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Evil Genius Meets Boy Hero: Two Books for Halloween

Oct31

Benjamin Franklinstein Meets Thomas Deadison by Matthew McElligott and Larry Tuxbury.
I didn’t read the first two books in this series, Benjamin Franklinstein Lives! and Benjamin Franklinstein Meets the Fright Brothers, but I was able to catch on to the gist of story up until this point pretty easily. This series is easy to read and just fun, nothing heavy or serious, just a simple story about an evil-emperor who tries to take over the world by hypnotizing everyone with scientifically altered light bulbs.

“Wherein is contained an Accounting of the Quest by our Subject and his Young Companions to subdue an Army of Hypnotized Zombies and thwart the Evil Plans of the Emperor.”

The Emperor is Napoleon. Young Victor Godwin is “our subject” and his friends are Benjamin Franklin, Orville and Wilbur Wright, and other members of the Modern Order of Prometheus. If you thought Franklin, Napoleon, and the Wright brothers were dead, you’d be right, except that they were actually preserved by the Order, each in his own Leyden casket, to be awakened when society faced a Great Emergency. Unfortunately, Napoleon was also preserved in a Leyden casket and revived by his assistant Moreau to further the evil Emperor’s plans to control the world.

Those plans include Infinity Light Bulbs in every light fixture in Philadelphia, the kidnapping of famous scientists, and mind control for famous and talented dead scientists like Thomas Edison, for instance. It’s a bumpy ride that starts with a literally bumpy ride in a gyroplane and ends in a desperate attempt to destroy Napoleon’s Harmonic Supertransmitter. The fun part, at least one fun part, is that there are diagrams and pictures of all of the wacky scientific gizmos in the book, like the supertransmitter, and the infinity bulb, and the Leyden casket/bathtub, and a harmonic antenna and even a potato battery eggplant. Here’s a picture of a Leyden jar (a device that ‘stores’ static electricity between two electrodes on the inside and outside of a glass jar), but I couldn’t find a picture of the Leyden casket. You don’t think it’s just a figment of Mr. McElligot’s or Mr. Tuxbury’s imagination, do you?

'106060' photo (c) 2009, Biblioteca de la Facultad de Derecho y Ciencias del Trabajo Universidad de Sevilla - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Reluctant readers, especially those who are interested in science and jokes but not reading, might very well eat this stuff up. It’s definitely worth a try. I’d start with the first book and see how it goes over. Benjamin Franklinstein lives!, just in time for Halloween, but hilarious anytime.

Fake Mustache, or How Jodie O’Rodeo and her Wonder Horse (and Some Nerdy Kid) Saved the U.S. Presidential Election from a Mad Genius Criminal Mastermind by Tom Angleberger.

A novelty store fake mustache, a very special mustache, turns Lenny Flem’s best friend, Casper, into the afore-mentioned evil genius who wants to take over, if not the world, at least the United States. Fake Mustache is even more of a farce and a slap-stick comedy than Benjamin Franklinstein. Angleberger parodies pre-teen Disney channel sitcoms, old-fashioned melodramas, and zombie attacks in this fast-moving 193 pages of buffoonery.

The first half of the story is narrated by Lenny who is the only one in the fair city of Hairsprinkle (as far as he knows) who hasn’t been brainwashed by Casper, aka Fako Mustacho. However, the second half of the story has washed-up TV star Jodie O’Rodeo telling the story—and getting all the glory– for putting a stop to the nefarious plans of Fako Mustacho, aka Casper.

Loads of fun. And the story takes place during Halloween and Election Day, just perfect for this time of year, but readable in any season.

The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate

Oct28

I can see why people are all gaga over Ivan, the gorilla who’s the star of the Exit 8 Big Top Mall and Video Arcade. Ivan is a sympathetic character, an artist, something of a stoic, and a good friend to Stella, the elephant, Bob, the stray dog, and Julia, the daughter of the night janitor for the mall. Ivan lives in the moment, takes life as it comes, and doesn’t worry over much. However, when he makes a promise to a dying friend, Ivan is determined to keep his word, no matter what.

I really enjoyed getting to know Ivan. And I had sympathy for his plight, a lonely gorilla who has nothing to do but watch TV and draw pictures to be sold in the mall gift shop. Ivan doesn’t feel sorry for himself, even though he has been living without the company of other gorillas for most of his life, the last twenty-some odd years. (The One and Only Ivan is based on the true of a gorilla named Ivan who lived for twenty-seven years in a circus-themed mall in Washington state and who now lives in the Atlanta Zoo.)

But honestly the whole “animals are people, too” theme was distracting to me. I think the author could have made us sympathize, even identify, with Ivan without beating us over the head with the philosophy that we’re all great apes, and animals are just like people (only they’re not really, are they?). The insertion into the story of animal rights rhetoric was intrusive and unnecessary. Animals are animals and people are people. People have a responsibility to treat animals with care and respect, and Ivan shouldn’t have been caged alone without other gorillas and without a natural habitat for over twenty years. The story of Ivan’s “emancipation” is a good one, even if Ivan is anthropomorphized a little too much. How else could he tell his own story?

The Book of Wonders by Jasmine Richards

Oct27

As Scheherazade tales go, I prefer Shadow Spinner by Susan Fletcher. In fact, Betsy-Bee (13) just re-read Shadow Spinner for her medieval history and literature class, and I couldn’t help but compare this story to that one.

The Book of Wonders tries to include too many stories: all of the stories of Sinbad, some Aladdin and Ali Baba, and Scheherazade’s own story are all packed as episodes into this one book, which is obviously the beginning of a series or trilogy or something. (Warning: the ending is less than resolved.) I could have used a little more breathing room within and between adventures.

Yet, at the same time, I found the book easy to put down and hard to maintain interest in. Zardi and her friend Rhidan are likable enough as protagonists, but I didn’t really get into the whole girl looking for adventure and to save her sister from death and orphan foundling boy looking for his father and his heritage plot. Oh, and the orphan boy, Rhidan is also probably a magical chosen child of specialness, and Zardi is a roguish but courageous girl, skilled with the bow and full of spunk. Stereotypes abound.

It’s also possible that I’m just being cranky, and if you really have a predilection for the Arabian Nights and stories that take off therefrom, The Book of Wonders might be more wonder-filled for you than it was for me.

Jasmine Richards’ website.

Other voices:
Charlotte’s Library: “The Book of Wonders is a good title for this–like the Arabian Nights, once things get going, the episodic adventures fall one after another like beads on a string, and just when seem things settled, another perilous encounter appears! If you are a reader who delights in one magical, dangerous, imaginative adventure after another, this is a book for you.”
The HappyNappy Bookseller: “What I loved best about The Book of Wonders is the author never tries to do too much, simply lets the story unfold. The author has written a wonderful story that is inspired by Middle Eastern folk tales.”
The Book Cellar: “I am now curious for book 2 – as the story cut off at a really high action time. I wanted a few more answers to be revealed before this book was tied up.”

Snow in Summer by Jane Yolen

Oct25

Snow in Summer: Fairest of Them All by Jane Yolen.

The mountains of West Virginia are the setting for this disturbing, yet riveting, retelling of the story of Snow White and her wicked stepmother. (The cover, by the way, is beautiful, but it doesn’t look like West Virginia, c.1949 at all, does it?) In this version, Snow in Summer is known as Summer to her mother, her cousin Jane, and the rest of her family. But her new stepmother, the witch, calls her Snow. Suffice it to say that this story won’t do anything to repair the reputation and public image of stepmothers in general.

The entire book walks just on the edge of plausibility. Could all of episodes in the book be real events, just sometimes interpreted by Snow in Summer as evil magic? Are a talking mirror and a bewitched father just too much to attribute to anything but sorcery and witchcraft? The story also includes a snake-handling, strychnine swallowing religious cult, green garden “magic”, and a murdering lecherous boy named Hunter. It’s reminiscent of some of the stories that take place in Storybrooke, Maine on the TV show Once Upon a Time, mostly just this side of magical, but tipping over into the inexplicable and downright creepy every so often.

I’d recommend the book for girls ages 13 and older who like a good fairy tale rendering. There’s too much “girly-stuff” in the book for most adolescent boys, and the book includes scenes of abuse and attempted assault (not graphic, but very real and scary) that might be disturbing to younger readers.

Crossed by Ally Condie

Oct24

I read Matched, the first book in this planned trilogy, in 2011, and I had this to say about it: “Matched by Ally Condie. There’s not so much action and adventure in this book, but more romance and thoughtful commentary on the pros and cons of a ‘safe’ society bought with the price of complete obedience to an authoritarian government.”

In this second book, Cassia goes to the Outer Provinces in pursuit of Ky, her chosen match and true love. Ky is already in the Outer Provinces where he is trying to survive in a government-controlled “war” that is designed to kill all who are forced to participate. Can Cassia find Ky? Will Ky survive long enough to be found? What will the two of them do once they have been reunited?

If Matched was about safety and freedom, Crossed, is more about trust and the lack thereof. A lot of romance and dystopia novels these days take the theme of trust and develop it as a prerequisite to a real lasting relationship. Of course, without trust there is not real relationship. However, I would say that trust develops as both partners in a relationship are given reason to trust one another by the daily sacrifices of love that are required in marriage or even any other family relationship or a long-term friendship. So beginning a relationship requires a “leap of faith”, maybe a small leap, but a hop nevertheless. Then that trust is rewarded with reciprocal trust and faithfulness, or it’s not. If not, the relationship needs mending and forgiveness and eventually another leap, or else it dies.

In Crossed and in other stories I’ve seen or read lately (Once Upon a Time), the characters seem to be saying, “You must trust me blindly with all your secrets and insecurities, and if I give you reason to doubt my faithfulness and trustworthiness, you must ignore those reasons. Otherwise it’s not True Love.” It doesn’t exactly work that way, does it? You commit to the relationship, and then you grow it little by little. And you remember that your partner is human and prone to sin just as you are, so betrayal of trust in some ways is inevitable. And the cycle of trust, reciprocal trust or betrayal, and forgiveness begins again. But repentance and forgiveness are just as necessary as trust and faithfulness are because we live in a fallen world.

The only one who is completely trustworthy, who will never leave you or betray you, is Jesus. Our human relationships are all imperfect and incomplete, no matter how fulfilling and trusting they may be.

I enjoyed the first two books in this series, and I will eventually be reading the third book, Reached, which comes out in November.

Website for the Matched series by Ally Condie.

Rock of Ivanore by Laurisa White Reyes

Oct22

Book One of The Celestine Chronicles.

Ms. Reyes says that this book, or series of books, started out as a bedtime story for her son, Marcum. It’s high fantasy, owing certainly something to Tolkien and to Star Wars, as most of this kind of fantasy does. Marcus and five other boys from his village, Quendel, set out on a Great Quest to find the Rock of Ivanore. Marcus takes with him a magical key and a walking stick named Xerxes. If the boys succeed, they will be heroes; if they fail they will return to disrespect and menial jobs in the village for the rest of their lives. Unfortunately for the boys, they have no idea what the Rock of Ivanore is or where to find it.

Marcus is an orphan, of course, and he has daddy issues. The other boys, including Kelvin, also an orphan and sort of a secondary protagonist, are described and take part in the action, but I never could pin down what made any of them tick. Why is Kelvin so prickly and distrustful of strangers? Why does Marcus steal something that belongs to Kelvin and only return it when forced to do so? Why does anyone follow Jerrid, the mayor’s son? The other three boys are mostly inconsequential afterthoughts; they sometimes play a part or have a bit of dialog, but they’re not very memorable.

More interesting as characters were Jayson, the half-breed Agoran, part cat and part human, and Xerxes, the talking walking stick that only Marcus can hear. I wanted to know more about them and understand them both better. King Frederic of Dokur is a wimp and a whiner, but his son Arik makes an adequate villain.

At 350 pages of fairly large print, this book might satisfy fantasy adventure fans who are looking for something a little easier and/or shorter to read than Tolkien or Rowling. But it left me a bit cold. I couldn’t get too interested in the characters, their stories, or their fates until about three-quarters of the way through the book. I can, however, see the potential for improvement as this series continues.

Ms.Reyes’ blog: 1000wrongs.blogspot.com

Time Snatchers by Richard Ungar

Oct19

Caleb is a time snatcher, an orphan trained by the man he calls “Uncle”, to travel through time and steal valuable artifacts that people in the year 2060 will pay big bucks to own. His time-traveling and thieving partner is Abbie, and the two of them have been living with Uncle and working for his company, Timeless Treasures, for as long as they can remember. The two teens enjoy their time travel, cat burglar adventures, but Uncle is becoming more and more callous and brutal. And Caleb is confused by his longing for a real family and by his feelings for Abbie. Are they partners or does Abbie care for Caleb in a different, more romantic way? Or is Abbie falling for Caleb’s cheating arch-enemy, Frank?

The author blurb says that Mr. Ungar “was inspired to write this novel by an image in Chris Van Allsburg’s picture book The Mysteries of Harris Burdick.” Good inspiration. Time Snatchers is a good novel.

What I liked: the idea of combining con games and cat burglary with time travel, the characterization of Caleb in particular, the cranky computer cyborg, Phoebe, who runs the elevator and has a running feud with Caleb, some of the snatches that Abbie and Caleb pull off.

What I disliked: Uncle is a particularly nasty bad guy who engages in rather gruesome child abuse to keep his “time snatchers” in line. To be specific, he uses a sword to cut off body parts of those who disobey him, and at one point he has his captive snapping turtles gnaw on Caleb’s arm. Yuck. The torture episodes gave me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Also, the romantic interludes (very tame and junior high-ish) seemed a little bit abrupt, not quite enough set-up or insight into what Abbie is thinking or feeling.

I’ve been watching a lot of the TV show White Collar, and I was reminded of that program while I was reading Time Snatchers. Caleb is not quite as classy as Neil Caffrey; he’s a lot younger, for one thing. However, just as Neil wants to know who his parents were and wants to be a part of a family, Caleb longs for a normal life with a real family. And both Caleb and Neil are pretty good at fast-thinking and theft. Unfortunately for both of them, thievery is not a very sustainable or morally justifiable lifestyle. Neil Caffrey and Caleb are both in the process of learning that crime doesn’t pay.

Time Snatchers ends with major unresolved questions, so I’m assuming we’re headed for a sequel or two. If you don’t mind the child abuse parts, it’s a good story.

Nanny Piggins and the Wicked Plan by R.A. Spratt

Oct18

Oh. my. goodness.

Nanny Piggins is the best nanny ever. How would you like to have a nanny who bakes ginormous chocolate cakes and insists upon sharing them with you, watches soap operas and reads trashy romance novels, encourages children to roll in the mud, and generally breaks all the responsible adult nanny rules and allows her charges to do the same. Well, if you’re a parent, Nanny Piggins might not be your first choice to care for your children. But if you’re a kid, Nanny Piggins is going to be the unrivaled Star Super Nanny of all time.

Just compare her with another fictional nanny.

Nanny Piggins versus Mary Poppins
Mary Poppins: “The newcomer had shiny black hair — ‘Rather like a wooden Dutch doll,’ whispered Jane. And she was thin, with large feet and hands, and small, rather peering blue-eyes.”
Nanny Piggins: “The world’s most glamorous flying pig.”

Mary Poppins: “Michael suddenly discovered that you could not look at Mary Poppins and disobey her.”
Nanny Piggins: “Nanny Piggins had no interest in obedience.” “She barely knew what the word obedience meant. And when she found out, she thought it was utterly unimportant. If she ever caught Derrick, Samantha, and Michael doing exactly what she said, she would tell them off for not using their imaginations.”

Mary Poppins: “I shouldn’t wonder if you didn’t wonder much too much!”
Nanny Piggins: “Telling Nanny Piggins she could not do something was always the best way to make sure that was exactly what she did.”

Mary Poppins: “There was something strange and extraordinary about her — something that was frightening and at the same time most exciting.”
Nanny Piggins: “Who could not fall in love with a nanny whose only job qualifications were her astonishing ability to be fired out of a cannon and her tremendous talent for making chocolate cake, sometimes both at the same time?”

So, Mary Poppins is magical and and extraordinary all that kind of thing, and she gives out a “spoonful of sugar” along with medicine (in the movie), but Nanny Piggins gives out huge slices of cake and chocolate bars and lots of other sticky, gooey stuff every day. Movie Mary Poppins teaches her charges to tidy up the nursery while she sings a magical clean-up song. Nanny Piggins orders five tons of mud to be deposited in the garden for her and the children to play in.

No contest. Nanny Piggins wins, hands down. Actually, she does enter the Westminster Nanny Show in chapter eleven, and I will let you guess who wins that contest. Or you could read Nanny Piggins and the Wicked Plan. (That’s a sneaky, N.P. way of getting you to read the book without telling you to read it. Because I figure you might be about as fond of obedience and being told what to do as Nanny Piggins.)

Beswitched by Kate Saunders

Oct17

In The Freedom Maze, Sophie found out that life back in the antebellum South wasn’t all Scarlett O’Hara and Southern plantation mansions. In Beswitched, Flora Fox finds out that a girls’ boarding school in 1935 isn’t exactly filled with modern conveniences either.

Time travel is like that: the time traveler who goes back in time gets to find out how the other half lived. Flora finds out that the clothes and manners of the 1930’s were rather uncomfortable, but she and her roommates become great friends with only a few missteps and cultural misunderstandings. The story paints a lovely picture of life in a girls’ boarding school in 1935, just before the second World War, and I almost wanted to go back in time myself to visit, if I could be sure to get back to my time before the war started.

I liked Beswitched, but a couple of things about the story made me uncomfortable. I didn’t much like all the spell-casting and witchy magic, even though the magic itself turned out to be benign. Maybe that was the problem: witchcraft, real witchcraft, isn’t a bit of good-natured fun. It’s a religion, and it’s evil. It’s the same problem that many Christians had (and still have) with the Harry Potter series, and I can get past it by telling myself that the magic in the Beswitched is just a mechanism to enable the time travel element of the story. (Harry Potter is an alternate world, and so the “rules” about magic and witches are different. Those books don’t raise my “dabbling in witchcraft” sensors at all.) Still, schoolgirls casting spells is kind of, well, disturbing.

The other part of the book that bothered me is that I didn’t really like the two main characters very much. Both Flora and her friend from the 1930’s, Pete, are, well, to put it bluntly, spoiled brats. The point of the book is supposed to be that the experience of magical time travel and each of them encountering a girl from another time period changes them both, but I never did warm up to either of the two girls. I guess I have twin prejudices against spoiled children and spell-casting witches.

On the Day I Died by Candace Fleming

Oct16

I remember Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone. Paranormal fiction, phantoms and ghouls, stories of the weird, the supernatural, and the spectral.

What do kids watch nowadays when they want a good, old-fashioned ghostly supernatural story or creepy mystery (not romantic vampires or stupid zombies)? For that matter, what do they read? Neil Gaiman. Mary Downing Hahn. Goosebumps. Eventually they could graduate to Stephen King or X-Files, I guess.

But what if the reader is looking for ghost stories, not novels? The kind of stories that were presented by Mr. Hitchcock or introduced by Rod Serling on the Twilight Zone? The kind you tell on a camp out on a dark night?

Subtitled “Stories from the Grave”, Ms. Fleming’s book fits that niche. The book includes nine stories, set in and around Chicago, all about teenagers who died. These stories eschew the violence and gore that so often substitutes for real suspense and spookiness these days, and instead they go straight for that horrified, eerie response feeling. You know, when you ask yourself, “Could that really happen? Naaaaa, maybe, well?”

Mike is led to a graveyard by a ghostly hitchhiker, surrounded by the ghost of teens who need to tell their stories, and compelled to listen to those stories. For instance, there’s Scott (1995-2012) who didn’t believe in the supernatural until he decided to make a visit to the abandoned grounds of Chicago State Asylum for the Insane. Johnnie (1920-1936) was a juvenile delinquent with a predilection for revenge until one of his victims took her revenge on him. There’s also a “monkey’s paw” story (Lily 1982-1999), and another (Edgar 1853-1870) that’s a take off from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, The Yellow Wallpaper.

I’d get this one, especially if you live in or are familiar with the Chicago area, just in time for Halloween. I can picture a Halloween party with older middle schoolers or young high schoolers dressed up as the dead people in the stories and prepared to tell their own “stories from the grave.”

The book could also be a springboard for research into your own local folklore about ghost sightings and death stories. Ms. Fleming began her stories with “memory and myth”, “local legend and folklore”, and “nearby places, real-life people, actual events.” She writes in the author’s notes at the end of the book, “The best ghost stories, I learned, should always include a kernel of truth.”

Maybe some of the stories at the website Ghosts of America could be starter seeds for your own book of ghostly tales. These stories are from my own hometown of San Angelo, Texas.