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Gossamer by Lois Lowry

Jan30

Let me say first that I really, really liked this book. I’m surprised it didn’t win some sort of award. (It was on the ALSC list of Notable Children’s Books.) Littlest One, the main character, is a dream-giver-in-training with a gossamer touch. Ms. Lowry has created in Gossamer a lovely imaginary world in which dreams have meaning, and even nightmares are susceptible to “dream therapy.”

My library system classifies this book as “young adult.” The main human character in the book, a boy, is seven years old, and Littlest One is of an undetermined age, but young. Maybe she’s the “young adult” character. Or maybe the book is “young adult” because it deals with child abuse. I wouldn’t suggest it for seven year olds, but middle grades and teenagers maybe? Alabama Moon, a book I wrote about not too long ago, was nominated for the Middle Grade Fiction Cybil Award, and I thought it was great but more appropriate for maybe junior high, or even high school students. Gossamer is also appropriate for the same age groups. So what is the age grouping for YA? Grades seven through 12? Through college? Does middle grades include middle school (grades 6-8) or just elementary school (grades 3-6)? Those poor twelve year olds, where do they fit in?

Anyway, I thought Gossamer was a satisfying story. It’s not too long; it felt more like a short story than a novel. However, it was meaningful and brought a smile to my face several times as I was reading. I’m planning to recommend it to Brown Bear Daughter and maybe even Organizer Daughter, the one who reads no fantasy except for Harry Potter. She might enjoy Gossamer, not that it will rival HP in any sense of the word rival.

Camilla by Madeleine L’Engle

Jan23

This book is the second book I’ve read in my plan to read or re-read all of Ms. L’Engle’s books this year. The first one I read was A Winter’s Love, published in 1957. Camilla, published several years earlier in 1951, deals with the same themes of the later book: marital compatibility and infidelity and the effect of marital problems on young adult children forced to confront their parents’ imperfections. I think A Winter’s Love shows some growth and maturity in the author’s ability to confront these issues, but Camilla is a very “young adult” sort of book, full of teen angst and idealism and some progress toward maturity on the part of the young protagonist.

Camilla is fifteen years old, but as a child of the 1940’s and a child of wealthy parents, she’s led a sheltered life. She acts more like a twelve or thirteen year old in our day and time, which I think is a sad commentary on the way we encourage our children to grow up faster and sooner nowadays. That aside, Camilla begins with the line: “I knew as soon as I got home Wednesday that Jacques was there with my mother.

And so Camilla must grow up and deal with the fact that her mother is having an affair and her father is unable to express his love for Camilla’s mother in a way that will keep her from pursuing another man. Throughout the novel, Camilla tries to hide from the truth of her parent’s failings, longs to crawl back into some safe place where her mother and father take care of her instead of betraying her trust, but it’s not possible. She finds safety and comfort for a while in her budding romantic friendship with her best friend’s older brother, but that relationsip, too, is imperfect and impermanent.

Finally, facts and science and her ambition to become an astronomer give at least a place of retreat and stability in a world that has become dreadfully unpredictable. Camilla’s plight mirrors the plight of the world at large in the late forties/early fifties, just recovering from a world war and fairly sure that another war is inevitable. David, one of the characters in the novel, says as much, “Always another war . . Always has been, always will be. Frank will go off to it and he’ll come back looking like me, or he’ll come back blind, or without hands, or arms. Or not at all. Or perhaps I am being optmistic. Maybe there won’t be anything to come back to.”

Camilla’s facing life and choosing life even though her parents can no longer be her protectors is likened to the intelligentsia facing the facts about life in the modern world where war destroys and maims and kills. The idea is that people are powerless to stop the madness of war and evil, but individuals are able to choose to respond to life with perseverance and spirit. It’s a kind of a “do not go gentle into that good night” attitude that serves the main characters in the novel as a philosophy of life.

Camilla and her boyfriend, Frank, discuss God quite a bit, but they talk more about the kind of God they don’t believe in than the one they do. Both profess a belief in God, but they’re obviously confused about His place in the universe and the about the whole question of how and why God allows evil to continue. They say they don’t believe it’s God’s will for “bad things to happen to good people,” but they haven’t figured out how God does work in the world. (Neither have I totally figured that one out, for that matter.) Frank has a theory that resembles reincarnation, but involves people being reborn on other planets “until at last we’d finally know and understand everything—absolutely everything—and then maybe we’d be ready for heaven.”

I don’t think that Ms. L’Engle really became committed to any sort of orthodox Christian worldview until after this novel was written, so it’s not surprising that the characters in the novel are torn between a belief in some kind of God and a desire for a doctrine that enables human to somehow perfect themselves. In later novels, this religious dead end drops away, and L’Engle’s characters are much more drawn to a specifically Christian outlook on the world. However, her novels never do become preachy nor her characters even completely orthodox in their theology. People are still people in L’Engle’s novels, and that’s a good thing in view of the discussion about “contrived fiction” that we had a few posts ago.

Camilla was L’Engle’s fourth novel, and it reads like an early effort. It was republished in 1965. How much changed, I don’t know. Nevertheless, the novel is well worth the reading for fans of Ms. L’Engle’s fiction. Camilla Dickinson, the character, reappears as an elderly astronomer in the 1996 novel A Live Coal in the Sea.

A Winter’s Love by Madeleine L’Engle

Jan1

I have several projects for January; one of them is to read/reread the major works of one of my favorite authors, Madeleine L’Engle. Some of you may not know that Ms. L’Engle wrote adult fiction as well as the Newbery-award winning fantasy A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels. In fact, all of her books are difficult to confine to one age group or target audience. I think that’s because Ms. L’Engle wrote about her own concerns and didn’t consciously write to a particular audience.

A Winter’s Love was one of her early novels published in 1957, the year of my birth, before the success of A Wrinkle in Time. It was good story to start out my journey through Madeleine L’Engle’s books because it was one of her first novels published and because it takes place just before Christmas. The setting is a Swiss village resort in the Alps; Emily and Courtney Bowen (Courtney is the husband) and their two daughters, Virginia and Connie, are living in a rented chalet. The family is from New York, but Courtney is on a sort of writing sabbatical from teaching classics in a New York university. Sixteen year old Virginia is home for the holidays from her European boarding school, and she has a friend spending the holidays with here, Mimi Oppenheimer.

The action and conflict in the novel are internal, rather than external. Nothing much happens. Emily begins the novel looking out a window at the stars and thinking about her life; she ends the story standing outdoors in the snow looking over the landscape and thinking. Yet, from that beginning to that ending, much has happened inside Emily Bowen. She’s made decisions that will affect her family and her friends for the rest of their lives. The novel is really about a marriage and about the temptation to have an affair or get a divorce when that marriage isn’t working well. Not only is Emily’s marriage not sustaining her; she has very little hope that she can ever communicate with and love her emotionally distant and closed husband, Court. And the Other Man, Abe Fielding, is so open and nurturing and available that Emily can’t help falling in love. She spends the rest of the novel trying to decide what to do about her new love and her old love and her children and ultimately herself.

As far as classification goes, I think this novel, were it to be published today, would be classifed as young adult fiction mostly because of the young adult characters, Virginia and Mimi, Sam, Abe’s son, and Sam’s friend, Beanie. However, the overwhelming theme of the novel is adult: what is the meaning of marriage and how does love grow and change and remain faithful to itself. I don’t think this is Madeleine L’Engle’s best novel, but it is a very creditable effort. She has at least three novels that were published before this one, Ilsa, The Small Rain and And Both Were Young, and I’d like to get those next so that I can read the novels in semi-chronological order. (I’ve already read A Small Rain and maybe And Both Were Young, but I’m planning to re-read them.) Virginia Bowen and Mimi Oppenheimer both appear in later L’Engle novels as minor characters.

Heat by Mike Lupica and Alabama Moon by Watt Key

Dec28

Michael Arroyo, age twelve, and Moon Blake, age ten, both have the same problem. Each of their fathers has died and left them without a parent to take care of them. And neither of them wants to go into foster care. Mike’s brother, Carlos, calls government people “Official Persons” and distrusts and avoids them. He and Mike manage, with the help of a friend, to hide their father’s death from NYC Officialdom and live on their own, sort of successfully. Moon Blake, down in the backwoods of Alabama, also distrusts the government and tries to hide the death of his father.

Heat by Mike Lupica and Alabama Moon by Watt Key do share a similar plot device: a young boy who has reasons to distrust the representatives of the state must figure out how to continue life on his own terms while navigating the adult world and avoiding both the well-meaning and the badly-intentioned interference of grown-ups. Finally, both boys must decide whom to trust and how much trust they can afford and how much help they need.

But there are some differences in the two books. Heat is set in New York City, and Michael’s father was a good man who died of a heart attack, unexpectedly leaving his boys fatherless. Michael does have his brother, Carlos, to take care of him, but Carlos is a minor, too, almost eighteen. The two boys are from Cuba, hence their lack of turst in the government, and they try to live in New York’s inner city on their own. But the adult world won’t leave them alone, and Michael finds out that even Little League baseball is played by rules that adults make and that kids need help to play the game. Michael know how to play baseball, but he doesn’t know how to take care of himself in New York City and neither does Carlos, really.

Moon of Alabama Moon, on the other hand, is much more prepared to take care of himself in some ways. His father is a survivalist, a believer in government conspiracies and in coming world war, and he’s taught Moon how to take care of himself in the woods. Moon knows how to hunt and fish, and build a shelter, and survive in the wilderness. He’s doesn’t determined to live free, just as he and his father did, but he doesn’t know what to do about all the people who won’t allow him to be on his own. And he doesn’t know how to cope with his own loneliness and isolation. Moon makes some friends after his father’s death, but having friends means living by society’s rules. Moon’s not so good at following rules made by other people.

Heat would be great book to recommend to baseball fans or kids who are interested in immigration issues or kids who read sports fiction in general. There’s lots of baseball description, but I found it fascinating rather than dry and technical. Michael’s difficult life and his father’s death are handled with sympathy, but nothing’s too dark or gruesome. Michael has friends and an interest in life (baseball) to keep him going. Even when Michael’s brother, Carlos, flirts with a life of crime in order to support himself and Michael, nothing too grim or dangerous happens. Carlos gets off with a warning, and the boys end up surrounded by love and support from friends.

Moon, the character, ends up OK, but the book Alabama Moon is much darker and more frightening than Heat. I liked Alabama Moon very much, but I wouldn’t recommend it for middle grade (3rd-6th) readers. It does feature a ten year old protagonist, but the subject matter and tone of the novel would be more appropriate for young adult and even adult readers. Moon’s father is mentally disturbed, and Moon must come to terms with the rest of the world after living his first ten years in isolation with only his eccentric father to teach him. The book also has a villain, a redneck Alabama constable who is just as mentally unbalanced as Moon’s father was. Alabama Moon is a dark and violent story in spite of its happy ending, and it raises questions that would be difficult to answer at the level of ten, eleven, or even twelve year old child. I know that Karate Kid (age 9) and even Brown Bear Daughter (age 12 today) would have trouble understanding why the father in the story was so distrustful and even mean to his own son and why the constable is so violently determined to capture Moon.

So, here are two great books with similar themes, one appropriate for boys (and girls) up to age twelve or thirteen, and the other for mature young adults who are beginning to understand that parents aren’t perfect and that some have serious problems. I was quite impressed with both books, and I’ll be looking for more from each of these talented authors. Both of these books were nominated for the Cybil Award for Middle Grade Fiction.

Eragon and Eldest from a Christian Perspective

Dec20

I’ve had a lot of people show up here at Semicolon looking for a Christian perspective on the fantasy series by Christopher Paolini that begins with the book, Eragon and is continued in the sequel Eldest. I’m assuming that people are interested in the books partly because of the movie version of Eragon that debuted a couple of weeks ago. So I thought it might be useful to re-run my reviews of the two books. As you can tell from reading the two reviews, I liked Eragon a lot more than I did its sequel. I do think the anti-Christian, atheistic message becomes much more blatant in the second book, but the first book is enjoyable as story and shouldn’t corrupt any young minds. I haven’t seen the movie and can’t comment on it, but Steve at Flos Carmeli saw it with his eight year old son and had this to say: “It was sufficient to entertain, entrance, captivate, and otherwise stimulate the mind and imagination of an eight-year-old boy. And so, it served its purpose well. Is it as good as other films that might do the same? Probably not.”

Semicolon book reviews (written last year 2005):

First of all, I like fantasy. I’m a Tolkien fanatic, and I’ve read and enjoyed Anne McCaffrey, Lloyd Alexander, C.S. Lewis, Ursula LeGuin, Stephen Lawhead, Carol Kendall, and John Christopher, to name a few favorites. However, I don’t like fantasy that gets too New Age-y or heretical. It doesn’t have to have Christian themes, but I prefer that it not be blatantly anti-Christian. (I will admit that I’ve never read Harry Potter nor have I read the Dark Materials books by Pullman because I was afraid both series would be just “off” enough to annoy me. Please don’t beat me up (figuratively) for not reading these. I know I may be wrong about either or both series.) So when I heard about Eragon,, a very popular fantasy novel mostly about dragons, I adopted a wait-and-see attitude. Dragons can be used to glorify evil in the wrong author’s hands.

Well, I was pleasantly surprised by Eragon. I wouldn’t say that the novel was profound or made me think deep thoughts, but it was a really good story, as advertised. I can see Tolkien influences in it as well as some resemblance to Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series, but Eragon is not a cheap copy of anyone else’s fantasy as far as I can tell. Christopher Paolini, a homeschooled teenager when he wrote the book, knows how to tell an absorbing story that kept me reading until after midnight last night just to see what would happen to Eragon and his dragon friend Saphira.

Maybe you already know the story of the writing and publication of Eragon: Christopher Paolini finished homeschool high school at age fifteen. He could have gone to college, but he decided to wait a while and write a book instead. He read books about writing, wrote his own book, and then showed it to his parents who owned a small publishing company. Christopher’s parents published the novel, and Christopher himself went on an author tour in the Northwest where his family lives to promote the book. Someone with connections in the publishing world read the book and liked it, and Knopf (Random House) re-published the book. It became a best-seller in 2003-4.

Eragon is the first book in a projected trilogy called the Inheritance trilogy. I will be getting the other two books in the series when they’re published in order to find out what happens next in the land of Alagaesia. I will also suggest that Computer Guru Son read this book. He’s been reading Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in anticipation of the release of the much-hyped movie version. He really should like Eragon.

NOTE: If you’ve not read Eldest by Christopher Paolini nor seen the movies from which it borrows freely, here there be spoilers!

An orphan boy who knows little or nothing about his parentage grows up on his uncle’s farm far from the political center of the Empire. Because the boy accidentally finds something that evil Emperor wants, the Empire sends soldiers to capture the boy. He escapes, but they destroy his uncle’s farm and kill his uncle. He is befriended by a wise mentor who teaches him to use the forces of “magic” to protect himself and to defeat his enemies. He pursues the agents of the Empire and eventually is able to rescue a young woman who has been captured by the Empire, but his teacher dies at the hand of the Emperor’s soldiers. Our young hero travels through many dangers to join the forces of the rebels against the Empire, and he is able to help them win a key battle fighting an Imperial army. However, he is wounded in the battle, and he comes to realize that he must have more training if he is to finally defeat the Evil Emperor and his henchmen. He goes to a hidden land and finds there another teacher whom he calls “Master.” His training involves swordplay, meditation, and learning the many uses of magic. Before his training is complete, he must leave to go and help the rebels who are under attack by the Emperor. Near the end of part 2 of the story, the hero finds out that his father is really the Emperor’s right-hand man, an evil traitor.

Does any of this sound vaguely familiar?

How about this? A young immature hero travels with a dwarf and an elf through a mythical land. They must find a way to defeat the Evil Lord of the land who wishes to make all living creatures his slaves. Only an alliance of men, elves, and dwarves (with a few other assorted creatures thrown in for good measure) can hope to defeat the overwhelming forces of evil.

OK, one more. Dragons hatch from eggs and upon hatching choose a human partner, a dragonrider, with whom they share a telepathic connection. The dragonrider and his or her dragon work together to keep the peace and defeat the enemies of peace. They are almost inseparable and come know each other in a way that mere friends cannot understand or emulate.

I don’t mean to be too critical, and there are many things to like about Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Trilogy, the first two books of which are Eragon and Eldest. But I must say that as I read through Eldest, in particular, I kept feeling as though I had read this story before somewhere. I like fantasy, but this trilogy is far too long and not nearly as absorbing as the stories it borrows from. As you can read in my review of Eragon, I began by being skeptical about that book, and ended up liking it very much. However, Eldest just didn’t hang onto the goodwill built up in my enjoyment of Eragon. I found myself skimming–a lot.

I did like the parts about Eragon’s cousin, Roran, and the villagers that Eragon left behind when he left to become a hero and pursue revenge against his uncle’s murderers. I also enjoyed the description of the elves’ celebration of Agaeti Blodhren which featured a sort of craft/poetry exhibition in which each person in attendance brought something he had created or written. The battle scene was well done, but hard to follow, probably because of the aforementioned skimming (my fault).

I’ve had many people come to this blog looking for a Christian perspective on Eragon. I certainly can’t claim to give The Christian Viewpoint on the books, but I do have a couple of observations. First of all, I don’t believe The Inheritance Trilogy derives from a Christian worldview. Religion is dealt with in this second book of the trilogy. The dwarves are polytheistic; they worship many gods represented by idols of stone, including a creator-god named Helzvog. Their beliefs and practices sound rather Norse in origin. Humans, according to Eragon, “lacked a single overriding doctrine, but they did share a collection of superstitions and rituals, most of which concerned warding off bad luck.” Basic pagan superstition. The elves of Alagaesia, however, the epitome of the fantasy’s civilization, do not worship anyone or anything. When Eragon asks his master what elves believe, this is the reply:

We believe the world behaves according to certain inviolable rules and that. by persistent effort, we can discover those rules and use them to predict events when circumstances repeat. . . . I cannot prove that gods do not exist. Nor can I prove that the world and everything in it was not created by an entity or entities in the distant past. But I can tell you that in the millennia we elves have studied nature, we have never witnessed an instance where the rules that govern the world have been broken. That is, we have never seen a miracle. . . . Death, sickness, poverty, tyranny and countless other miseries stalk the land. If this is the handiwork of divine beings, then they are to be rebelled against and overthrown, not given obeisance, obedience, and reverence.”

So in the world of Alagaesia, we can choose between pagan polytheistic idol worship, pagan superstition, and “enlightened” closed-system scientism. Those options are limited and short-sighted. In addition, the themes of meditating and becoming one with nature and wielding magical powers for the good of all humanity are not Christian, but rather New Age spiritualism.

If you’ve read Eldest and disagree with my opinion, you’re free to share your ideas about the book in the comments. I’m rather disappointed that with such a promising beginning in Eragon, Mr. Paolini didn’t give us a better sequel.

Among the Books of Margaret Peterson Haddix

Nov30

A couple of months ago I wrote about my discovery of YA author Margaret Peterson Haddix. But at that time I hadn’t yet discovered her most popular series of books, a series that begins with Among the Hidden and continues through seven volumes. I read six of the books in the series this week, and I don’t see that the sixth book brings the story to a satisfying conclusion. However, Ms. Haddix may intend to leave the ending open, or it may all come together in the seventh book, the one I haven’t managed to find in the library yet.

The seven books in this series are:
Among the Hidden (1998)
Among the Imposters (2001)
Among the Betrayed (2002)
Among the Barons (2003)
Among the Brave (2004)
Among The Enemy (2005)
Among the Free (2006)

They’re really just one continuous story, packaged in books that are a couple of hundred pages long for ease of consumption. In my library, half of the books in the series are shelved in the children’s fiction section and the other half are shelved in the YA section. I’d say that’s an issue for libraries, but not for readers. The books are easy to read for about fourth grade and up, and the subject matter is appropriate for anyone who understands the existence of evil and won’t be traumatized by people, even main characters, dying. There is violence, but it’s not terribly graphic for the most part. The children in the book are in real danger, and that danger is not minimized or called off at the last minute.

The premise of the stories is that these children live in a world in which it is illegal for anyone to have more than two children. There has been a problem with food supply in the past, and the totalitarian government decrees that the solution is for everyone to have only two children, no more. Third children are to be aborted or, if they are found out later, killed. In such a world, all the “thirds” are hidden children. Some live in hidden rooms, and others buy fake identities, but they’re all in danger of being found and exterminated at any time.

The books follow a similar pattern: the child protagonist, a third, is forced to come of age and tap inner resources in order to survive in a hostile world. I like the way the children struggle with their own fears and the handicap of having lived a “shadow” life. I like the way some of the characters, who have a heritage of having been taught to trust in God for strength and guidance, continue to do so in a very natural and non-preachy way. sibling relationships and friendships are featured and described in a realistic way.

These books would be excellent for junior high/high school age young adults and science fiction fans. Adventure, an interesting premise, moral dilemmas, intriguing characters —The Shadow Children series has it all. I enjoyed them, and I’m still looking for the last book in the series.

Shug by Jenny Han and Rules by Cynthia Lord

Nov25



These two books have a lot in common:
1. Both are fiction, written for middle school age children, specifically twelve year old girls.
2. Both books feature a twelve year old girl as the protagonist.
3. Both are first novels for their respective authors.
4. Both stories are told in first person, present tense, which I found a bit odd. Especially in Shug, there were switches from present tense to past tense which were awkwardly handled. Is telling the story in present tense a new trend in YA fiction? I suppose it gives a sense of immediacy to the story, as if the reader is experiencing the action of the story along withe narrator instead of hearing about what happened in the past from an older and wiser teenager.
4. The themes are similar: first love, a family with secrets that are embarrassing, popularity and the struggle to fit in and be liked.
5. The plots are even similar: Girl meets boy, Girl makes friends with boy by helping him, Girl also befriends cool new girl in town, family problems embarrass Girl, Girl hurts boy’s feelings, they make up. A dance is the setting for the climactic action of both novels.
6. Both books have been nominated for the Cybil Award for Middle Grade Fiction, which is why I ordered them from the Harris County Library and read them.

So why did I like Rules so much and find Shug to be depressing and discouraging? I read Shug first and all I could think about throughout the entire 248 pages was how sad and difficult and hopeless Shug’s life was. I analyzed this feeling of gloom and realized that it wasn’t, as I would expect, because of Shug’s alcoholic mother that her life was so grim; it was because of the grim, cutthroat realities of middle school life. The Pecking Popularity Order is alive and well in Shug’s town and in her school especially. All the children in the book, who should still be playing games and squabbling over ice cream and dress up clothes, are instead worried about popularity, their first date, their first kiss, and who’s the prettiest. The children are cruel to each other, and although I’m under no illusions about how mean twelve year olds can be, I found the verbal cruelty in Shug to be particularly sad and if it’s true to life in the twenty-first century middle school, I’ve found another reason to homeschool.

If I wanted to be particularly harsh with myself, I could question my judgment and say that I liked Rules better than Shug because I find autistic children more sympathetic than alcoholic adults. However, there’s more to my preference for one book over the other than a preference for one problem over another. The children in Rules were sometimes unkind to one another; they made mistakes and needed forgiveness. But there was so much more grace in Rules; Catherine, the heroine of Rules, apologizes to the person she hurts because she is sorry, not because, like Shug, she’s calculating how unpopular she will be if she doesn’t apologize. Catherine loves her autistic brother, David, and shows it, even if she does become exasperated with the difficulties and embarrassments he brings into her life. Shug, on the other hand, has pretty much given up on her parents, not without reason. Shug’s reality should be more hopeful than Catherine’s; alcoholics do recover and become sober while autistic children don’t usually become un-autistic. Nevertheless, Shug’s only hope is to avoid her parents long enough to grow up and move out, but Catherine comes to a kind of peace about her brother and learns not to make his problems hers while still loving and communicating with him on his own terms.

If you want to read or recommend a middle school problem novel, I’d suggest Cynthia Lord’s Rules. Of course, it didn’t hurt a bit that one of the symptoms of David’s autism is that he uses the words of Arnold Lobel (Frog and Toad) to express his thoughts and feelings. Frog and Toad are much more fun than middle school back-stabbing.
And I like Catherine’s self-made rules: Pantless brothers are not my problem.

“I am laughing at you, Toad,” said Frog, “because you do look funny in your bathing suit.”

“Of course I do,” said Toad. Then he picked up his clothes and went home.

Another take on Shug from Jen Robinson at JKR Books.

the curious incident of the dog in the night-time by Mark Haddon

Nov21

I’m always a little late because I get most of my books from the library or the used bookstore. So I’m just now reading this book, published in 2003, that I remember lots of bloggers talking about last year. To add to the acclamation, I thought it was wonderful.

If you’ve never read the book or read about the book, it’s the story of Christopher John Francis Boone, age 15 years, 3 months, and 2 days, who decides to investigate the death under mysterious circumstances of a dog named Wellington. Christopher knows a lot of things —the names of all the countries of the world and their capitals, every prime number up to 7057, and the steps to take in detecting a crime ala Sherlock Holmes; however, he also knows that there many things he doesn’t understand —how to read the expressions on people’s faces, metaphors, and belief in the supernatural, to name a few. Christopher is autistic, and his autism causes him to observe things that other people don’t notice. It also causes him to discount things that can’t be explained logically. He’s good at math, bad at relationships.

In one part of his book, written in first person from Christopher’s point of view, Christopher discusses how he likes Sherlock Holmes, but dislikes Holmes’s creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He dislikes Doyle because Doyle became interested in the supernatural, particularly seances and ghosts, after the death of his son in World War II. As I read, I was left with a picture of a boy who likes Sherlock Holmes because he’s safe and predictable, because he follows the logic of the fictional detective, but can’t stand the writer who made Sherlock Holmes because Doyle is more complicated and believes in things outside the conventions of fiction. Christopher is a boy who is limited by a quirk of the mind, although quite intelligent, limited to his “maths” and his science and his safe home and his strict version of literal truth.

And, for example, some people say how can an eye happen by accident? Because an eye has to evolve from something else very like an eye and it doesn’t just happen because of a genetic mistake, and what is the use of half an eye? But half an eye is very useful because half an eye means that an animal can see half of an animal that wants to eat it and get out of the way, and it will eat that animal that only has a third of an eye or 49% of an eye instead because it hsn’t got out of the way quick enough, and the animal that is eaten won’t have babies because it is dead. And 1% of an eye is better than no eye.

So, the ever logical Christopher reduces Irreducible Complexity to nonsense. Except, of course, Christopher’s explanation is itself nonsense. Half of an eye isn’t useful at all, and 1% of an eye is not better than no eye. If I have only a few rods and cones floating about with no cornea or retina or nerves leading to the brain or whatever, I have nothing. Such a thing would never evolve. And Christopher’s superior intelligence combined with an autism that causes him to miss out on many of the skills he needs to survive in human society is not an evolutonary adaptation that will make him more likely to survive and reproduce, but rather a seriously tragic handicap that requires the help of others and the bravery and resourcefulness of Christopher himself for him to transcend his own blindness and be able to live a real, connected life.

Christopher doesn’t believe in God, but his flawed, but loving parents and other people who help him to survive the journey that he embarks upon demonstrate the truth that God believes in Christopher and has provided a way for him to survive and even thrive in spite of his limitations. I wanted to quote to Christopher many times over the course of the story, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

I really enjoyed the way author Mark Haddon was able to climb inside the mind of a high-functioning autistic young adult and present his thoughts to the reader. I don’t know if the book accurately portrays the thoughts and attitudes of an autistic person, but it feels right, and I liked Christopher in spite of his somewhat self-centered outlook on life. I wonder if Mr. Haddon knows someone or is close to someone who is autistic?

The curious incident of the dog in the night-time is short, thoughtful, and absorbing. It’s hopeful without being unrealistic about the problems facing both those with autism and their care-givers.

Margaret Peterson Haddix

Aug1

On the recommendation of my friend, Donna, also the mother of a teen young adult daughter, I discovered a new-to-me YA author, Margaret Peterson Haddix. I’ve read four of her books in the past week and a half, and although she doesn’t join my exclusive list of Best 100 Fiction Books Ever Written, she does manage to produce good, readable light fiction for teens and moms who enjoy YA fiction.

I read The House on the Gulf first, and I thought Ms. Haddix wrote mostly suspenseful mystery-type fiction. In this book, a single parent family, mother, son and thirteen year old daughter, is invited to house-sit over the summer for a retired couple who spend their summers up North and their winters in Florida. The house-sitting job is a godsend for this rather poverty-stricken family because the mom wants to go to college, and if she just gets in one good session of summer school, she might be able to get a scholarship. However, there’s something mysterious about the whole set-up. The brother, Bran, is acting really strange, hiding things, making odd rules for his younger sister, Britt, even lying about seemingly insignificant stuff. So Britt decides to find out what’s really going on. Although I could see parts of what was coming, I didn’t put the whole plot together until it was revealed at the end. So, I thought, a good suspense novel for thirteen year olds.

Then, I read Leaving Fishers, and I realized that Ms. Haddix writes movie of the week, current youth crisis novels. Leaving Fishers tells the story of Dorry, a lonely high school student who has just moved to the big city of Indianapolis with her family. She can’t find any friends at school until she becomes involved with the Fishers, a seemingly Christian youth group. The Fishers inundate Dorry with all the friendship and affection and attention she’s been missing, and she’s happy to reciprocate by agreeing with whatever they ask of her. However, it becomes more and more difficult to live within the guidelines set up for Fishers, and Dorry is torn between her commitment to God and the Fishers and her need to have an identity of her own. So, I thought, a good teen issue novel for fourteen and fifteen year olds.

With the next novel, Double Identity, the current issue (cloning) and the suspense (a mysterious stranger following the almost-thirteen year old protagonist) are both there, but a new element is added. This book is ever-so-slightly sci-fi. It takes place in the future, a few years in the future, and it’s about cloning human beings and what might happen if a scientist secretly and successfully cloned a baby. Lots of action, sympathetic characters, this one was my favorite of the four I read.

Finally, I read Escape from Memory, the story of Kira who finds out when she is hypnotized at a slumber party that she has repressed memories of escaping from a war zone. Kira begins to investigate her past, and she gets into more trouble than she and her best friend, Lynne, together, can handle. I had to suspend my disbelief a little too willingly for this one, but I enjoyed it. It featured computer recovery of memories, the Cold War, and ethical dilemmas for scientists.

All of Ms. Haddix’s books are quick reads, absorbing and well-written. I also noticed that she has sympathetic portrayals of Christians and Christianity which is a welcome change from some movies and books. Dancer Daughter read them, too, and enjoyed them, although she said that the chapters with invariable cliff-hanger endings were a little annoying. I imagine the technique does keep one reading. I’m looking forward to reading more of Ms. Haddix’s fiction, and that’s high praise from a rather critical old mom with a low tolerance for twaddle.