リボンの騎士 1 by Osamu Tezuka
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Gender, Adventure, Romance, Suspense, and Humor in the First Modern Shojo Manga By mixing adventure and romance with a disguised female protagonist, Tezuka Osamu’s Ribbon No Kishi or Ribbon Knight or Princess Knight (1953-56) started the modern shojo (girls’) manga, leading to things like Sailor Moon. Tezuka also added some interesting elements regarding gender and identity, and through 700 pages told an exciting, humorous, unpredictable story with dynamic artwork and layouts. The story begins in heaven, when a mischievous pint-sized angel called Tink approaches the line of babies waiting to be born on earth and shoves a boy’s heart into a baby girl just before God inserts a girl’s heart in her, so she is born with both a boy’s and a girl’s heart. Tink’s punishment is to descend to earth until he’s able to get the girl to act feminine enough and or to remove her boy’s heart from her. His task is complicated by the fact that the girl, Sapphire, is born to the King and Queen of Silverland, and as only males may inherit the throne (shades of Japan) and as they have no other children, they announce that their baby is a boy. Thus, Sapphire grows up as Prince Sapphire, learning fencing and horse riding and acting masculine, apart from some private moments where she’s able to dress like a girl and enjoy flowers in a private palace garden. Meanwhile, the scheming Duke Duralumin and his nefarious minion Sir Nylon suspect the truth and try underhandedly to reveal that Sapphire is a girl. If they’re successful, Duralumin has an spoiled young son called Plastic ready to be a puppet on the throne. This situation provides Tezuka with plenty of gender material. Much of it is stereotypically disappointing: e.g., boys’ hearts in heaven are blue, girls’ red, and Sapphire is rather weak, passive, blushing, and “feminine” when her girl’s heart is dominant compared to her feisty self when her boy’s heart is dominant, while Plastic becomes independent and commanding after swallowing Sapphire’s boy’s heart. Despite Sapphire having been raised as a boy, she starts acting like a girl the second she has a chance to. At one point, the pirate Captain Blood gives her (disguised as a boy) a beautiful ball gown, and as soon as she’s alone she puts on the dress, becoming a swooning maiden daydream-dancing with the prince of Goldland, Franz Charming. She speaks feminine Japanese when alone and masculine Japanese around other people. The reader never forgets that Sapphire is always a girl, even when she refers to herself with the male pronoun “boku” and says to guys who see her in feminine costume and want to marry her, “Hah--I’m a boy!” The manga repeatedly indicates that because her body is female, Sapphire is female, regardless of the gender of her heart or hearts. Although Sapphire is a girl who can do most of the things a boy can, she’s often rather passive, getting captured and wounded and rescued more often than she does the capturing, wounding, and rescuing. A good fighter, she’s nonetheless often defeated when possessed only of her girl’s heart. After all, in many ways she’s a stereotypical traditional girl as seen from the 1950s. Tink at one point asks Sapphire, “Which do you want to be, a boy or a girl?” That the question is starkly binary reveals Tezuka’s 1950s era: there’s no question of Sapphire choosing both or neither. All that said, when the early 50s publication of the manga is accounted for, Tezuka does some cool things with gender, like criticizing the (Japanese style) line of succession through male heirs only. The women of Silverland are stronger than the men (husbands, soldiers, advisors, etc.), and make the men start doing “women’s” work to teach them a lesson and win a war between the genders. And the most powerful and compelling characters in the story are female. Metamorphosing people or turning herself into a dragon and summoning snakes etc., the formidable witch Madam Hell wants to take Sapphire’s girl’s heart and give it to her own wild daughter Hecate. The ponytailed Hecate, clad in modern slacks and turtleneck, doesn’t want Sapphire’s girl’s heart and constantly subverts her mother’s plans. The goddess Venus also transforms herself or others and becomes a potent foe of Sapphire’s. Finally, Furibe, a young lady who dons black armor (with hearts over her breasts), fights in tournaments and wants to marry Sapphire disguised as a boy. Into his episodic story Tezuka weaves disparate elements: Christianity, Greek mythology, the supernatural, chivalry, pirates, fairy tales, and exotic islands. He also does some social commentary (as when Plastic makes a law guaranteeing equal treatment for women and men), refers to other literature (as when Duralumin compares his suddenly independent and feminist-oriented son Plastic to King Lear’s wicked daughters), and plays postmodernist tricks (as when Duralumin tells Nylon to take a photo of Sapphire dressed as a girl only to have his minion say, “Unfortunately, cameras have not been invented in this era”). About Tezuka’s art, it often looks cartoonish and violates human anatomy. His animals look cuter and less natural even than Disney’s. His art is nothing like Hal Foster’s for Prince Valiant or Otomo’s for Akira. But Tezuka’s art is dynamic and vivid and boasts playful or compelling visual touches, as when Duralumin becomes so frustrated at not being able to execute Sapphire that he bites the bottom line of his panel frame and pulls it up with his teeth. Another remarkable page features a broad panel at the top showing Captain Blood bringing a life-restoring medicine to Silverland, sailing in a small boat on the sea set against the big full moon, beneath which panel a pair of broad ones combine to show a single scene, Silverland’s castle and surrounding town set against the same moon. The juxtaposed scenes impress with suspense and beauty. And Tezuka’s imaginative flights of fancy are neat, as when Tink dreams that he’s surrounded by an orchestra of crickets, their music swirling all around him. In Ribbon no Kishi, Tezuka created a compelling and immeasurably influential and amusing, exciting, surprising, and sometimes moving story. There is an English translation available… View all my reviews
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The Wild Robot by Peter Brown
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “I am not a monster. I am a robot.” A robot packed in a crate is washed up on a deserted island after a storm sinks a ship transporting a cargo of robots somewhere. A gang of curious sea otters investigates and accidentally turns on the robot, birthing her like Venus out of the shell (crate). The island is only deserted in the sense that there are no people on it, for it is teeming with all manner of wildlife: in addition to flowers, trees, and grass, there are foxes, geese, rabbits, bears, beavers, robins, chickadees, geese, opossums, turtles, stick bugs, pikes, squirrels, deer, and more. We are told early on by the narrator, “As you might know, robots don’t really feel emotions. Not like animals do.” This is quickly proven false, as the robot, who calls herself Roz (short for Rozzum unit 7134, Brown’s playful nod to the Rossum’s Universal Robots of Karel Capek’s seminal robot play RUR), evinces curiosity and survival instinct, likes to stay clean, and wants to fit into her new environment. There are moments when she feels happy, as when she manages to escape from a mudslide during a sudden heavy storm. And another time she feels fear because, programmed to survive, she does not want an aggressive bear brother and sister to attack her, so she runs away from them. And yet Roz is not biologically alive. Getting energy directly from sunlight, she doesn’t need to eat. She “sleeps,” but only by shutting down her nonessential functions. Her perfect lines and angles contrast with the irregularity of the island’s flora and fauna. And to the animals on the island, she is at first a “sparkling monster” to be avoided. Interestingly, it never occurs to her that she doesn’t belong there, and instead she feels that she is home. Because of course she was born (turned on) on the island: “I’ve been here my whole life.” The story, then, depicts Roz’ attempts to settle into her new life on the island, learning to camouflage herself to look less artificial and more natural, observing animals communicating with each other so as to learn their universal language, making friends (and enemies), becoming a mother (adopting an orphaned gosling she names Brightbill), building a home, and generally being affected by the community of animals on the island as she affects them, the robot becoming wilder, the animals more civilized. If Roz can say, “I awoke just a machine, but you have taught me how to live, how to be wild,” the animals learn from her how to cooperate, build shelters, and use fire. There are many neat scenes in the novel, like when Roz learns from watching an opossum play dead that she can play alive, or when she “wakes” in the middle of an abnormally cold winter and finds many frozen dead animals and birds (“the wilderness is filled with beauty but also ugliness”), or when Brightbill tells Roz about his adventures migrating south for the winter. The plot is unpredictable. The writing is simple but affecting, being beautiful or moving or funny or suspenseful. The many monochrome illustrations are neat: simple, beautiful, childlike, distinctive, effective. Interestingly, although Roz is gendered female by the text, the pictures show her gender neutral. The novel is a mixed bag about gender. On the one hand, it’s a little disappointing in being rather gender normative. It is true that the mothers in the story are the strongest characters physically and emotionally. And Roz is a highly sympathetic and admirable female protagonist. But it would be interesting if Roz were male and her son Brightbill female. As it is, Roz the female robot becomes a mother, while Brightbill her son becomes flight leader of his flock. There are no gay animals on the island! For that matter, there is no sex, either. In spring new baby animals appear as if by magic, without a word as to their generation. Roz, of course, is a sexless, virgin mother. Sure, it’s a kids’ book! But it has violence and death and droppings. But the lack of any hint of sexual reproduction feels weird. Could there be a way to allude to it so kids wouldn’t get it, but adults or teens would? Anyway, there are plenty of neat messages for kids about things like mortality, global warming, cooperation, and families, as when Brightbill asks Roz, “You’re not my real mother, are you?” and Roz answers, “There are many kinds of mothers,” so Brightbill decides, “We’re a strange family, but I kind of like it that way.” There is also something thoughtful going on in the book regarding the nature of life, artificial things like robots and wild animals like those on the island having more in common than at first meets the eye. Multiple times we are told that Roz or an animal is or is not “designed” to do something or “natural” at doing something. And in “A Note About the Story,” Brown says, “animal instincts are kind of like computer programs.” The novel explores how living creatures (robots or animals) may or may not transcend their programming. About the audiobook version, yikes--the intrusive movie-like music and redundant sound effects (which reproduce textual mentions of splashes, crashes, tearing, button clicking, etc.) during the first 8.5 minutes are difficult to endure, and the excrescent noise almost made me stop listening. Luckily, it stops after several chapters, leaving us with Kate Atwood’s mostly fine reading. Her base narrator and Roz are fine, and some animals like the pike talking underwater are great--though sometimes she tries too hard to “do” different animals, making the beavers, for some reason, stuffy pseudo-brits. When the music and sound effects return with about 18 minutes remaining, they almost ruin the ending. Another irksome thing about the audiobook: every time the narrator addresses us, Kate Atwood says, “listener,” whereas in the original novel the narrator says “reader.” I want to read the original book when listening to an audiobook version, not something adapted for people listening to it. A nice feature of the audiobook is the free pdf file that includes the illustrations from the physical book. I am looking forward to using the physical book in my ESL classes. View all my reviews
The Emerald City of Oz by L. Frank Baum
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “I will not fight—even to save my kingdom.” L. Frank Baum’s sixth Oz book, The Emerald City of Oz (1910), begins comically and suspensefully. Roquat the Red, the tyrannical, childish Nome King, is in a bad mood, nursing a grudge against Princess Ozma the ruler of Oz and Dorothy the girl of Kansas, because in the third novel, Ozma of Oz (1907), they freed the royal family of Ev whom Roquat had enslaved AND took from him the source of his magic power, his Magic Belt. Therefore, he’s resolved to surprise attack the Emerald City, pillage it, enslave all the inhabitants of the Land of Oz, and retrieve his Magic Belt. His General opposes the plan, because Oz is protected by an impassable desert, and Ozma possesses too much magic for even the 50,000 well-trained Nome soldiers to overcome. Displeased, Roquat brains his General and then promotes to General an old soldier called Guph who’s gung-ho to conquer Oz because he hates good people, detests happy people, and is opposed to anyone content and prosperous. Roquat sets a thousand miners to work tunneling beneath the desert to Oz, while Guph visits formidable peoples (“evil spirits”) to enlist their aid in the coming war: the Whimsies (endowed with powerful big bodies but embarrassingly tiny heads they hide under large false paste board heads), the Growleywogs (bellicose giants), and the Phanfasms of Phantastico (who hide their true forms and “whose chief joy” is “to destroy happiness”). Between such ominous chapters Baum weaves lighter ones showing Ozma transporting Dorothy’s beloved Uncle Henry and Aunt Em to the Emerald City’s Palace, where they ought to be happy (in Kansas they were about to lose their farm to the bank). The scenes with Henry and Em trying to get used to the finery, pomp, ceremony, and bizarre beings of the Emerald Palace are fun, but they start fretting over not having any work to do for the first time in their lives. Thus she escorts her Uncle and Aunt on a tour of Oz, accompanied by Toto, the Wooden Sawhorse, Bellina the Yellow Hen, the Wizard of Oz, the Shaggy Man, and Omby Amby (the Captain-General of Ozma’s minute army), after which Ozma should have thought of something for Uncle Henry and Aunt Em to do. The tour begins with a visit to the Royal Athletic College of Oz, where Professor Woggle-Bug T. E. has the students learning traditional subjects like arithmetic by taking sugar-coated pills, which frees them to devote all their time to practicing athletics. From there, the group visits a paper doll town, wherein a sneeze sends the denizens into disordered flight, and a jigsaw puzzle town, wherein a visit surprises the locals into scattering their body parts in small, confused pieces. They also settle an argument between a zebra and an crab as to whether there is more land or water in the world. More outre scenes and Ozites follow, featuring sentient baked goods in Bunbury, civilized rabbits in Bunnybury, people who talk too much without saying anything in Rigamarole, and people who worry about everything that might go wrong in Flutterbudget. All the while, unbeknownst to our heroine and her friends, the Nomes are coming, so the story unfolds with a charming suspense: “An unsuspected enemy is doubly dangerous.” Even when Ozma finally looks in her Magic Picture and sees the Nomes tunneling towards Oz and their demonic allies assembling, she takes no action, sanguinely saying that because her army is so small (consisting of only a handful of officers) and because there is no hope of defeating the invaders, there is no point in organizing any defense. Can even the Tin Woodman and Scarecrow reunited with Dorothy save Oz? Baum resolves the tour and invasion of Oz sub-plots with a satisfying and impressive contrivance. Perhaps to a fault Baum never met a pun he didn’t like. Almost everything the sentient utensils of Utensia say is a pun involving their shapes or functions or compositions. And the Scarecrow boasts about his farm, “The corn I grow is always husky, and I call the ears my regiments, because they have so many kernels.” There are MANY other puns, and if you dislike them, Baum’s book may irritate you. The novel has flaws or inconsistencies. Dorothy occasionally lapses into an odd dialect that may be kid English or Kansas English or both: “I can’t say ‘zactly” and “the joggerfys [geographies] will tell you…” For that matter, why can’t Toto talk in Oz when Bellina the Yellow Hen (also from Kansas) can? At times Baum’s fertile imagination escapes his sense and provides him more creatures and peoples and characters than he knows what to do with (the Shaggy Man, Omby Amby, the Cowardly Lion, and Tik-Tok don’t do much), but at the same time, his fantastic creations are usually grounded by a moral or satirical base. Indeed, each of the seemingly unrelated incidents of the tour of Oz expresses some message about life (e.g., don’t talk thoughtlessly or worry needlessly) or satirizes some aspect of human nature or civilization (e.g., universities prioritize athletics over academics, or your vision and understanding are limited by your environment). And combined all the different peoples in Oz celebrate diversity and make the reader more thoughtful. The core theme of this book concerns happiness: what it is, how to get it, how unhappy people feel about happy ones and vice versa, and so on. Uncle Henry and Aunt Em were stressed in Kansas, so Dorothy thought to make them happy by bringing them to Oz, but they can’t be comfortable there without work. The King of Bunnybury believes he’d be happier living naturally as he did before Glinda used her magic to give the rabbits their civilized city and culture, but when he begins to imagine giving up the perks of royalty (his fine suit, chair, guards, entertainers, and singers), he changes his mind. The Nomes and Phanfasms want to ruin other people’s happiness, while Ozma would be unhappy to make other people unhappy even to save her own kingdom. There is a refreshing pacifist thrust to the novel. My favorite of the several Oz books I’ve read so far is the second, The Marvelous Land of Oz, but The Emerald City of Oz has plenty of charming whimsy, pointed humor, and unexpected developments (and a great ending). View all my reviews
Riley Mack and the Other Known Troublemakers by Chris Grabenstein
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Light Fun: Spunky Kids Dealing With Unpleasant Adults Seventh grade, twelve-year-old Riley Mack is the leader of the “Gnat Pack,” three other long-standing members and a new recruit, precocious junior high schoolers with attitude and a desire to stand up for the little guy against bullies and venal adults. Each member of the Pack has his or her own strengths: Briana is good at costumes, disguises, accents, and acting; Mongo is giant; Ben is an ace computer hacker; Jamal is a lock picking whiz (who loves using new words learnt from the dictionary); and Riley? He’s good at a bit of everything, especially planning and improvising. Riley’s father is overseas serving his country in the army, an officer leading top secret dangerous missions who, when talking with Riley on the phone, gives him advice like Don’t run from danger and Protect your family and people in trouble and quotes famous martial minds like Sun Tzu. Riley’s mother is an earnest, good-natured woman working as a teller in the town bank. Arrayed against the Gnat Pack in the full-cast Audible Original Drama Riley Mack and the Other Known Troublemakers (2018) written by Chris Grabenstein are the corrupt town Sherriff Brown, his tobacco-juice-spitting, stolen-goods-selling, puppy-mill-running mother, and his bully son Gavin. And the smarmy “Call me Chip” bank manager, who has a gambling issue. And a couple bank robbers who happen to be afraid of dogs. Also playing roles in the drama are night vision goggles, duct tape, ear mics, computers, locks, dog treats, security cameras, multiple safes and locks, a limo, some opera, a shotgun, fifty-seven or so dogs, an FBI agent or two, and more. I almost stopped listening at the start due to the arm farts, omnipresent noisy peppy late 70s early 80s police sit com music, and pre-teen slang like “fabtastic” and “skeezer.” But it actually ended up catching me, so I had to finish all 4+ hours. It does have a nice animal rights thrust, solid voice-acting, and fast-moving and fun (if implausible) story. It is always good to see corrupt and nasty adults getting their comeuppance at the hands of spunky 12-year-olds, and I can see why kids would enjoy it. View all my reviews
The House with a Clock in Its Walls by John Bellairs
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Poker, Baseball, History, Magic, and the Apocalypse In 1948, a freshly orphaned ten-year-old boy called Lewis Barnavelt rides a bus from Wisconsin to Michigan to live with his uncle Jonathan in New Zebedee, pop 6,000. Lewis cuts no heroic figure: he parts his oiled hair in the middle, wears purple corduroy pants, has a moony fat face with shiny cheeks, and murmurs Latin choir boy prayers full of sorrowful questions like “quare me repulisti?” (Why have you cast me off?”) He packs his enormous suitcase full of books and lead soldiers. He’s hopeless at sports (he can’t hit a baseball and always lets the bat fly out of his hands when he tries, while playing football he always collapses to the ground when anyone approaches him, and he is always picked last, if at all, when teams are chosen). He likes eating chocolate-covered mints while reading history books about bloody events like the assassination of Rizzio by Mary Queen of Scots’ noblemen (fifty-six stab wounds!). Lewis is also given to crying, whenever his feelings are hurt or he’s scared--which is not seldom. But he does have a lively imagination and a heart ready to love, and luckily, his eccentric uncle Jonathan van Olden Barnavelt is likeably strange and lives in a wonderful three-story stone mansion at 100 High Street that Lewis immediately takes to. When he first enters the house, Lewis finds a gray-haired smiley-wrinkle faced woman listening to the wall; it’s his uncle’s neighbor and best friend, Florence Zimmermann. And soon the trio are playing poker till midnight with old foreign coins and a dubious deck of old magician’s cards, with Lewis winning most of the hands. Is it due to his luck or to some kind of slight-of-hand performed in his favor by Mrs. Zimmermann and Jonathan? The pair are like a married couple who live next door to each other, always visiting each other and affectionately insulting each other: Weird Beard, Fatso, and Tub of Beans vs. Frumpy, Doll Face, and Frizzy Wig. Lewis quickly comes to love his uncle and Mrs. Zimmerman--way cooler parents than his own strict and threatening biological ones whose recent demise he never thinks or feels sad about. But why has Jonathan scattered a hodgepodge of clocks throughout his house? And why does he creep stealthily about the house late at night, turning the clocks off or tapping on the walls as if listening to something? The short novel depicts Lewis learning provocative half answers to his questions while experiencing vivid illusions and dangerous necromancy and a “device” that looks like a clock and becoming a catalyst for a battle for the fate of the world between bad good and good bad warlocks and witches. Bellairs writes a lot of fine descriptions, like “He heard the noise that earthworms make, as they slowly inch along, breaking hard black clods with their blunt heads.” He also writes telling life wisdom, like this: “You can’t prepare for all the disasters in this frightening world of ours.” Or “One of the troubles with people is that they can only see out of their own eyes.” He fills his novel with neat things, like Jonathan’s galleon hookah and a petrified forest family grave space in the local cemetery. Magic in his hands has a consistent basis: “Most magic is accomplished with solid everyday objects, objects that have had spells said over them.” He writes plenty of humorous lines, like “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Lewis, stop playing Sherlock Holmes. You make a better Watson.” I liked The House with a Clock in Its Walls (1973), because of Bellairs’ vivid descriptions of New Zebedee, 100 High Street, the town cemetery, and the historical and other illusions; because of the relationships between Mrs. Zimmermann, Jonathan, and Lewis and between Lewis and Tarby (the daredevil sportsman most popular boy in school); and because Lewis is such an atypical hero. Also because the antagonists Mr. and Mrs. Izard are pretty scary. And because of Edward Gorey’s typically dark, quaint, and stylized illustrations. And especially because of George Guidall’s savory reading of the audiobook. The novel ends a little abruptly. A new character is inserted without any preparation or narration in an off-handed way at the very end. Lewis can get a little frustrating. There is no explanation as to why early on Jonathan freezes when the bell in the monster-faced steeple of the town church tolls. Finally, I’m almost--but not quite--enticed enough by this first book to go on and read the others in the series. View all my reviews
The Christmas Hirelings by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Well-Written and Moving but also Manipulative and Complacent Well-written by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and well-read by Richard Armitage, The Christmas Hirelings (1894) is a heart-warming Christmas novella audiobook in the vein of Charles Dickens and Frances Hodgson Burnett. Braddon is a female late-Victorian author of eighty plus novels whom I’d never even heard of before listening to this audiobook of The Christmas Hirelings. I am glad to have made her acquaintance, but-- In the story, Sir John Penlyon is an aging baronet widower planning to spend a quiet Christmas at his family’s manor estate Penlyon Place on the Cornish coast with his “smart young lady” niece Miss Adela Hawberk and his best friend Danby (who lives in a series of other people’s homes but is so charming that he’s usually “booked” for his visits far in advance), when Danby suggests hiring for the Christmas holidays “some children … of respectable birth and good manners, but whose parents are poor enough to accept the fee which our liberality may offer.” Sir John accedes to the plan but insists that whatever kids Danby hires, they are not to have any claim on him or Penlyon Place. Background chapters reveal that after bearing two daughters Sir John’s young wife died unloved because the baronet mistakenly thought she’d only married him for his land and title. Although in early childhood the two little girls spent their days healthily running wild and doing as they pleased with a permissive and sympathetic governess, Sir John’s sister finally entered the scene and took charge, bringing in a new governess and transforming the daughters’ lives into one of constant study so as to enable them to make reputable debuts in society. The older sister died childless not long after marrying, while the younger daughter eloped with a penniless parson and was disowned by Sir John. The hirelings duly arrive at Penlyon Place: three little kids, Laddie (the eldest), Lassie, and then four-year-old Moppet, who’s quite the spunky cutie. Then follows the bulk of the story, which involves the hirelings’ Christmas holidays at Penlyon, a serious illness, and the revelation of a well-intentioned scheme. The novel is capably written: British upper crust life, the psychology of its members, the descriptions of moors and manors. Braddon knew the Victorian British novel. Plenty of neat descriptions of the kids, like, “Her quaint little face in which the forehead somewhat overbalanced the tiny features below it was all aglow with mind. One could not imagine more mind in any living creature than was compressed within this quaint scrap of humanity.” There is also at times something almost cloying in her depiction of the kids, whom we just know are going to melt old Penlyon’s frozen heart. There are some intriguing hints about gender and sexuality and Mr. Danby, whom Sir John refers to as “a lady’s man” (not the Casanova kind) and as “Nurse Danby.” The guy is an eternal bachelor who loves playing with kids. . . Reader Richard Armitage does an excellent job enhancing the story and its characters and scenes, never overdoing it even when voicing Moppet, nailing gruff Penlyon and good-natured Danby. He made listening to a three-star story a four-star experience. I did find something smug and conservative about class in the story. There are, of course, no words about changing a patriarchal social system that has a small number of lords like Sir John living in luxury in palatial mansions on vast estates and passing them on to his male heirs while most people are working poor, and his gestures of charity mainly (to this reader) highlight the inequity of it all. Although Moppet momentarily cannot be happy when she imagines poor kids who can’t enjoy Christmas as she is doing, she is soon enough almost condescendingly presiding over the distribution of leftover toys to the lower-class village kids. Even the hirelings’ mother seems partly a cultural snob, in that she won’t let her children play with the local French kids living in the continental coastal village where they all live. There are lines that effectively convey how much little kids hate having to go to bed before grownups, like “The idea of bed is pretty much like the idea of Portland or Dartmoor is to the criminal classes,” but then that is another reinforcement of the class consciousness of the novel. (And just who belong to the criminal classes, anyway, and why?) If you think that this novella was published in 1894, near the end of the Victorian era, while Dickens’ books were published much earlier, you might be a little disappointed that Braddon didn’t seem (in this work anyway) to absorb more of his social conscience. Finally, I really did mostly enjoy this Christmas story and was moved or amused by much of it, but will I now hunt for more of Braddon’s old novels? Honestly, I probably won’t, but I am glad I chose this one as one of my free Audible Member monthly books. I recommend it to people who like The Secret Garden but want something similar and shorter for adults… View all my reviews
Matilda by Roald Dahl
My rating: 3 of 5 stars A Five-Year-Old Bookworm as Fairy Godmother and Prince Charming “The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. . . She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.” Roald Dahl’s Matilda (1988) is an over-the-top paean to reading and to the underdog; it’s a Cinderella story set in contemporary England, with a five-year-old girl as fairy godmother slash prince charming; it’s also an exaggerated takedown of the brutish giant adults in too many little kids’ lives. At first I thought Matilda seems too good and her parents too bad to be true. Mr. and Mrs. Wormwood are so cartoonishly awful, coarse, vain, ignorant, amoral, unfair, and unloving that Matilda seems like a divine alien placed in their home. (That must be the point, but still--) One of the least compelling points of the Harry Potter books (for me) is how unbelievably and uninterestingly unpleasant the Dursleys are, and reading this book makes me think that J. K. Rowling got her inspiration for Harry’s foster-parents from Dahl. I also didn’t at first care for Matilda’s prank revenges on her admittedly deserving father, involving superglue and hair dye, thinking, Matilda, you’re better than that. However, once Matilda starts going to school at age five, I warmed to the novel and ended up enjoying it a lot. Having read through the entire children’s section of the local library and through much of the adult, including most of Dickens, Austen, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hardy, and Hemingway, Matilda starts school, attending the (too) aptly named Crunchem Hall Primary School, presided over by the “formidable” (i.e., malevolent, masculine, muscular, and sadistic) Headmistress (too) aptly named Miss Trunchbull. Miss Trunchbull, aka THE Trunchbull, is “a gigantic holy terror, a fierce tyrannical monster who frightened the life out of the pupils and teachers alike.” The younger children are, the more she loathes them: “My idea of a perfect school . . . is one that has no children at all.” She’s given to sensational feats of cruelty like picking up students by their hair or ears and swinging them around and letting them go to crash to the floor or fly through the air. No one complains because she so intimidates everyone, including the children’s parents, who, anyway, like Matilda’s, would never believe their own kids’ version of events against the Trunchbull’s. The heart of the story concerns the relationship between the extraordinarily precocious, charmingly unaffected, potential-packed, pint-sized polymath Matilda and her sweet, understanding, and impoverished homeroom teacher the (too) aptly named Miss Honey. Miss Honey is one of the few adults who can appreciate Matilda’s brilliance and charm. Her parents sure can’t, trying to force her to watch TV instead of wasting her time on books and insulting her for being stupid etc. As the story develops there are humorous outrageous scenes, involving newts, chocolate cake, mathematics tests, telekenisis (I loved watching Matilda exerting her will to make miracles happen), and the like, as well as some moving ones involving Matilda trying to help her beloved teacher. The ending is splendidly satisfying. The many monochrome illustrations by Quentin Blake are perfect, emphasizing the contrast between the tiny kids and the gargantuan adults looming over them, and in their graceful and grotesque, evocative, free, and easy lines they recall the work of Jules Feiffer for The Phantom Tollbooth. I can see why kids would love Roald Dahl’s stories: they imaginatively depict tiny underdogs who are smarter, braver, and better than the cruel adults trying to lord it over them and who employ prank and plot against the clueless giants to assert their own dignity and agency. View all my reviews
Makoons by Louise Erdrich
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Readable, Funny, and Moving, but the Least Satisfying Birchbark House Book So Far The fifth entry in Louise Erdrich’s The Birchbark House series about the mid-19th-century Ojibwa girl/woman Omakayas and her family, Makoons (2016), begins not long after the ending of the fourth, Chickadee (2012), with one of Omakayas’ eight-year-old twin sons, Makoons (Little Bear), still recovering from his illness caused by missing his beloved twin Chickadee when that boy was kidnapped and taken to the prairie far away from their Minnesota woods, lakes, and islands home. Though now the twins have been reunited on the prairie where the family relocated to recover Chickadee, Erdrich inserts ominous foreshadowing early on, as Makoons has a vision revealing that their family will never return to Minnesota and that the twins won’t be able to save everyone from some trouble. Most of the boys’ loving family is still present: mother Omakayas, father Animikiins, grandmother Yellow Kettle, grandfather Deydey, beautiful aunt Angeline and her husband Fishtail, happy go lucky uncle Quill, wise great-grandmother Nokomis, and tomboy with a vengeance second-cousin Two Strike. Bizheens, Omakayas’ beloved adopted baby brother from the second and third books in the series who should now be the teenage uncle of the twins, is still absent without any mention by the characters or explanation from the author. The novel depicts the boys learning to ride horses for buffalo hunting, which is how the family must support themselves on the prairie. For Makoons horseback riding is easy and natural, guiding his pony Whirlwind with his legs and teaching it to run at a buffalo skin without shying, while Chickadee repeatedly falls off his horse, until Uncle Quill gives him a better pony, which turns out to be vicious and willful, so the twins name it Sweetheart. Makoons and Chickadee observe the adults in their big family and small community hunting and rendering the buffalo (“the Generous Ones”) into useful meat and hides and other commodities. (One wonders how the adults could so quickly become such accomplished buffalo hunters and processors after having lived all their lives in the forests and islands back east.) The boys also watch the absurd antics of a muscular, handsome, and vain young man called Gichi Noodin, who likes to preen, pose, show off, brag, assume that every girl and woman admires him, and—to his cost—ignore buffalo hunting protocol. Erdrich must have decided that her children’s series should have child protagonists, and because the end of the third novel ended Omakayas’ girlhood, the series moved forward twelve years to focus on her twin sons. OK. But in the process of outgrowing her protagonist’s role, Omakayas lost her appealing and vivid personality as well as her gifts (affinity for bears, spirits, dreams, and visions). Now only her sons have such gifts, and her only distinctive personality trait is to ensure that her husband and twins are presentable by braiding their hair every morning. Erdrich, then, valorizes childhood as a special, more imaginative, sensitive, and interesting time in a person’s life. At the same time, Erdrich contrived to move Omakayas and her family from the forests and lakes of Wisconsin and Minnesota onto the great plains, gaining thereby a new field of historical Native American life oriented around buffalo to write about (paralleling the move west of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s family in The Little House on the Prairie books). She thrillingly depicts a Native American buffalo hunt and vividly describes what comes after, not hiding the butchery, blood, rendering, and flies. The fourth novel compellingly focuses on Chickadee being separated from his family and having to survive apart from them as he comes to appreciate his name, but here in the fifth book Makoons does not have such an interesting experience on which to center a story. Makoons, like Chickadee, feels like a real boy, desiring to participate in a buffalo hunt before he’s old enough and playing funny tricks on the clueless Gichi Noodin, but his role as protagonist is a strangely minor one, without much development or even a substantial portion of the point of view scenes relative to other characters like Chickadee and even an adopted buffalo calf. And Gichi Noodin’s story arc is much more compelling than Makoons’, as the egotistical buffoon learns to see other people instead of only himself. “Before, he’d seen only his own reflection in his mind, or the eyes of other people. Now he was truly looking at people.” Erdrich is great at writing scenes kids would enjoy, like one in which Gichi Noodin loses his pants during a buffalo hunt, and at poignant scenes, like one featuring the twins’ great-grandmother Nokomis. She writes a neat story within her story, when Omakayas tells one about a man who marries a bear woman and joins her people. But the novel feels less substantial, realized, and finished than the earlier books in the series, and I even started noticing some of Erdrich’s neat illustrations from earlier books being recycled into this one, like the drawing ostensibly showing a buffalo hide being scraped that originally illustrated little Omakayas scraping a moose hide, and even the central picture on the cover is not a new one showing Makoons as a boy but an old interior illustration from the first book in the series showing Omakayas as a girl greeting two bear cubs. Finally, Makoons ends on something of a cliffhanger involving the twins, a vision, and darkness, but I am running out of steam for reading the series and am not anxiously waiting for Erdrich to finish the sixth entry. I do highly recommend the first three books about Omakayas as a girl, starting with the wonderful The Birchbark House (1999). View all my reviews
Chickadee by Louise Erdrich
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “Small things have great power” The first three books in Louise Erdrich’s The Birchbark House series take Omakayas from seven years old in 1847 to twelve in 1852 and her family from the Island of the Golden-Breasted Woodpecker in Wisconsin to the magical forested islands and lakes of Minnesota. The fourth book, Chickadee (2012), jumps forward fourteen years to 1866, when Omakayas is married to Animikiins (first known as Angry Boy) and the mother of eight-year-old twin boys, Chickadee and Makoons (Little Bear), and the foster mother of Zozie, the daughter of her cousin and childhood rival Two Strike. The story depicts what happens to the loving, closely-knit family and the inseparable twins when Chickadee is kidnapped by a buffoonish and muscular pair of mail-delivery brothers Babiche and Batiste and taken far away. The novel proceeds in multiple point of view strands, one depicting Chickadee on his own, the others the different family members searching for him or waiting for him to return. There is much humor in the novel. Chickadee’s misperception of Catholic Sisters, Mother, and Father as a strange family is cute, as is his observation of the two brothers Babiche and Batiste who love each other as much as Chickadee and Makoons love each other and are comical rather than hateful: “Your fist is hard,” said Batiste. “And as large as your own head.” “Har, har, har,” laughed Babiche. “You are very funny, my brother.” Chickadee is an authentic boy, as when he regrets his name: “Why couldn’t he have a protector like the bear or the lynx or the caribou or the eagle? Why was he singled out by such an insignificant little bird? He had a sudden thought that appalled him--he would be a grown man and still be called Chickadee! What kind of name was that for a grown warrior? He groaned.” Luckily, he has a wise great-grandmother, Nokomis, who tells him about his namesake: “He is a teacher. The chickadee shows the Anishinabeg how to live. For instance, he never stores his food all in one place. . . . The chickadee takes good care of his family. The mother and the father stay with their babies as they fly out into the world. They stick together, like the Anishnabeg. . . . The Chickadee is always cheerful even in adversity. He is brave and has great purpose, great meaning. You are lucky to have your name.” The moments of Chickadee’s culture shock, whether seeing for the first time the prairie (“Where were the trees? Where were the hills? And again, where were the trees?”) and a city (“This mouth, this city, was wide and insatiable. It would never be satisfied, thought Chickadee dizzily, until everything was gone”), or hearing for the first time violins (“the crying music that sometimes skipped and sometimes wailed”) are fine. And the twins’ love for each other is poignant: “Chickadee and Makoons curled together under one fluffy rabbit-skin blanket. Warm and full, lulled by the grown-ups’ voices, they fell into a charmed sleep and dreamed, as they always did, together.” So it is all the more painful when they’re separated, and when one brother is eating he tries to imagine what the other is eating, and when one brother is falling asleep with a painful chest he says the name of the other. There are moments of vivid life in the novel, as when “Animikiins drew his knife and sliced out the moose’s tongue and liver. He brought both into the shelter, heaped snow against the opening, and ate a bloody, raw, satisfying meal before he dozed off to sleep.” However, apart from some vivid details about the Metis community (mixed race Indian-whites who enjoy fiddle music, singing, and dancing and colorful clothes and go on long buffalo hunting trips in ear piercingly noisy wagons made completely out of wood), and a neat explanation of why the Ojibwe don’t point at people or things, the level of absorbing and authentic detail illustrating how Ojibwa lived in the mid-19th century, developing the characters, and making the previous three novels in the series so outstanding, is lower here. Another noticeable lack is Bizheens, Omakayas’ beloved adopted baby brother who plays a neat role in the second and third books. In The Porcupine Year (2008) Omakayas thinks, “He was the best thing that had ever happened to her, ever . . . this little brother who adored her no matter what she did.” So where is he now? Her other family members from the previous books are present: grandmother Nokomis, mother Yellow Kettle, father Deydey, big sister Angeline and her husband Fishtail, younger brother Pinch/Quill, and cousin Two-Strike. So what happened to Bizheens, who should be about sixteen by now? Did Erdrich want to focus on the twins and so removed Bizheens from the family and the series without bothering to write an explanation? How dissatisfying! The novel is the shortest in the series so far, and is a less is more work, so much so that there isn’t enough of it, too few characters making their presence felt, so that, for example, I forget about Yellow Kettle till she says something suddenly out of the blue, so that I want more of the ever fierce loner Two Strike (I love the scene where she lets Omakayas hug her after promising to retrieve Chickadee), and more of Nokomis, Deydey, and Angeline. And I wished for more Omakayas! After developing her so much as the appealing protagonist in the first three books, with her hearing voices of spirits telling her what to use for medicine, being in tune with bears, having a crow pet, being a natural healer, and having dreams that help save Deydey’s life as well as a vision of her future life, in this fourth book she’s just a loving and worried mother with too few compelling traits and point of view passages. But much of my disappointment in the fourth book is due to the excellence of the first three in the series, and readers who liked them should like this one (though readers new to the series should begin with the wonderful first book, The Birchbark House). View all my reviews
The Porcupine Year by Louise Erdrich
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Omakayas Growing Up Louise Erdrich’s third Birchbark House series novel, The Porcupine Year (2008) takes place in 1852 two years after The Game of Silence left off, with now 12-year-old Omakayas and her family still in exile, still traveling the forested Minnesota lakes by canoe looking for a new home while trying to avoid the hostile Bwanaag (Dakota/Lakota), having given in to US governmental pressure to leave their ancestral Wisconsin home at the end of the previous book. As this one opens, Omakayas and her irritating younger brother Pinch are doing a little nighttime river deer hunting in their canoe with torch (Omakayas) and bow and arrow (Pinch) when the powerful current of a surging river joining their mild one carries them off downstream, clinging to each other, through such formidable rapids that when the siblings later see them in daylight, they are struck dumb by the realization that “Whatever had saved them was beyond and greater than any human strength or skill.” How the kids get by insultingly supporting each other until they may reunite with their family is neat. During that process Pinch gains a new medicine animal, a porcupine, and a new name, Quill, in a humorous and nice way: “You look like you were in a battle with a thousand miniature warriors. And they hit you with their arrows. Tiny ones.” Omakayas twisted her face to stop her laughter, but a snort escaped. She pretended to control herself. “My brother, I am in awe of the great deed you did today.” “Then I’m making a fire,” said Pinch. “Give me your striker. If our enemies discover us, I’ll quill them to death. I am not Quillboy, but Quill. Just Quill. The great Quill! We’re going to feast on my courage now.” The book goes on to depict for Omakayas and her family a “year of danger and love, sacrifice and surprise—that porcupine year.” By the end of the Porcupine Year Omakayas, who is transitioning between girlhood and womanhood, will suffer hunger and cold and separation, gain a new appreciation of her goofy but maturing younger brother Quill, love her baby brother Bizheens more and more, develop her relationship with Animikiins (aka the Angry Boy), feel an “ancient” hatred and then a sudden sympathy for her fierce cousin Two Strike, learn why her father doesn’t trust white people and how Old Tallow stopped being Light Moving in the Leaves and became Old Tallow, and enter the woman lodge. By the way, despite Deydey’s painful story about when as a boy he met his white father for the first and last time, Erdrich does not exclusively depict white people as villains. Auntie Muskrat’s husband Albert LaPautre is a pathetic alcoholic who does Omakayas’ family an almost fatal bad turn. As with the other Birchbark House books, this one is full of fine writing and appealing, interesting, and complex characters. It is also full of vivid details of daily Ojibwe life in the mid 19th century, including cutting and drying venison, making pemmican, getting a new name, making a sweat lodge, becoming a woman, dating while chaperoned, etc. It is also full of storytelling, as grandmother Nokomis, family friend Old Tallow, and father Deydey tell various stories, from realistic biographical vignettes featuring abandonment, abuse, compromise, and canine justice to fantastic moral legends featuring bears becoming humans and left and right arms fighting. It is also full of humor and pathos. And what happens when the family finally encounters some of their fearsome, if handsome, enemies the Bwanaag is scary, funny, and somehow magnificent. Erdrich again displays her awareness of the psychology of kids, as when Omakayas and Quill are both jealous when Two Strike starts taking Animikiins out hunting with her every day, or as when, in a wonderfully suspenseful and funny scene, Bizheens (the family’s beloved toddler) goes out on some dangerously thin ice, far too thin to take the weight of anyone older than him, and takes such pleasure in the terrified and appalled reactions of the family stuck on shore that he goes out on the ice further still. As in her other Birchbark House books, Erdrich incorporates Ojibwa words, providing a glossary at the end of the novel but also usually defining the words in her text, as when Omakayas’ baby brother Bizheens says to her, “Giizhawenimin. Giizhawenimin. . . I really love you.” Readers who like young adult historical fiction, especially well-written work centering on Native American girls with charming illustrations by the author, should find much to like here. I am looking forward to future books about Omakayas and her family. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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