Five Kingdoms: Sky Raiders by Brandon Mull

The main character is likable, interesting and loyal. He's a great friend. He's both clever and yet still a kid, so prone to doing dumb things. 

This book is a delight. And it feels like it's written for kids, starring kids who act and think and speak like kids or young adults. It's refreshing after reading some clever books in which the kids are ideologically pure adults in kid form. Here the kids do dumb things that adults simply wouldn't do, like going into a stranger's house, into the basement without any adults knowing where they were. Or being told not to speak in the Quiet Wood (in case they are attacked) and two of the characters having a sparring match to see who can have the last word. Adults would tend not to do those things; but they are fairly natural to kids.


The world is reasonably easy to come to grips with. There are certain elements that are difficult to comprehend (like the castles made from clouds containing treasure), but the whole is reasonably cohesive. It's an unpredictable, difficult, different world compared with earth, but it's not so incongruous as to be unbelievable. The other characters are well realised and interact differently, so aren't copies of the main character, nor copies of each other.

One of the issues of the book that would be worth discussing is how trust is earned. The main character is entrusted with an important secret because he demonstrates trustworthiness to the character carrying the secret. This is partly because of his loyalty and also because he shows himself to be the kind of person who will jump into a situation and help. In all the situations he does this, it turns out well. But it might not. What would happen if it didn't? How far should we go?

Cole, the main character, solves his fights by thinking. This would be a great conversation. How do his ideas help? How are they better than the other strategies by some of the other characters (like straight out fighting)? Where would his thinking need to start as he's trying to figure out what to do?

A wise parent would also have a conversation about entering strange people's houses. Ever. And not going into a stranger's basement. Ever.

There's fighting, real sword play. There's betrayal by grown ups. There is slavery. There is corrupt government and a king who has his daughters apparently killed in order to imprison them and steal their powers. So, lots of grown up stuff to deal with and discuss, but not too brutal with the details.

I like this book. I want to read the other four. 4 out of 5 stars.

Jinx by Sage Blackwood

 

Jinx is a great, easy read. The main character, Jinx is likable and interesting. He has one of the coolest abilities I've ever come across. His friends (whom he meets about 2/3rds of the way into the book), are also interesting, likable and a bit unknowable.

Jinx is 'rescued' by a wizard and becomes his apprentice, leaving his master to solves some problems and defeat the bad guy with his friends. It's part orphan story, part quest and it leaves room for the next book to be all about a follow-up quest. Jinx lives in an interesting, believable world which is fairly easy to access and imagine. It has various 'parts' to it that are interconnected and well realised.

Jinx lives in a dangerous world, full of evil people and rampaging monsters. Sometimes the evil is half-hearted, sometimes well intentioned, sometimes purposeful and frightening. But there are no easy, gentle good characters in the book. No-one is doing something for someone else because they love them. The only exception to this is the one major action that may be good but may not. We are never completely sure. The upshot of this is that it's hard to know who to trust and this waxes and wanes throughout the book. Indeed, from time to time the reader even doubts whether she can trust Jinx's point of view, which is something of an accomplishment in a young adult's novel: most main characters are infallible! The twist in this is that one of the character has a curse on her where she can only speak the truth in response to a direct question. This has caused substantial problems for her and means that she is an orphan of sorts also.

The book captures the issues of needing to understand the other people in our world, in order to respond properly and trust appropriately. Jinx needs to have this information to survive. When he loses the ability to 'read' people and needs to rely on what they show on their faces and in their voices the degree of duplicity (accidental or otherwise) creates difficult and frightening situations. When he regains the ability he is far more in control of how he responds to relationships and able to make better decisions. This would be a useful discussion to have: how our words reveal us and enable us to cloak ourselves, how our voices and faces show what we're thinking; what honesty looks like in a world where it is hard to trust each other and we face consequences for trusting one another.

One of the difficult things about this book is that it has a very black worldview: there are no altruistic people with genuine goodness who are inherently trustworthy. Grownups are as much victims as young people; grownups are an incompetent, foolish and caught in their own heads and worlds as everyone else. They aren't looking out for the kids; they warn them, but they don't care enough to intervene. They let them have the consequences of their choices, even where the consequences are dire. They'll only intervene if they are called on to do so, or they think it might be interesting. It's easy to see why you wouldn't trust an adult. The unadulterated selfishness that spikes the book makes it hard to read in the sense that it hurts ones soul. This would be another great discussion to have: imagine there was no-one in your world that you could trust to think beyond themselves and care about you, sacrificially. What would that be like? How would that affect you? What would 'trust' look like in that world? And who are you grateful for that is not like that in your world, because anyone you can identify to be 'for you' even where it might cost them something is a gift for which to be grateful.

3 out of 5. Not too hard to read. Ages 9-11.

Review of Pure Joy by Christopher Ash

Wanting to think through what it means to have a conscience? Not sure where the limits of conscience should be with regard to how you make decisions? How can you know your conscience isn't just you acting out your personality?

So many questions in the age of individualism where I need to be 'true to myself' to be a valid person. Talking about conscience in this context can feel a bit like being inside a Disney movie with a song about to burst into the dialogue at any moment.

Into this context, Christopher Ash writes about the conscience in Pure Joy.  And gets straight to the point and goes for the pastoral issues surrounding conscience. It's great stuff because it feels like it is written for real people who don't have the mental space to think through the place of the conscience in the 21st century western world. He writes to real people who may or may not be Christian and want to know how to think about what the Bible means by conscience and their own experience of having one.

Ash is great at putting Jesus front and centre in his discussion. By the end of the book it feels as though what Jesus has done for us is far more important than any subjective experience we have, and that our conscience is the servant of the message of Jesus, not the other way around. He helpfully shows how the conscience fits with trusting Jesus, needs to be trained by God through his word by his Spirit, isn't static and is both profoundly untrustworthy, and very useful as a trusted tool (for different reasons).

In his thinking he is shaped by the Puritans, to which he refers frequently. The appendix demonstrates why: his understanding of the usefulness of the conscience when shaped and reshaped by Scripture aligns with what he understands their thinking on the issue to be. He has chosen the most useful aspects of their thought and left some of their less helpful legalism unstated. This is great, but if someone were going to chase down all the references and read all their context, they might need some debriefing.

It's fantastic to have this book available. Most of us have a fairly modern take on our conscience: it's my God given right to disagree with everyone and believe in myself. Ash pushes us back to kneel at Jesus' feet with our conscience, as with everything and allow it to be shaped and reshaped by him through his Word by his Spirit. This is a great service to us.

Further, each chapter drips with pastoral situations from people at various points on their conversion: non-Christian through to strong Christian. These demonstrate how the conscience functions for different people in different contexts and solves some of the more difficult problems using concrete situations. This both fleshes out for us what he means, gives the book some energy, and helps us to think beyond ourselves as we read to situations we might not have faced in order to understand others and how their conscience might be functioning for them.

I was disappointed by the introduction to the last chapter. It felt like we'd crept into legalism: how to die with a clean conscience. It was useful in terms of really pushing the limit of what it means to have a clean conscience: how do we die well. It's a great thing to come to God and confess sins each and every day, but to do so in order to make death easier seems to detract from the full forgiveness of sins offered in Christ. It could be that it smacked of some of the more systems thinking of the Purtians, which I find distracting from the grace we have in Christ, but it left me uneasy.  Ash reiterates that grace later in the chapter, a re-emphasis which probably counters this (apparent) deficiency.

This was a fine book and I would lend it and will probably give it to someone else with confidence. It's well written, clear and Christ centred. It was good for the soul.  And it fills a hole in popular level books on issues of the heart.

Lights, Camera, Action Hero by H. J. Harper

What I like about this book is that professor pestilence is wanted. The main character is jay casey. The  thing that happened in the book is that star league kill some robots. Someone who likes really tense stories will enjoy reading this book. 5 out of 5 stars.

JD

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.