Cosimo, the handsome and chivalrous son of the reigning Prince of Lombrica. Cosimo had an arranged marriage with Violante, the ugly but shrewd daughter of the evil Adderhead, who reigns across the mountains in Argenta. Then Cosimo died. According to Fenoglio’s story, none of this was supposed to befall the youth. He writes a resurrection for Cosimo, and forces Meggie to read the passage aloud.
And a doppelganger of Cosimo appears—but he has no memories of anything the real Cosimo did. He shows no interest in his little son with Violante, forbids the poor woman from entering his chambers, and calls upon Brianna, the beautiful and headstrong teenage daughter of Dustfinger and Roxane, to share his bed in his wife’s place. The reader never witnesses an interlude between the young royal and his even younger mistress, but their consummated dalliance is the talk of the kingdom.
Meanwhile, the Magpie fatally wounds Moe with her gun (why did she need to read him there if she was only going to shoot him with a weapon from our world?) but he and Resa are found by the Motley Folk—the class of roving actors, acrobats, jugglers, minstrels, fortune-tellers, and assorted other curiosities that Dustfinger and Roxane belong to. Some of them remember Resa from her time as a slave in Capricorn’s household. They take Mo in, but believe him to be a charismatic highwayman known as the Bluejay, robbing caravans from Argenta in a one-man war against the Adderhead’s tyranny.
Little do they know that Fenoglio, who has apparently learned nothing, has made up this Bluejay, circulated the songs about him, and based him on Mo. What could possibly go wrong?
Some of you may think that I waited too long between finishing this meandering doorstopper and reviewing it. I assure you that the span of time makes no difference. This book made no more sense to me when I first closed it than it does now.
While the first book in this series had no plot but zigzagged between locations, this one has no plot, but follows about two hundred sets of characters each in their own location. At no point do the plotlines intersect—okay, the adults all met up when Roxane arranged for the Barn Owl to tend Mo, and Dustfinger spoke to Resa through the bars of her dungeon cell in total darkness, and Funke implies something weird here, something to the effect of “she had fond memories of him visiting her in the dark” which confirms my suspicion from book one that there was something between these two. Is it really adultery when both believe their spouses to be dead? This is a question for the Aeneid, not a middle-grade novel with Shel Silverstein and Roald Dahl quotes in the chapter headings.
Quick summary of everything that actually happened in this book:
1. Orpheus is bad. Really bad.
2. Also, Orpheus tends to sweat and has bad skin, so it’s funny when Farid, who is fifteen years old, by the way, repeatedly refers to him as “Cheese-face.” Farid, Junie B. Jones just called and she says you sound immature. Grow up, man.
3. Dustfinger is such a horn-dog that Roxane sees a strange kid with him and automatically assumes said kid is his.
4. Mo never tells anyone anything. Mo is an idiot.
5. Also, Mo hates cats. Told you he’s an idiot.
6. Adultery. Lots of adultery. You know, for kids!
7. Fenoglio is a menace to society and must be stopped at all costs.
8. The two kingdoms don’t like each other because reasons.
9. No one cares that Cosimo is cheating on Violante because Brianna is hot and Violante has a pockmark on her face. Seriously.
10. Sometimes we check back in with Elinor and Darius for no discernible reason.
11. On page 420, a wild Mr. Tumnus appears…and is never mentioned again. Orpheus just reads him out of his book and he potters around Elinor’s house looking forlorn. I didn’t care about Tinkerbell in Inkheart—I never cared about Tinkerbell in Peter Pan, either. But Tumnus is my smol son. Protect him.
12. Have I mentioned Fenoglio is a menace? Someone, please, stop that man.
13. Mo is slowly turning into the Bluejay whether he likes it or not.
14. Farid and Meggie like each other because teenagers and hormones.
15. Dustfinger is dead! Dead for real!...Sure, Cornelia, I totally believe that you killed off one of two characters in this whole miserable story who had a pulse. And by the time it happens, it’s too late to care. We’ve been dragged through 635 pages of nothing.
In all this there are two positives. One is the world-building. The setting was richly realized and felt infinite like a good faerieland should - even though this sort of faux-Italian renaissance faire kingdom was cliché back when Jo March was sending serials to the Weekly Volcano.
The other bright spot is Roxane, who alone among the dramatis personae is stoic, competent, and able to put the needs of others ahead of her own. It’s kind of hilarious that she goes to someone called the Barn Owl for help, considering Jennifer Connelly played her in the movie version—if you get why this is amusing, you remind me of the babe. Connelly so strongly resembles Roxane as described in the book that I wonder if Funke wrote the character with her in mind, the way Mo is patterned on Brendan Frasier.
Roxane’s perspective for more of the book would have helped, since she was the only person around who occasionally showed symptoms of common sense.
The ending was meant to be a cliffhanger, but upon closing the book my only thought was “a) my head hurts and b) Who’s going to get poor Mr. Tumnus back to Narnia?”...more
This gets two stars only because Arroyo has done some really great nonfiction work for adults. The book itself is a mess of cartoonish characters, sloThis gets two stars only because Arroyo has done some really great nonfiction work for adults. The book itself is a mess of cartoonish characters, sloppy Biblical references, and appallingly ham-fisted social commentary. Long review coming soon....more
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