The Wooden Mile by Chris Mould (Something Wickedly Weird series)

This is a great little read. It'd suit a younger reader, who was just finding her feet in the world of chapter books. It's got one of the usual motifs: lone child, benevolent but distant parent figures, great danger, need for them to save the day.

It moves fast through the plot and there's not much in the way of dramatic tension. It's not the kind of book that a kid would get 'stuck' in. And for that reason it might not be terribly compelling for the child who wants real substance and significance in their book.

The baddies are fairly incompetent and a bit menacing, but the main character never feels particularly overwhelmed by them. The minor characters are a bit ineffectual and uncommunicative, which pose one of the problems for the protagonist.

Some of the details are whimsical but not really relevant, given the space they receive. (Like the wooden mile, which is really cool, but not that important in the book). Similarly, some of the dialogue, inner dialogue and descriptions are written in a clunky way.

Great, quirky illustrations.

It's an easy read. It has lots of elements that would appeal to a younger reader (pirates, lighthouses, etc).

The main character is happily disobedient, and the adults kind of know that but don't do much about it. There's the occasional lecture, but he really doesn't take it seriously. I think it would be useful to discuss whether the adults are really helping the situation. And how the boy could have helped solve the situation without putting himself in danger. While it's fine within the confines of the story, in real life the strategies he uses don't work. He'd be dead. Swiftly. Horribly.

Another thing that could be useful to talk through is how secrets are kept and why. How does a group of people agree together to live with pain and suffering rather than rally and solve it? Why might they? What is preventing them from reaching a better solution? How could someone convince them to change? What effect does it have to have a secret that no-one can mention? What would happen if someone spoke about it openly?

Following Jesus means being prepared to name the elephant in the room from time to time. Thinking about why this might be better for people and how it can be done without destroying people and relationships could be a good conversation to begin. This book would be a useful context for that.

For younger readers: 4 stars out of 5.  For older readers/those who like substance: 2 stars out of 5.

The Dragons 1: Camelot by Colin Thompson

This book is trying to be Terry Pratchett for pre-teens. With bottom jokes. And jokes only a disenfranchised, educated, lower class English person would be able to get. But it's published in Australia for an Australian audience.

I didn't enjoy it.

It's slightly clever. And the basic plot is OK: the spoilt king turns out not to be and the malnourished, flame resistant boy is the true king. There is a sub plot with a neighbouring dragon family which is resolved in the resolution of the main plot and everyone lives happily ever after except for the false king (and his various victims along the way).

Several people perish is fairly dire circumstances. There are some black inner dialogues from supporting characters. And this is all done tongue-in-cheek with no real attempt to deal with the horrific reality that this points to. In a sense this is a sub-genre of children's literature, but to do it well you need a really solid, sympathetic main character so that there is some kind of substance to the whole. Thompson lacks this.

It's fairly easy to read, notwithstanding the interrupting (and irrelevant, apparently humorous) footnotes. It might be funny if you're the right kind of kid at the right kind of age.

I think what I'd like to discuss if one of my kids were reading it, would be the way we think one thing and say another to get what we want. And the way we try and use rules to get people to do what we want. I think he shows the negative aspects of both of those in such a way as to demonstrate that people are completely manipulative. There isn't one character who isn't manipulative in the book, even (and especially) the good guys.

The usefulness of truth would also be good to chat about, given that truth is central to Christian thinking. How is truth useful where someone is volatile and corrupt? Isn't it better to lie? How do lies make things worse in the book? How could they have made things better? How can you tell the truth in a way that doesn't make things worse?

I'd give it 1 star out of 5. It's possible that I'm way too old for this book to be even vaguely entertaining.

The Shadow Thieves (The Cronus Chronicles) by Anne Ursu

What does it mean if the myths of ancient Greece are true? What if the Underworld is as they describe, with the kinds of gods and demi-gods and such like in charge?

The main characters journey to the Underworld to save their friends from death. They manage to not eat the food and come back unscathed. Their relationship (they are cousins) grows and they learn to grow up and take responsibility, tell the truth and trust each other. It's got a funky kind of touch and doesn't feel stodgy.

I like this book because it takes the Underworld seriously, and uses this motif to consider what it means to be dead and alive. It doesn't sugar coat the unattractiveness of the Greek Underworld, nor idealise its main characters. I thought Ursu painted well the meaningless of life in the Underworld, the static existence with no future, the sense of 'greyness', the arid, empty world of death. It's awful. It's faithful to the myths. The unspoken conclusion has to be that life is worth holding onto at all costs because there is just empty meaningless floating waiting, if the Greeks were right. And it is useful because it does demonstrate that what you believe happens after you die changes how you live.

If you are going to die and face an eternity of nothingness, meaningless floating about if you manage to get a coin and get over the Styx, then what you do in life is suck as much as you can get, because there is nothing much to look forward to. Specifically there's nothing relationally to look forward to. All you've got is a very individual existence with no connections. It's a bit sad.

But if you die and you have relationships, whether they are harrowing or pure delight, then life now is different. The value we place on people and our investment in them, if we are Christian is a glimpse of a life to come: where this world is the 'grey' existence (compared to the next) and where the joy we have from relationships will prosper in the hereafter when our (and their) selfishness is finally removed. That is the Christian hope: that our relationships with God and each other will reach their zenith and continue uninterrupted by any ill or evil forever. It's a hope that is worth living for, and looking forward to. Death isn't the end. The best we can hope for isn't just being turned into a cat so we can continue to somehow be part of our loved ones' lives. (Should have put a spoiler alert in there. Oops).

This is one of the more compelling, well rounded stories in the young teenager age bracket. It would suit 12-14 year old children, I think. 3/5 stars.

All Women Will Miss Their Babies

I have a question - I've been chewing it over for a while. Is it really helpful to say to mothers of young children, "It's hard but these are the 'golden years' and you'll miss them later?"

I'm wondering for two reasons:

1. It makes it more difficult when you should be enjoying something that is hard (with good bits), and so you end up feeling guilty over something that is not actually bad. That is, it's OK to say 'this is hard' and hate it and find contentment anyway. There is nothing wrong with that. You don't need feel guilty over not enjoying it as much as your future self may miss it.

2. It feels like it is never OK to say 'This is just hard'. There's no silver lining. This is incredibly unrealistic. Some days are bad days. Yes, if we trust Jesus, we are engaged in a struggle to be thankful even there, but that can be thankfulness for tiny things in the context of knowing that we are safe in Jesus. It doesn't have to be, 'This is awful, but it's actually good', which is what this whole thing feels like.
Maybe it'll be something you look back on sentimentally, but you just don't know. You might spend the rest of your life saying, 'Thank goodness that's over'. 

And so what if you miss it? You can't add the pressure of 'making the most of it' onto everything else without diminishing everything else. We can't live in the future. Unless we have absolutely awful lives every single day, then we will miss things as we grow up. People will die. We'll miss them. We move and miss that tree or seasons or something. It doesn't mean we should always enjoy what we love or the people we love in some seriously dysfunctional fear based future focused way. Which we can't sustain anyway.

You and I may miss our babies. We probably will. But the package of having a baby means being sleep deprived, irrational, not completely in control and overwhelmed at times. Not to mention bodily fluids. I doubt anyone looks back and misses the smell of vomit. Yet that is part of what it means to be a full time carer of most little children.

Being a Christian means being able to be realistic about the sharp edges of life being interwoven with great joy. This is a fallen world. Our apples have worms. But we still like apples. We say 'thank you' to God for the apples. And we pray that we'll cope with the worms.

Christian women, of all people, shouldn't be adding guilt into the already heated world of mothers of small children.

So, there is the answer to my question. Thank you. Thank you very much.

The Unusual Suspects by Michael Buckley

This novel is fairly fast moving. It is the second in the series of the 'The Sisters Grimm', which explores the idea that descendants of the Grimm Brothers are able to interact with fairy tales characters. These characters have all been exiled to a small town and aren't terribly happy about it. Their crimes are sorted by the Grimm sisters, under the supervision of their grandmother and with the help of Puck, of Midsummer fame.

The main character is the eldest sister, who is entering adolescence and struggling to connect with her family and deal with the absence of her parents. Her parents have been kidnapped and she is convinced that the fairy tales creatures are to blame. All of them. So, she knows who is to blame with the latest crime in her small town - the fairy tale characters. What follows is a fairly predictable tale where the fairy tale characters become more sympathetic the more she gets to know them, and apologises to everyone and they all live happily...no. That is the useful thing about this book. There is no 'happily ever after'. There is resolution, but it comes through communication and toleration, with a fair bit of self evaluation and bearing with others.

The bad characters are really bad. And they are pretty gross too. The good characters are trying hard to help, getting it wrong, being ticked off with others for very little reason or being seriously annoying. But they're good because they are fundamentally loyal to each other. The themes of honour, loyalty, teamwork and so forth get played out and considered.

The bad guys are beyond reason and indeed the last illustration of the book (by Peter Ferguson) is really freaky. It is one of the most alarming illustrations I have ever seen in a book. The bad guys really are psychotic. This is one of the weaknesses of the book. Evil isn't that easy to recognise and we often turn out to be the bad guys, even in small ways. This book buys into the idea that we're all pretty good, sometimes corrupted by pressures but in completely understandable ways and this makes us a tragic figure. The bad guys are 'them' and you can't connect with them in any meaningful way: they are morally and rationally operating on a completely different plane. But in reality, we're all bad and those who choose to do evil often choose just to be selfish: it's pretty basic and doesn't involve bodily functions.

Part of the usefulness of this book lies in the way it demonstrates our need for each other. The main character isolates herself from the group, but in doing so her relationships suffer and her capacity to draw useful conclusions suffers because her capacity for thinking things through is enhanced. This is quite complex for the age group and could be a useful basis of discussion of how we operate as individuals and connect together.

This book could suit an early adolescent. The worldview is a bit bleak. The kidnapped parents loom large and there's no one to really help. The grandmother is well meaning but not overly competent. They don't get hurt, but not because of anything other than sheer luck and pluck. It's a less safe world than Harry Potter.

I would give this 3 stars out of 5.

Eoin Colfer: Warp (Book 1) The Reluctant Assassin

OK, so I'm a huge Artemis Fowl fan. Love the books and many of them are waiting on the boys' shelves for them to read when they are older. There's some of his other books that I really enjoyed as well.

This book was hard to finish. I think it's the most black I have ever read from Colfer. I don't mind a nice helping of black in my books, and I appreciate the kind of black in the Artemis Fowl books. But this was a whole 'nother thing.

I'd say it's written for a much older audience than his other books, and certainly, I wouldn't want to be giving it to someone much younger than 14 or 15. He does that thing of his where the adults and caregivers are shadowy impotent figures, which is a fairly common device in children's literature. I think Colfer is really good at creating real but insubstantial 'caretaker' type of characters. But in the world he creates here, there is real death, cruelty and pain. His main characters have to deal with a psychotic superhuman with unresolved parental issues as they time travel between our time and Victorian England.

He does capture the differences between old and new London well. The stench, the ease of transport, the implications of CCTV as well as speech and physical differences are all covered. And the time travel plot device is well constructed: it isn't without flaws and the kind of flaws that do involve real risk taking and have serious consequences.

The two main characters work together realistically, working out their various issues and discovering who they are and where they belong in the world (and time line).

It's well written and has a full on pace. It's stimulating to read. It's harrowing to read, at the same time. Yes, the world is awful and adults let you down. But when the big bad is a psychotic superhuman with no empathy, and you have to pretend to murder someone just to survive... it's moved to a whole new level.

I don't think it should be avoided for these reasons, just not handed to an avid 10 year old Artemis Fowl fan, as though it is the same thing.

The Flaxfield Quartet: Book 1: Dragonborn by Toby Forward

This book is disorientating because it insists on being whimsical. There is nothing inherently wrong with being whimsical, but it's hard to get a lock on the world here and how it works. You need to keep sticking with the book to get an understanding of how the world works, how magic works and what on earth is going on with the bad guys and even where the good guys might be.  There are ominous characters that don't seem to fit, but add to the bleakness and slightly adversarial tone of the book. They might be developed in subsequent books. Getting a visual image of the world is also hard: it seems like our world, yet utterly unlike it, such that it is hard to follow the imaginings of the author.

I liked it, though. There are some great characters, aside from the main character (Sam), through whose eyes we see a lot of the main action. He is trying to figure out the world, and the people in it, and how he fits and what he should do. It's all coming-of-age type stuff, but on a massive scale, which really captures how it feels at the time. Even trying to figure out the other characters is tough for Sam, whose experience of life is so limited, but like most adolescents, he really needs to understand who others are and whether to trust them. This is really difficult for Sam. So, one of the key characters who dies as the story opens, seems to look like a bully at the beginning, but is by the end of the book much more sympathetic. The opposite also happens: helpful characters are revealed to be dodgy as the book unfolds.

There are a lot of extra characters who feel  like they'll rejoin the story later, but that may also be an attempt to imitate life: people we grow attached to leave and because we are attached to them we expect to see them again, but we don't always.

The big bad is defeated, but again, it's multi-layered and existentially hard to enjoy. And the big bad really is bad: there is torture, to which we are privy, at least for a few pages.

It's really complex, trying to do so much, with so many huge themes.

In terms of plot, I'd be hard-pressed to retell this. It feels like a roller coaster, with a lot happening and the significance of what is happening seems to unravel slowly, so that it's hard to really see the significance of what is taking place as it happens. It isn't a surprise to discover this author is influenced by le Guin, as it has that same 'feel'.

This would take a bit more maturity to read and stick with, and would need a bit of debriefing. It's not a safe, easy world, and is complex and difficult in ways that don't always ring true of this world. That's not necessarily a weakness. It is worth mentioning though as the book is dealing with issues which do make our world a hard place to live. The resolutions, and even the descriptions aren't necessarily a good model to use to think about living in a hard world.

Having said all of that, and it is clear that I did feel frustrated by this book, I would recommend it. It's interesting, compelling, challenging (both as narrative and in terms of some of the issues it tackles) and thought provoking. It isn't gritty as a lot are in this genre, but is more well-rounded, and raises issues in ways that are genuinely thought provoking, rather than the hackney-ed emo type scrawl that gets a bit old. Life is hard, but is also more than just hard, and that is difficult to capture. This book does a good job of that.

Review: The Ranger's Apprentice (Book 1: The Ruins of Gorlan) by John Flanagan

So, I read books most nights to reset my brain to sleep. Nothing else seems to work. But there's a lot of dreary ill-conceived, badly written books out there. And a lot of cool books in the young adult section. So, I'm going to review some books which will also serve as notes for future reference, when our boys graduate from Famous Five and want something more action packed.

Here's the first: The Rangers Apprentice: The Ruins of Gorlan by John Flanagan.

In short: I enjoyed this. There is basically no narrative tension beyond a few pages. Almost everything is resolved quickly and in the best, most honorable way. It's an easy book to read which doesn't require a lot from the reader. The world is accessible and interesting, feeling more like a historical novel in places than fantasy.

The main character (Will) is the normal misfit of the fantasy type genre, with the absent parent motif from much children's literature also well and truly present. He is part of a group of friends whose ways part as they are chosen for different apprenticeships. Their careers are traced loosely throughout the book as it follows Will's development into a ranger, and the significance of the rangers are explored in the context of the world. There's training, conflict, heroism, quest, self-discovery and all in the shadow of strong, benevolent parent type figures, who act as we all wish parents acted with just the right mix of allowing potential and independence to flourish, and yet are there to recognise the development and protect as required.

It's a nice world. There should be unicorns. But it does nurture and explore honour, noble heartedness, endurance and other things which are easily overlooked and ignored in young adult fiction. In real  life these things feel much less heroic and are much harder to choose, and there are not handy parental figure looking over your shoulder congratulating you when you actually manage to do them. But in our dreams they are. And, as a Christian, this isn't too far from the knowledge that God knows our silent, hard choices and is pleased, and that that matters deeply and eternally. So, I don't think it's a useless thing to have the kind of dreamwish that this book generates. I kind of like it. It's only one half of the story, but it's an important half that is often overlooked in a genre that seems to enjoy rolling in the mud for its own sake.