"Keeper of the Rend" by Lisa Maxwell

The cover makes it look like horror, but it's not really. It's more magical realism than anything.

This book has a symbolism-laden main villain (a colorless and lifeless alternate dimension inhabited by an entity that wants to make our dimension colorless and lifeless) that it doesn't attempt to use as a heavy-handed allegory for something in real life, and I'm not sure what to make of that.

On the one hand, it's kind of nice to have a book like this not be bashing you over the head with its philosophy. On the other hand, it does leave the book feeling kind of... uh... unfinished? Incomplete? It's got a sort of space in it where it feels like something is supposed to go, where you expect there to be that aforementioned allegory, but there's nothing in it. There's no overwhelming central message to the book, contrary to the rest of the text that feels like it should have one.

Which honestly makes it seem more mature than a lot of other middle-grade fiction. Now that I think about it, I don't know if what I'm seeing is this book being nuanced, or other books being overly direct. Granted, the maturity and nuance is kind of undermined by its tacking on a weirdly trite bit at the end, but still.

(Basically, there's two intermingled subplots, one about how the main character's brother is being a more-than-usual jerk to him, and one about how the main character's dad ignores him and thinks his birdwatching hobby is for wimps. The first one ends with a "well, now that he's no longer |pretty much mind-controlled by the evil dimension entity's spooky marbles of doom| he's nicer, but there have been some permanent effects and this isn't just going to magically go away." Which makes the resolution of the second one, which I expected to also have some variant of "this isn't just going to magically go away," seem weird -- "the dad suddenly realizes he needs to spend more time with his other son, and asks him about birdwatching to do so, despite not having had any sort of character arc leading up to this" doesn't really mesh with the rest of the book. The rest of the book is intricate and well-plotted enough that I'm just going to blame the editor for this weird juxtaposition.)

The book doesn't shy away from having the boy protagonist get rescued from things by the girl deuteragonist, but it also doesn't shy away from reversing that and having the girl deuteragonist get rescued from things by the boy protagonist. I thought that was interesting; usually if you flip the damsel-in-distress trope around by having the damsel be a guy, you don't also flip it around again and have the rescuer also have to get rescued herself.

It's possible that part of the message of this book is "parents should be there for their kids, who shouldn't have to be solving problems that should be solved by adults." Both Xavier (the protagonist) and Clementine (the deuteragonist) really shouldn't be fighting this evil entity, and they both grow up significantly over the course of the story. They're also |not actually able to stop it by themselves; if Clementine's dad hadn't realized what was going on and come to the rescue, they would have lost, and probably both died.|

That being (at least some of) the message would explain the weird tacked-on bit I mentioned above, if the editor was trying to make it more obvious or something.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for violence and family problems.

4 stars. I'd really like to read this with a book club sometime so I can see what other people think of it, as it was really thought-provoking. Maybe that's what the lack of hitting-you-over-the-head-with-real-world-applicability is for; it's so you actually think about it instead of being like "okay, this is what this book is unsubtly saying, I get it, on to the next one."

(Endnote: Blogger insists "deuteragonist" isn't a word, which it totally is. Look it up if you don't believe me.)