"Darkbeast" by Morgan Keyes

There are stories that fit nicely in a short middle-grade novel/novella, and this is not one of them.

Let me explain. Twelve-year-old Keara lives in a world where children are granted magical animals, called darkbeasts (hence the book's title), by the gods. The darkbeasts eat their negative emotions and impulses, which helps them become good adults or something. Then, on their twelfth birthday, the children must murderize their darkbeasts. Not murderizing your darkbeast? It's just not done, and also the Spanish Fantasy Inquisition will hunt you down and beat you up until you do it anyway. And then possibly beat you up some more.

But Keara doesn't want to murderize her darkbeast, because he's pretty much the only friend she's ever had. So she runs away from home on the night she was supposed to kill the raven on the front cover, joins up with a troupe of traveling actors, and tries to keep the Spanish Fantasy Inquisition from finding out that she didn't murderize her darkbeast.

 

I feel like this would have worked quite well as some sort of epic five-book series of revolution and societal reform, sort of like one of Cressida Crowell's things - serious, but still for kids. Instead, we have a middle-grade novel(la?) severely lacking in gravitas, and which basically ends with (SPOILERS AHEAD) "so yeah, turns out other people also didn't murderize their darkbeasts and a couple of side characters were some of those, so now we're all hiding in a swamp and trying to do some revolution and societal reform while also avoiding the Spanish Fantasy Inquisition because they kinda want us dead."

It would have been better if written by Cressida Crowell, is what I'm saying. Or at least if it was written in something approximating her style. (In case you didn't know, she wrote the Wizards of Once series, as well as the original How to Train Your Dragon books, which have a rather different plot and overall feel from the movies.) Crowell's characters go through some pretty traumatic stuff, and it definitely gets pretty dark at times, but you always have a sense of "this will end happily, even if it's a bittersweet kind of happily." She always has a light at the end of the tunnel, no matter how long or twisty the tunnel in question is.

 

So, if this was the first book in an epic five-book fantasy series, I would probably search for the other books. As it now stands, it does have a sequel, but it and (presumably) the sequel are quite short on "epic".

This seems to have been more of a "here's how this book could have been better" review than a normal "here's how this book is" review, hasn't it? I think a large part of the reason for this is that it couldn't make me care about pretty much anything that happened in the entire book. This wasn't as egregious a problem as with Dungeon Academy: No Humans Allowed (citation: I didn't DNF this one), but it was still there. When I finished reading Darkbeast, I put the book down and thought something along the lines of "Huh. I feel no emotions about this."

And when reading fiction, I need to feel something. That's part of the reason I read it, in fact; it lets me experience emotions in a context pretty much entirely divorced from reality, so they can't affect anything. This just seemed like the author was trying to do a story about challenging the conventions of your society, but couldn't find the real-world convention she was trying to challenge. In lieu of anything else, this book left me with a feeling of "What was the point of that?" (At least it convinced me of a thing about literature that I hadn't really believed before, which is that a book has to have a point to it somehow.)

 

(Note: Nonfiction is an entirely different matter. I read that to learn things, not to feel things.)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for violent references.

Darkbeast can have three stars, because it wasn't exactly bad. It just also wasn't good. My feeling of "why did I bother reading this" is because the story didn't have a skeleton or anything to really hold it together, not because it was anything untoward.

(Endnote: As presented, the Spanish Fantasy Inquisition from this is nowhere near as scary as the not-Inquisition from The Notorious Scarlett and Browne. I think this is due to the author of this trying to do a "these guys have a fearsome reputation" on her Spanish Fantasy Inquisition, but it instead comes off as all the characters insisting "yes yes these guys are very scary" and the guys in question never actually doing anything. By contrast, the other book's not-Inquisition actually demonstrates its scariness, which makes it have a lot more impact on the reader.)

"A Tale of Time City" by Diana Wynne Jones

Despite the title evoking A Tale of Two Cities, this book has functionally nothing to do with Dickens. Instead, it involves time travel.

How this book's time travel works is there are "Stable Eras" and "Unstable Eras." This obviates confusion about "but what if you go back in time and change history?", because history is always changing in the Unstable Eras. Those always turn out the same way, though, so the Stable Eras (where nothing messes with history) don't get messed up. It's a good way to have time travel work, in other words.

Anyway, on to the plot! Vivian Smith is a normal girl being evacuated from London during the Blitz. She's supposed to be staying with a cousin in the country, but instead she gets abducted by aliens two teenage boys from Time City. They think they're saving the city from disintegrating or something (I don't actually remember what was going to happen if the city finally wore out the patch of weird altered time it was sitting on) by getting the person who's going to mess it up out of history, but they kidnap the wrong person.

(I have a sneaking suspicion none of that made any sense.)

Then they have to pretend Vivian is supposed to be there, which she isn't, long enough that they can figure out who's screwing with history. And, ideally, stop them. Plus there's a group of four MacGuffins that keep Time City anchored to history so it doesn't go flying off to nowhere and get lost, and people keep stealing them.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for mild and indirectly described violence.

I'm giving A Tale of Time City 4 stars, one for each MacGuffin.

Favorite lines:

I actually do have... well, it's more of a favorite page, but still. Since it's so long, I've put it on my brand new Very Long Quotes Page, as quote 1. Vivian's despair over her miserable failure to translate it, and Dr. Wilander's sarcasm, are quite hilarious. I actually went back and read that page several times because it made me laugh so much.

(Endnote: The time travel in this isn't really dwelt upon, and nobody even bothers trying to explain any of it. I think that's part of the reason it doesn't invite speculation and/or plot holes as much as in other books.)

"Bridge to Terabithia" by Katherine Paterson.

This is an essay I wrote for a literature class. It's part of my first completed quest. You know the drill by now.

Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson

 Bridge to Terabithia is a book that starts out as an ordinary, typical slice-of-life book, only to abruptly take a sharp turn into a serious story of sudden tragedy; this facilitates its look at the topic of good and bad emotional outlets. The author’s writing style reflects the age of the characters and their seemingly simple, uncomplicated life throughout most of the book.

The book starts out as a relatively normal story of two middle-school kids named Jess and Leslie becoming friends based around their creation of the imaginary kingdom of Terabithia in the forest, hence the title. And for most of the book, that’s exactly what it is. (If anyone doesn’t want spoilers, say something now.) But then Leslie suddenly dies, and approximately the remaining fifth of the book focuses on Jess as he tries to cope with losing his only friend. Notably, the story has basically no foreshadowing of the death, which almost jumps out at the reader; this sudden appearance reflects its “out of nowhere” nature within the story’s world. This structure helps the reader to feel as Jess does about Leslie’s death.

Bridge to Terabithia seems to have a theme of handling emotions. At the beginning of the book, Jess expresses his emotions via drawings, which he shows to absolutely nobody; this reflects him keeping everything inside and not telling anyone about it. Leslie similarly internalizes her thoughts, though she shows it less. When Jess and Leslie create Terabithia, Jess has an emotional outlet; its unexpected removal, combined with the grief from Leslie’s death, causes him to start to emotionally fall apart. There is a supporting character who also reflects the theme: Janice Avery, a bully at Jess’s school. Towards the end of the book, Janice reveals to Leslie that she bullies others because she’s always angry over how her abusive father treats her. Janice serves as a foil for both Jess and Leslie; her destructive method of dealing with her emotions contrasts with their constructive creation of Terabithia (although, admittedly, the stuff they’re using Terabithia to deal with is not nearly as bad as Janice Avery’s problem).

Katherine Paterson’s style matches the main character and overall story. The book has a serious tone, and the narration is definitely written seriously; however, it does not make use of overly scholarly language. Sentences are no longer than they need to be; compound sentences are few and far between. Despite this, the sentences don’t feel choppy. They lead into one another while still remaining separate. After Leslie’s death, the style turns introspective and almost dreamlike as Jess tries to process what just happened.

In conclusion, Katherine Paterson uses a relatively straightforward narrative and a serious but not scholarly writing style to allow the storytelling to feel natural and make the emotional themes easier for readers to understand.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: The lower edge of E10+ for bullying and Leslie's (admittedly off-page) death.

Bridge to Terabithia gets 4 stars. It's not my new favorite book, but what it sets out to do, it does well.

(Endnote: I didn't have time before the due date to read the paper out loud to find stuff that doesn't work, so I didn't even notice the fact that my conclusion paragraph is a single sentence. Or that I had three sentences in a row with semicolons. I may have a semicolon obsession when writing formally...)

"The Notorious Scarlett and Browne" by Jonathan Stroud

Well, we're back in the land of relatively good books again, everyone. (At least for a bit. I'm not sure if my luck will hold.)

 

Basically, it's about a couple of late-teens outlaws (Scarlett McCain and Albert Browne, because we had to have our color-names theme) who wander around in dystopian post-apocalyptic England robbing the rich to feed the poor (at Albert's insistence; giving Scarlett money is a good way for that money to find its way into an unknown void). They're pretty much your classic fighter-and-mage duo; Scarlett is good with guns and pretty much any other weapons you hand her, and Albert has various apocalypse-induced anomalous powers like reading minds and occasionally telekinesis (in stressful moments).

The book kicks off with the pair of them breaking into the underground treasure vault of a not!church run by le badguys. (More on them later). It continues with them trying to escape le badguys (henceforth the not-Inquisition) and some other villains (I'll call them the not-Mafia) as they try to get at the main characters for various nefarious reasons. The not-Inquisition apparently has been collecting up psions like Albert to... I don't actually know what they want with Albert and the rest of the psions. Buuuut they keep throwing this one guy at Albert, and by extension Scarlett because she's connected to Albert and doesn't have enough caution to not pick fights with edgy weirdos.

There's also a bunch of stuff with a |sunken city| that the not-Inquisition controls and the not-Mafia wants to loot. So, naturally, our main characters get sent there by Scarlett's friends/contacts/handlers/nemeses in the not-Mafia.

As promised, more on the not-Inquisition. At first glance, these guys seem like a textbook example of Organized Religion Is Evil™. However, while that normally feels like a cheap stab at Christianity, these guys (well, their parent organization) are more like universalists. ("Evil organized universalists" isn't a phrase you hear every day, is it?) Since my stance on universalism is "wouldn't it be nice, but unfortunately it doesn't work like that," this doesn't bother me as much.

Also, these guys aren't even good at universalism. It's hard to be bad at something that's basically the Calvinball of religion, but they manage it. It's like if they looked at the medieval/Renaissance Catholic church and said, "What if this, but universalist." So on the one hand, they're even terrible at heresy; on the other hand, they're basically running most of dystopian post-apocalyptic England via the not-Inquisition and executing people for defying them.

Yep. This has been Silly Songs with Larry a long-winded explanation of why despite its villain being of a type that I don't usually like, I rate this book 4 stars.

And were it a videogame, I'd rate it: A very stern T for content: swearing. (Man, it's nice to be doing a content warning that's just swearwords. I used to think those were all Inappropriate Content that adults talked about.) It's mostly traditional and/or British-specific language; I can think of maybe one instance anyone uses a modern obscenity, and that one's fairly mild.

(Endnote: I rather liked that the two title characters have a completely platonic friendship. That was nice. Although, I looked back, and most of the books I've been reviewing have had pretty much no romance in them? Maybe it's just the expectation that when your protagonists [or protagonist and deuteragonist] are a boy and a girl, they'll obviously get together or at least liiiiike each other? If you have any thoughts on that, let me know.)

"The Last Mapmaker" by Christina Soontornvat

I feel like if the author had played the ending straight, this could have been quite a good book instead of a merely okay one.

Let me explain. No; that would take too long. Let me sum up.

The main character, Sai, is basically on a quest to make something of herself. She's the assistant to a mapmaker, who's going on an exploration mission, and he needs her to come along. So she does. It helps that if the exploration ship discovers what it's trying to discover, everyone on it will be rewarded with their choice of a bunch of money or five links of a lineal (these jewelry-chain things that denote status in the book's fictional country, with one link per cool ancestor you can trace in your lineage). And since Sai's only known ancestor is her dad, who is a low-down snake-in-the-grass kind of guy, she really wants that lineal.

The ship discovers what it's trying to discover. The good guys make it back home relatively safely. |Sai takes the bunch of money as her reward because she's apparently decided she doesn't want the lineal, and she and her mentor pass off the newly-discovered land as not being all it's cracked up to be even though it actually is all it's cracked up to be|.

Now, the second one I can understand. While it does smack slightly of "oh noooo keep people from finding the cool place because they'll destroy teh enviornment niuuoooo!", people had expressed doubts about |the mystery continent|'s very existence for the entire book, and so passing it off as just a barren volcanic wasteland felt at least plausible. And that one didn't come out of nowhere; it had been foreshadowed a bit throughout the story.

But the first one? Nope. If the author had built the story up as a "maybe this society is deeply flawed and we should probably take a good long look to see if we might be living in a dystopia here" story, Sai's decision to |not take the lineal| would have made sense with the way the story was going. But until the very end, it was built as a "this society is mostly fine and we should do the best we can within it" story. The end decision just felt out-of-the-blue and out of character.

But hey, other than that, the content was fine! Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for some mild violence and one guy who repeatedly says what are assumed to be in-universe foreign swearwords.

Because of the disconnect between the ending and the rest of the story, I'm only giving this one 3 stars. Other than that, it was good, but the ending... it's just off.

(Endnote: The title is kind of misleading here. There will be other mapmakers after Sai's gone, she isn't the end of all mapmaking tradition. Honestly, I'm not sure what the "The Last" part of the title is about; "Mapmaker" is spot on, though.)

"My Jasper June" by Laurel Snyder

Most of this book was good, except for one part in the middle where it was like the author forgot that she wasn't writing YA instead of middle-grade fiction. Aside from that, the book was like an odd mix of Alone, Hazard, and The Missing Piece of Charlie O'Reilly. 

 

It had Alone's relatively self-sufficient early teen girl protagonist (and deuteragonist, here; Alone doesn't have that). It had Hazard's serious take on mental health issues and its initially-mysterious past tragedies. And it had The Missing Piece of Charlie O'Reilly's parental sanity problems and disappointing content level spike. (Don't get me wrong, this book doesn't have the same spike content type as TMPoCO'R, so that's good, at least.)

The book is about a thirteen-year-old girl named Leah, whose entire family is depressed now because of something that happened about a year ago. It's also about a slightly older girl named Jasper (title character!), whose home situation is mysterious but obviously terrible. (Well, actually, |her home situation is nonexistent, as Leah learns about a third of the way through the book. Jasper doesn't have one|.)

So, yes, it's a rather serious book. It all ends well, though.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for discussion of domestic abuse... except for pages 180 through 183. As I said above, it's like the author forgot she was writing middle-grade fiction for a moment. Those pages are T15+ for |sexual and drug references; it's when Leah's mom automatically jumps to assuming the worst about what Jasper and Leah get up to|. Which drags the book as a whole up to T15+.

Because of that, I'm giving My Jasper June 3 stars. Had it been intended as a YA book and placed in the YA section in the library, I would have just accepted pages 180-183 as part of normal YA content and moved on, and given the book 4 stars instead. But since it showed up in something in the normal-fiction-for-kids section... nope. (At least it had enough inherent quality that it didn't go the way of that one.)

(Endnote: About halfway through the book, I could just hear the footsteps of doom arriving. I'm not sure whether this was due to the author subtly foreshadowing or to me metagaming based on how these sorts of books usually go.)