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Genre: Fiction

Manners Make (More Than) the Man

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Some books have you read them slowly. Some books have you keep turning the pages. The best books do both. Such is A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. The gentleman is Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov. In 1922, while living in Moscow’s Hotel Metropol, he is summoned before The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, which is inclined to have him shot for being a noble. They remember, however, that before the Revolution he wrote a poem showing some sympathy for the cause, and so his life is spared. Instead, they…

A Series of Unfortunate Events – Reviewed

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The thirteen books in Daniel Handler’s A Series of Unfortunate Events provide humorous if formulaic escapism which, like an emergency room full of merely-competent doctors, does no obvious harm. While many contemporary children’s series positively ooze with socially-conscious messages that their authors or publishers think “The Children” need to hear, these books are mercifully bereft of such earnest nonsense. True, the series is also free of anything like transcendence, and it offers no remedy to the problem of evil that is its main source of drama (and humor), but at…

Skullduggery, Published

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Skullduggery Pleasant is about as bodiless as its titular character. Notice I didn’t say “protagonist,” for Skullduggery, the skinless magical gumshoe on a quest to stop Serpine from bringing back the Nameless Ones, is not really the center of the story. He is, if you pardon the brittle pun, only its frame. The real honor goes to a plucky and wise twelve-year old named Stephanie Edgley.  Stephanie is mature beyond her years, preferring to read books and to correspond with her mysterious uncle rather than get swept up in the…

Everything Sad Is Untrue (A True Story)

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As Roald Dahl did in his childhood memoir, Boy, Nayeri takes painful, embarrassing, and sometimes violent moments, and reframes them. Nayeri’s ultimate theme is the self-consciously Tolkien-ish idea that dark things are only apparent, are passing away, and are therefore, fundamentally untrue.

Miss Peregrine’s World-Weary Children

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Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is a story that grew out of old photographs. When author Ransom Riggs approached Quirk Books with his collection of found photos, many of them in sepia tones and featuring odd or surreal subject matter, the publisher suggested he develop a fictional narrative to explain the pictures. The resulting quirky novel was a New York Times bestseller, which has subsequently been translated to film. The book is absorbing, but is also marred by content that doesn’t seem right for its Young Adult audience. Jacob Portman is…

Elves, Boys, and Mean Girls

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Keeper of the Lost Cities, by Shannon Messenger, is a derivative but ultimately wholesome fantasy adventure written for a female audience. Now, you’ve so heard this kind of tween prose before, and you might be totally, absolutely mortified when you notice how much this book echoes the plots of other bestselling, middle grade fantasy books. But, like Sophie Foster, you’ll probably survive the ordeal. I mean just barely. And, while you’ll have to wade through the standard eco-gospel, and a lot of middle school melodrama to get there, the book…

The Hollow Heart of Merlin’s God

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Mary Stewart’s Merlin Trilogy is a well-written, but ultimately troubling take on the Arthurian mythos . Stewart took great pains to give her historical fantasy a realistic, early Medieval backdrop, but her meticulous reinterpretation of the legendary source material has an agenda contrary to that material’s chivalric heart. Through the eyes and mouth of her ethically and spiritually ambiguous protagonist, the author exchanges the charming anachronism of Arthurian proto-chivalry for a far less believable Arthurian realpolitik. The result is an historically fascinating, but morally hollow series. Before delving in, let…

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

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A Great Treat in the Mystery Genre: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie In The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley you will find a new classic in the mystery genre. From the opening paragraph (no small feat!), Bradley brilliantly weaves a web of murder, privilege, and PTSD around the protagonist and sleuth, eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce. “So,” you may ask, “is she the titular ‘sweetness’ in the story?” Absolutely not. Flavia is not your typical post-war pre-teen Briton. She has a passion for…

The Lost Island

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Island Adventures There is something about an island that makes for a good adventure story.  Three that come to mind are Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, and Ian Cameron’s The Island at the Top of the World. An island, by definition, is cut off; it is remote, separate and unknown. Such stories are often two adventures in one: the adventure of getting to the island, and then the adventure of what is on the island.  (With perhaps a third – the adventure of getting home…

The Candy Shop Wars

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The Candy Shop Wars is cheap American candy. Younger palettes may initially enjoy the easy thrills of magic sweets, but after a few chapters, most taste buds will be numb to the flavor and ready to move on to something more substantial. The core recipe for the story is unbalanced, and the magic candy action is little more than a superficial additive intended to mask the bland flavor. While the book does not contain anything that is blatantly inappropriate or offensive, there is little to recommend it.   The story centers…