Dragons with attitude

More Middle-grade adventures

I’ve been spending time reading through the best-selling Wings of Fire series by Tui T. Sutherland. Very entertaining, and great examples of story-telling craft.

Narrative voice and well-defined characters are why these books are so successful. Sutherland clearly lays out “here’s this character’s temperament, attitude, goals” and you know by the end of the story the crises will directly challenge all of those things.

I have enjoyed all of the books so far but I didn’t *like* all the main characters. Some I like a lot more than others, and I suspect the author did too. That, to me, is actually the most interesting aspect of the series, because it tells me what I as a reader wanted from the story. And what makes a successful hero.

I should explain that each book is told from a different character’s point of view. So you may really love one character, but boom, in the next book you have to identify with a new one.

I want courage and heroism and character growth if I am going to identify with the point of view character. If they’re cowardly, betray their friends, refuse to help others in need, then I don’t want to identify with them. And yet some of these characters do just that. I was shaking my head, wondering why we had to go there. Sure, it leaves a lot of room for character development, but it also leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Who gets to be a hero?

And yet my favorite character in the series so far is a mass murderer. There’s a lot of violence in the series, and I am ambivalent about it. But it doesn’t seem to have the same impact as it would if these were human characters. Dragons are naturally violent; or so the dragons invested in the ongoing war claim. Our heroes don’t agree with this familiar human argument.

Peril burns everything she touches; she can’t help it, it was the way she was born. An evil queen uses her as a weapon of punishment. Peril obeys her because she doesn’t know any better, until someone points out she doesn’t have to do this, that she could choose something else. How do you stop being a weapon of mass destruction? Now that’s a moral journey.

This happens in the first book of the series. When we get to Peril’s own book, we see her attempts to change who she is, as she tries to figure out how to be a good, likable dragon, even though most dragons shun her, hating her for what’s she’s done in the past.

Peril says what other people think but would never say out loud. She’s rude, blunt, and funny. She’s also smart. We don’t mind identifying with her — she’s trying, she helps others, she would do anything for the dragon she’s besotted with, and in the end she proves she really has changed, because of the choices she makes.

Peril’s character is transgressive – she doesn’t bother to be socially appropriate and polite, because that’s not going to work for her anyway. She will never be ‘acceptable.’ And we can vicariously enjoy being rude and dangerous and courageous at the same time.

She’s a great hero. I just wish she’d come back in another book.

Middle-grade point of view

It’s my second summer of reading middle-grade books and I’ve been having a great time.

A couple of marvelous books stand out.

The first is The Truth as Told by Mason Buttle. I am usually not a big fan of realistic novels for this age group because they tend to be reductionist (“here’s the bully, here’s the inattentive parent, here’s our hero battling odds, here’s the specific trendy problem that appeals to NY publishers…”) and at first glance this seems like it fits all those categories.

But someone told me this was a great book, so I tried the first few pages and was hooked.

So how is this different? Mason’s narrative voice.

Leslie Connor pulled off something extremely hard to do: she gave us a first-person POV with an unreliable narrator who is extremely appealing. Mason doesn’t understand everything that he records as part of his story–but we do. Mason is fun to hang out with, and we end up liking him a lot, just as most of the people around him do. Yes, there are quite a few adults who should be paying more attention, but the reasons they don’t see what’s happening are believable, and mean no one except the actual bad guy looks anything other than human.

Mason has some pretty serious problems: extreme dyslexia, abnormal sweating, he’s too big for his age, and his parents are dead. Kids call him stupid, and it seems he doesn’t read other people’s emotions as well as we can, just from his descriptions. He lives with his grandmother and his uncle. Their lives were turned upside down by the death of Mason’s parents and by the death of Mason’s best friend — in mysterious circumstances. It is this mystery that’s the spine of the plot.

I won’t give too much away because it’s such a fun book to read you should discover it for yourself. My only quibble is that the villain was so completely villainous, and I wasn’t comfortable with the implication that his bad behavior was caused by an absent father. But we don’t really know much about the villain’s motivations, and it doesn’t really matter, because Mason is the star.

It was great to spend time with him, with Ms. Blinny (I loved Ms. Blinny) and the people in Mason’s world.

It’s the end of the world, and I feel fine

Summer is just about over, but we still have some middle-grade adventures to complete!

I wasn’t initially enthusiastic about the concept for City of Ember, because I have read a lot of survival after the end of the world stories. But the author was profiled in the local newspaper and I was intrigued by the story of how she came to write it, and it’s not a dystopia.

I was charmed when I began reading it. The book reminded me of Robinson Crusoe, with that exacting level of detail of how people live, what they eat (potatoes and turnips), and what they wear. For them it’s entirely normal to live with no sky, and with lights that go out at a certain time of night. The emotional heart of the story are the explorations of two young people finding their way in the world, when everything is an adventure, not gloom and doom. Although there’s plenty of gloom when the lights go out. And of course the satisfying middle grade trope of adults in power being a threat, even to themselves.

I wanted to find out how the kids would get out of their predicament, and what had caused it (being of the duck-and-cover generation, I naturally assumed nuclear war) and by the end of the book I still don’t know why the underground city was built, or why they had to stay there for several hundred years. Apparently I must read the next book, The People of Sparks.

Our brains are wired to look for experiences that will help us survive; maybe that’s why we never tire of imagining what we’d do when the apocalypse finally comes. I recommend the book, especially for younger readers, because there’s nothing too scary in it, yet the suspense is satisfying.

Books for kids (and adults) who love animals

My middle-grade adventures continue. This time I’m revisiting two books I’ve read before. The point of the exercise is to learn from the masters, to recognize what’s done well, and these books do so many things well.

In How to Speak Dolphin, Ginny Rorby creates a complex and emotionally honest story about Lily, the older sister of an autistic brother. Never sentimental, this book is deeply moving, presenting Lily’s dilemma of whether to help Nori, a young dolphin being held in captivity for human use, or ignore the animal’s suffering because relating to Nori is one of the few things that make her autistic brother happy.

Lily’s friend Zoe, who just happens to be blind, keeps pushing Lily. She has no doubt that keeping social animals like dolphins in captivity is cruel and never justified. I won’t provide any spoilers but will say the ending wasn’t easy or simple but felt true to the realities of the world we live in.

This was the second book of Ms. Rorby’s that I read. The first one was much more emotionally wrenching thanks to my own experiences with animals kept for medical research, and the kinds of research I was exposed to in my primatology courses.

That book, Hurt Go Happy, won Ms. Rorby the Schneider Family Book Award. Joey Willis is deaf and her mother won’t allow her to learn sign language. That changes when she meets the chimp Sukari, who signs, and Joey secretly begins to learn it too. When Sukari is moved from a relatively loving and safe situation to a prison-like facility where animals are “stored” for medical experimentation, Joey has to decide what to do. The book can be hard to read, but everything is based on fact and the story is immediately relatable for kids and adults alike. The human characters are placed in difficult situations and Rorby’s characters always have enough complexity for us to empathize with them as well as the animals that are trapped or endangered by humans.

Well-researched, powerfully written, and based in fact, I highly recommend both books to readers of all ages.

Diana Wynne Jones’ Last Book

The next book in my middle-grade adventures is a book that was left unfinished at the time of the author’s death. I was absolutely thrilled to find a new book by Diana Wynne Jones on the shelves of my local library.

It’s sad we won’t have any more adventures from Ms. Jones, a wonderful storyteller, but this last book, finished by her sister, Ursula Jones, is a great read, with all the surprises and inventiveness you’d expect. The afterword, describing how the book was finished was marvelous, too. This reader saw no indication that anyone besides the original author had written any part of it, a great tribute to the care and inspiration of Ursula Jones.

The Islands of Chaldea tells the tale of Aileen, a twelve-year-old girl who thinks she hasn’t inherited any magical powers, causing inevitable disappointment to her magical family. Her aunt Beck, the Wise Woman of Skarr, has been raising her and its about time for those powers to manifest. Aileen’s island and her life have been disrupted by a magical barrier that keeps anyone from approaching one of the islands of the title. Unfortunately, her father and her country’s prince in waiting were both taken hostage and hidden behind the barrier. Aileen and her aunt set out on a quest to free the hostages and lower the barrier, traveling from island to island and meeting interesting characters and magical figures along the way. With magic a common occurrence, nothing is ever as it seems, and as usual in one of Diana Wynne Jones’ books, you can’t anticipate what will happen, although you know in the end Aileen will make a difference, and the hostages will be freed.

I thoroughly enjoyed this lovely tale about a girl reclaiming her family and claiming her power by seeing through the intrigue and lies of the adults around her. Highly recommended.

Let the animals speak

In children’s books we aren’t surprised when animals take center stage, or when they speak. We find that unusual, or “odd” in adult literature (the major exception seems to be fantasy where there are a *lot* of talkative dragons, but that’s another post). And even in kidlit, in a realistic story, the animals have agency and a voice only figuratively.

We don’t need animals to talk to tell us their side of the story (although I like it when they do.) We know what dogs are feeling without any verbal explanations, and they seem to know our feelings too.

Next up in my middle-grade adventures is a story about a girl on the autism spectrum who finds companionship with a stray dog. Rain Reign by Ann Martin takes some pretty big risks. The biggest risk is having an autistic child as the viewpoint character. While that helps us feel her concerns and worldview with great intimacy, Rose’s repetitive interests (homonyms!) and constant repetition of the same questions and thoughts risks having the reader react just as Rose’s father or the other teasing kids do – with annoyance or impatience. I love words, but even I was daunted by intro pages that launched into an explanation of the difference between homonyms and homophones as my entree into this world. Maybe my attention span has been eaten by the Internet, but this felt like an uphill climb for the first pages of a book aimed at 8-12 year-olds.

I enjoyed the book, but because I react differently than an autistic individual would, it was all too easy for my reactions to diverge from Rose’s. I was baffled by her constant nagging of her father who clearly had a hair trigger temper and was dangerously close to being violent. It felt so wrong to me that a child wouldn’t read that. Of course that is “showing” that Rose can’t read feelings, but again, I felt distanced from her.

What was absolutely great? Descriptions of her relationship with the dog she’s named Rain, and the physical descriptions of Rain’s affection for her. When Rain is lost during a hurricane (Rose suspects her father let the dog out deliberately so she’d run away) there is a Quest to locate her again, and Rose does find her dog. I won’t spoil the plot by revealing more, but by the end of the book Rose chooses to sacrifice her love for Rain to follow the “rules” and I felt unsatisfied by the ending. Losing both her parents, and the dog she loved, we don’t know whether Rose’s future will be better or worse.

This book reminded me strongly of another book that deals with autism and moral choices about animals, How to Speak Dolphin. Again we have a less than sympathetic father, and an autistic child dependent on a relationship with a captive dolphin to be able to interact with the world. There are major differences, though, including the fact that in Dolphin,we see the world through a sibling’s eyes, and the moral choice is whether to privilege the needs of that autistic child over the rights of a captive dolphin. I think that makes that a good candidate for my next middle-grade adventure!

Tesser well

Sigh. This seems to be another time-travel book that no one calls science fiction. It is wearing to have all that barbed wire to climb over, getting in and out of the genre ghetto. Some days you just get so tired of the snags in your socks.

But the ghetto doesn’t apply to kids’ books, right? Subvert them when they’re young, mwa ha ha, although they seem to finally be calling A Wrinkle in Time a science fiction book. Perhaps it was just to justify the dayglo makeup on Oprah in the movie.

Speaking of a Wrinkle in Time, my next middle-grade adventure is a humdinger of an homage to that very novel. In When you Reach Me by Rebecca Stead, Miranda carries her favorite book with her everywhere, and that just happens to be Wrinkle. In fact, she refuses to read anything else. (Whoa there, Missy, there were sequels, too.) Another main character in the book figures out how to tesser in time, and that fact is central to the plot and the novel’s structure. But is that what the book is about? What a good question!

No. At its heart, it’s about friendship, at that age where friendship is everything, at least among girls. How you treat your friends, how you betray your friends, how you do or do not trust other people, whether your pride prevents you from helping a friend— that’s what it’s about. But the time-travel makes it all so much more amazing, in a 12 monkeys kind of way. (If you haven’t seen 12 monkeys, go see it now. I’ll wait.)

I am late to the party in heaping praise on When You Reach Me but it deserves another heap. Anything that can get me to spend a Saturday afternoon re-reading almost the entire book to notice the clues I missed before, and working out whether the ending would have completely changed the future or not, deserves its popularity, even if it didn’t have to spend time locked up in the scifi ghetto with the other deserving books. The deft handling of clues, and the revelation of bits and pieces of the mystery was masterful. I would dearly love to know how the author kept track of when she would reveal what. If you want to learn how to write a mystery, this book is a great model of the controlled release of information.

I love this book for so many reasons, but mostly because the author played fair with the reader and gave us all the information we needed to work out what was happening, before the narrator apparently did. If you paid attention, you even noticed when the main character’s self-centered behavior may have been partially responsible for the almost-tragedy, that was a tragedy nonetheless. See how I am trying not to create a spoiler here? Whew.

Despite this, the reader is rooting for the MC, but the complexity of motives and emotions is what’s so satisfying and plausible. I’m going to make a philosophical pronouncement and say that girls can be pretty mean at that age, especially in the throes of that “you’re not my best friend anymore” warfare.

For the record, I completely choked up at the unexpected dedication in a book Miranda receives as a gift. I admit it, okay?

This was a beautiful book that makes you both think and feel, and it’s quite clear why it won the Newbery Honor Medal.

Now please, Ms. Stead, share your plot chart with us?

For extra credit, a youtube video in which Dr. Tyson explains dimensions and tesseracts in a way which lets me (and everyone else) off the hook for having so much trouble trying to visualize this in high school geometry class. Tesseracts – Neil deGrasse Tyson. Thank you, Dr. Tyson, for helping me let go of geometry trauma.

For extra, extra credit (you nerds know who you are) if you like time travel books, I can recommend the Ijon Tichy books by Samuel Lem. Start with Memoirs of a Space Traveler and once you’ve had a taste you can move on to the rest. Not only is the science right, but the books are quite funny.

Egyptian curses and a very smart girl

First up in my middle-grade adventures is the first book in the Theodosia series by R.L. La Fevers, titled Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos. The settings alternate between Victorian London and Egypt, and the author clearly knows her ancient Egyptian history and magic (with some liberties taken to create scary situations).

I’ve actually read all four books in the series now (can I get a sticker?) and am a little disappointed there aren’t more, although the last book did provide satisfying closure for secrets and questions revealed in the earlier books.

Our feisty heroine, Theodosia, has several secrets she’s trying to keep from her not terribly attentive parents, all the while hoping to gain their attention and approval. Luckily she’s resourceful, brave, and takes matters into her own hands to protect the people around her when they clearly can’t do it for themselves.

Her father runs a Museum in London, its collections in competition with those of the British Museum. Her mother is absent at the start of the first book; as a professional archaeologist, she’s off on a dig in Egypt and is sending back artifacts for the museum. Unfortunately, only Theodosia can tell when an artifact has a curse on it, and she’s devised several ways to test for this, and to counteract such spells.

She can’t explain her abilities to her parents because they simply don’t believe her and worry that she’s “peculiar.”

So when she finds she’s the target of an evil secret society (the Serpents of Chaos) bent on using magic to throw the world into Chaos and start another world war, she must hide her skills, her meetings with allies, and the real reason strange things are happening around her.

It’s left to Theodosia, and her friend Sticky Will to meet the threat of these sinister forces, since the adults have trouble believing what they see, and never quite grasp the dangers that threaten the children.

What I love most about these books is the narrative voice of Theodosia. She’s smart, assertive, and has strong opinions without that snarkiness that seems to be the bane of contemporary kidlit. LaFevers also convinces me that the narrator is British, and her word choice is appropriate for the period, with nary an anachronism. I enjoyed spending time with this smart, unappreciated child who has rollicking adventures while employing ancient magic.

Highly recommended. A girl-centered world of magic with fast pacing and suspense. My candidate for a great adventure movie for girls.

(Image Credit: A wedjat eye of Horus, an amulet of protection from the Metropolitan Museum of NY. The wedjat eye is important throughout all the Theodosia books.)

The summer of middle-grade reading

This summer, in addition to my writing projects, I will be on catching up on all the great middle-grade or early YA books that I haven’t had a chance to read yet.

One of the instigators of this was my visit to Ashland, OR, part of my quest to decide where to live during the next phase of my life.

While I was there, I stumbled across the most fabulous children’s bookstore ever, Treehouse Books! Take a look at the website to see what a magical place it is. Since it was 104 degrees outside the day I was there, it was no great hardship to spend a couple of hours raptly pulling books from the shelves.

With great effort, I kept myself in hand, selecting only what I had to have at that moment (rather than the entire store). Reviews of those books — and others—to come!

I should mention I was bowled over by the public library there, too; there’s an entire floor for YA and they have piles of current releases, unlike my local. The library in Eugene, OR also had me lusting over what was available there – they had a real poetry section. As in University presses, small presses, recent releases, not just stale anthologies of people long dead. It was wonderful to see.

I suspect the population being served by my local system is much larger and the competition more fierce (and then there’s always the question of where the budget comes from.)

In terms of bookstores and libraries, Oregon rocks. 104 degree weather? Not so much. And every time I visit I have to relearn that green and rural Oregon has much more polluted air than the urban area where I live. California’s clean air law makes a huge difference; CA gasoline doesn’t contain such high levels of benzene and other toxic hydrocarbons. Maybe OR legislators should worry less about who pumps the gas and more about what’s in it.