"Walk Two Moons" by Sharon Creech

I first read this book as a preteen. I didn't like it; later, I came to the conclusion that I was simply too young for it. And I still think I was too young for it then, but I also still don't like it. But I dislike it for different reasons this time!

Walk Two Moons is the sort of children's book that grown-ups think is good. Hence, probably, why it won the Newbery Medal. It's got tragedy, complex characters, that plot-within-a-plot thing that you sometimes get in this sort of book... all the things that make adults go "What a good book!" and make kids go "uhhhhhh..."

Basically, a thirteen-ish-year-old girl (the book does its best to avoid giving us any numbers regarding her age, perhaps in an attempt to make it appeal to a wider age range, but I infer from some context that she's thirteenish) has a mom who, some time ago, went to Idaho. And didn't come back. Our main character, Salamanca "Sal" Hiddle, misses her mom a lot, and embarks upon an Epic Quest (also known as a road trip) with her grandparents to go to Idaho and find her mom.

Along the way, she tells her grandparents the tale of Phoebe Winterbottom, one of her classmates. Phoebe's family has gone slightly weird from trying to be too perfect, and it's also (maybe) being stalked by a (maybe) lunatic. (Phoebe has a very vivid imagination and is convinced that this person she keeps seeing is a lunatic who's going to murder them all.) The tale of Phoebe Winterbottom also incudes general bits about Sal's school and home life. These sections serve as the "plot-within-a-plot" I mentioned above.

Sal's mom, by the way, |is dead|. I debated whether or not to spoiler that, because there's a lot of subtext that points to it. However, I can't speak to how clear that subtext is; I entirely missed it the first time I read this, but I was also bad at subtext in general at that age, and this time around I knew what it pointed to.

All right, the two main reasons why I didn't like it this time.

First: Phoebe Winterbottom annoys me. She's a good character, because she has both flaws and personality, but unfortunately one of her flaws is "getting on my nerves". Part of that may be because I don't like stuck-up characters in general, and Phoebe has acquired some upsticking as part of her family's attempt to be too perfect.

Second: Animism. Y'know how the book is named from a Native American proverb--something like "Before you judge a man, first walk two moons in his moccasins"? That sort of flavor runs throughout the whole book. There's random throwaway lines about praying to trees (don't pray to trees, by the way, they can't hear you so there's no point) and the like, and there's also a wistful and vaguely spritiualist denouement featuring a quote that quite conclusively shows the incompleteness of worldviews that don't include the Fall.

(I know I broke parallelism in the above two paragraphs. I couldn't figure out a better way to say them.)

This review is part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+. I don't like the book, but there's nothing really objectionable in it, aside from the animism and such (which I think ten-year-olds should be able to handle).

2 stars.

Unfavorite Lines Which I Wish To Refute:

    It seems to me that we can't explain all the truly awful things in the world like war and murder and brain tumors...

    Page 263. We can explain all the truly awful things in the world. They're Satan's fault. They came in via the Fall. That's literally what the Fall was.

(Endnote: Personally, I prefer the Discworld version of the proverb, that being the words of the trollish philosopher Plateau: "If you wants to understan' an enemy, you gotta walk a mile in his shoes. Den, if he's still your enemy, at least you're a mile away and he's got no shoes.")

"Charlotte's Web" by E. B. White

I did not expect to like this book. However, unlike Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, I actually did end up liking Charlotte's Web.

Before we go any further, I must provide a content warning for spiders. This is a book that heavily involves spiders (one spider in particular). If you have arachnophobia, maybe don't read it.

That said. Charlotte, the spider in question, is one of the most charactery characters I've seen in quite a while. She has a specific personality, and one that's evident pretty much as soon as you meet her. I'm not quite sure how the author managed to characterize Charlotte so well in only a few pages, but there you have it.

Actually, E. B. White displays an amazing ability with dialogue here. You can practically hear the tone of voice.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+, probably, for spiders and for the plot hinging on trying to avert the main character's impending death.

4 stars.

Favorite lines:

    "Can I have a pig, too, Pop?" asked Avery.

    "No, I only distribute pigs to early risers," said Mr. Arable. "Fern was up at daylight, trying to rid the world of injustice. As a result, she now has a pig. A small one, to be sure, but nevertheless a pig. It just shows what can happen if a person gets out of bed promptly."

    Page 5, showcasing again the author's ability with dialogue.

    Mothers for miles around worried about Zuckerman's swing. They feared some child would fall off. But no child ever did. Children almost always hang onto things tighter than their parents think they will.

    Page 69.

(Endnote: This book has nothing to do with Charlotte, North Carolina.)

Boss Design Studio: GLaDOS

Good screenshots are oddly hard to find.

Hello, everyone! Welcome back to Boss Design Studio, my essay series which so far has had a grand total of one installment.

In this post, I'm taking a look at another final boss: GLaDOS, the sentient supercomputer from Portal.

GLaDOS is an interesting case because she's also the game's narrator, a role about which I could probably write another entire essay. But suffice it to say that she's a sarcastic robot who initially pretends to be prerecorded messages, and who talks to you throughout the game. She's one of the best narrators I've ever seen. (Granted, she's also one of the only videogame narrators I've ever seen.)

To defeat GLaDOS, you have to knock three personality cores off of her main body and incinerate them in an incinerator, all while there's a turret shooting rockets at you. However, your portal gun can't directly hurt her, so you have to redirect the rockets from the turret back at the boss by baiting them into portals. Oh, and there's deadly neurotoxin that will kill you in six minutes, so you're on a time limit.

The fight is mostly divided into two phases: the "bait a rocket into a portal so it comes out another one, hits GLaDOS, and knocks a core off" phase and the "retrieve the core from whatever inaccessible place it landed, then open the incinerator and chuck it in" phase.

The bossfight with GLaDOS is also rather unique as bossfights go, because neither of you can directly hurt the other. That rocket turret is the only thing that does any offensive damage to anyone, and GLaDOS doesn't actually control it anymore (as evidenced by her voice line "I can't shut off the turret defenses"). GLaDOS also has some deadly neurotoxin that kills you in six minutes, effectively putting the bossfight on a six-minute timer, but that's really all it does; the neurotoxin doesn't restrict sections of the arena or anything.

The deadly neurotoxin death clock is also displayed on screens on the walls of the arena, rapidly counting down the six minutes you have left, which adds a sense of urgency to the fight. 

On your first encounter, despite both participants' inability to directly harm each other, this bossfight is a frantic dash to burn all the cores before you die of deadly neurotoxin exposure, helped along somewhat by the music (more on that later). Like most puzzle-based things it does suffer a bit on subsequent playthroughs, because racing to find the solution before the time runs out loses much of its luster when you already know the solution.

Oh yes. The boss arena. GLaDOS's boss arena is dark and spartan, but not dark enough that you don't get annoyed by being unable to see where anything is, and not spartan enough to be boring. At the same time, it's dark and spartan enough that it's not distracting (unlike the boss arena in Portal 2, but more on that in a different post).

GLaDOS's boss music is "You Can't Escape, You Know," a track which consists of rapid and slightly erratic percussion with no melody. However, it doesn't need a melody, because the need for boss music in this bossfight is replaced with GLaDOS narrating it. Sarcastically. Her narration fills the space usually occupied by music (i.e. giving you something to listen to), with the added bonus of being funny.

The climactic battle at the end of Portal is a coherent and very unique bossfight, and one which I still enjoy despite its having lost some of the excitement on later playthroughs.

This has been Boss Design Studio. Tune in next time to hear the Space Sphere say, "I'm in space!"

"Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing" by Judy Blume

I did not expect to like this book. Turns out, I don't like this book, so my expectations were correct. And that is entirely due to:

"Look for the other books about Peter, Sheila, and the irrepressible Fudge!"

     -the back cover

"Fudge should be repressed."

     -me to my family midway through reading this

Fudge is the protagonist's incredibly annoying younger brother. He is, as you may have guessed, incredibly annoying. So kudos to Judy Blume for making him authentically awful, but at the same time, he's so awful that he ruins pretty much the entire book for me. Much like he ruins pretty much the entire book for his older brother, come to think of it.

Really, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing is a cautionary tale on how toddlers (in general) will be as awful as they can get away with, and if you parent your toddler wrong (i.e. letting them get away with things) the toddler will be awful. If you ever find anyone who doesn't believe in original sin, just point them at a small child who's been parented badly (i.e. allowed to get away with things).

But hey, fourth graders aren't twelve! So there's that, at least.

Note: To be clear, I have nothing against twelve-year-olds. It's just that they comprise approximately 96% of all middle-grade fiction protagonists, so I'm kind of tired of reading about them.

I expected to dislike this, because I expected it to be a ten-year-old girl having school drama. Instead I disliked it because it was a nine-year-old boy having family drama with his incredibly annoying younger brother. I've never had an incredibly annoying younger brother, but I'm glad of that fact and have no desire to experience such a sibling vicariously.

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

2 stars. Which rating it only manages because I generally reserve one-star ratings for things like "wildly inappropriate content" or "portraying Satan as a good guy".

(Endnote: I'm starting a petition to put Fudge in a timeout and ignore him until he behaves.)

Mini-Reviews 18: Wheels on a Big Rig

Callings for Life: God's Plan, Your Purpose by Jeffrey Leininger

This book takes a hundred and fifty-four pages to say something that I can pretty comprehensively sum up in three sentences: "God probably hasn't called you to do something grand and epic, so you should focus on where God has put you now rather than the grand and epic thing you think God wants you to do. Having a normal life is not bad, and you should value it. God intends you to do a lot of small things rather than one really huge thing."

As you may have suspected, I was not enthralled. Oh, it's a lovely exploration of the doctrine of vocation, I just couldn't get into it because A) I fully grasped the point from reading the back cover, and B) I already understand the doctrine of vocation. I read nonfiction to learn things, and I honestly don't learn much from a book that repeatedly tells me something I already know for 154 pages.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for people dying in some of the examples it gives. It would make a supremely boring videogame.

3 stars. It's not a bad book, it's just also not the right one for me.

Tags for this one: 3-star, Christian nonfiction, nonfiction, rated E10+

The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams 

This book is quite short. Also slightly sad. Though not as sad as I was expecting, given that I expected |the titular rabbit to die outright, and he only sort of dies|. Also there's a fairy involved. 

I had to look up what velveteen was, because I didn't actually know. It's apparently "velvet but instead of making it velvety by cutting the vertical threads, you make it velvety by cutting the horizontal threads." Or something of that sort.

This review is part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for being sad.

3 stars. It somehow manages to be both slightly depressing and slightly sappy.

Tags for this one: 3-star, rated E10+

Mr. Popper's Penguins by Richard and Florence Atwater

This book is less short than The Velveteen Rabbit is, but I have similarly little to say about it. Hence this being a mini-review.

The plot of this is not terribly believable, but that's part of its charm.

This review is also part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E.

4 stars.

Tags for this one: 4-star, junior fiction, rated E

(Endnote: And they're rollin' rollin' rollin', rollin' rollin' rollin)

"Winter" by Marissa Meyer

I haven't the faintest idea how to start this review.

We finally go to the moon, in this the final book of a series called the Lunar Chronicles. Though, granted, the "Lunar" part is actually referring to the people who live on the moon. And the people who used to live on the moon, but have moved to Earth because the queen of the moon is a tyrant.

Our Snow White character, Queen Levana's stepdaughter Princess Winter, is insane. Apparently this is what happens if Lunars go too long without using their glamour. (I don't know if I ever mentioned the glamour, actually. Lunars have this thing called glamour, which supposedly works by manipulating bioelectricity or something, and which they can use to change their appearance and/or mind-control people.)

Everyone gets their moment to shine in this book, even Prince/Emperor Kai (our Cinderella prince), who hasn't really had much to do for the entire series. If you don't count the prequel and the short story collection, this is the final book, so all the principals getting to do something cool and cap off their plot threads is only right and proper.

The Evil Queen (Queen Levana) has a very tragic backstory. It's a bit of an explanation for her evilness, but it isn't used as an excuse; whatever made her this way, she's still evil, not just misunderstood. I appreciated that, because it often seems like "tragic villain" and "actually legitimately evil villain" are mutually exclusive in a lot of writing.

We get to see the Lunar aristocracy (and Prince/Emperor Kai has to deal with them), and they are exactly as shallow and vapid and vain as one might expect.

I really liked how they did the poisoned apple in this retelling.

It's pretty clear to me that the author had the entire series basically planned out before she wrote the first one. Each book retells a different fairy tale, but bits of setup for each of them are woven throughout the previous ones.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for sci-fi violence and some sexual references. Also child abuse as part of some backstories. Marissa Meyer managed to go the entire series without descending into lameness or ideology shoehorning (I'm looking at you, Shannon Messenger and Keeper of the Lost Cities), so some extra kudos to her for that.

4 stars. The whole of this series is greater than the sum of its parts, because I'd probably give the series 5 if I did overall series ratings. Maybe I should start doing that.

This has been my second of two contributions to We Love Fairy Tales Week, hosted at Hamlette's Soliloquy.

(Endnote: Winter's skin is not canonically purple. I'm pretty sure she's dark-skinned in the book.)

"Cress" by Marissa Meyer

I knew it. I knew it! The plague turns people blue!

(Back during the first book, I theorized that the plague in this series--letumosis, also called "the blue plague"--turns people blue as one of its symptoms. This I inferred from the fact that it's called "the blue plague." However, I didn't remember any actual confirmation of that until I ran into some in this book.)

Anyway. As you may be able to guess from the cover, this is a retelling of Rapunzel. But because this is a sci-fi series, Cress (our Rapunzel) is imprisoned on a satellite instead of in a tower, and her escape involves a partially botched reentry after our Gothel character tries to ruin everything. (Despite her best efforts, however, Gothel only ruins some things.)

I actually don't think I've read the original fairy tale. I'd watched Tangled (2010), but that isn't the most faithful adaptation, so I missed out on some details that I think this book did in pretty cool ways.

Case in point, in the original, the prince was blinded after getting shoved out of the tower. Which makes the fact that Carswell Thorne acquires some head-trauma-induced blindness from getting thrown around during the reentry make a lot more sense. Given that blindness from head trauma is actually a thing that can happen, that's actually rather brilliant.

Carswell "Probably Flynn Rider Guy" Thorne, by the way, is our prince for this. He first showed up in the previous book. As I suspected, the reason his cargo ship can go to space is for plot reasons, so he can rescue Cress from her satellite. Cress has an almost comically bad crush on him, because she's sixteen and he (thinks he) is Han Solo. It's honestly kind of adorable.

"Thinks he is Han Solo" is pretty much Thorne's entire character; he wants to be this cool smuggler person with a stolen spaceship, but he can't quite pull it off. Case in point, he starts the series... in jail. For stealing that spaceship. He doesn't even have a grand plan to escape, he just sort of gets dragged along in Cinder's beecause she needs his spaceship.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for some sexual references and a rather disturbing telepathic torture scene.

4 stars.

This has been my first of two contributions to We Love Fairy Tales Week, hosted at Hamlette's Soliloquy.

(Endnote: I'm just glad the author picked "Cress" as the name for her Rapunzel character, and not "Spinach" or "Parsley" or something.)

Boss Design Studio: The Ender Dragon

GIF because I couldn't find a good still render

Hello, everyone! Welcome to Boss Design Studio, a new series where I overanalyze videogame bosses and tell you what I think of them.

In this post, we're taking a look at the final(-ish) boss of the first videogame I ever bought: Minecraft's Ender Dragon. So without further ado, let's talk about it.

If I had to sum up the Ender Dragon bossfight in one word, that word would be desolate.

First, allow me to provide some background. The world of Minecraft is procedurally generated, and it's full of things. In the main dimension, the Overworld, those things are mostly nature, both of the beautiful landscape variety and the plants-and-animals variety. You can also build a portal to a second dimension, the Nether, which is also full of things. Mainly lava and angry monsters, but also natural formations, ancient fortresses, and weird fungus versions of grass and trees. The Overworld has a lovely, cloud-filled blue sky with a sun (and stars at night), and the Nether is just sort of ambiently lit up. Probably from all the lava.

But there's also a third dimension, the End, accessed by finding a stronghold and opening the portal within it. In contrast to the Overworld and the Nether, the End is almost entirely barren; it has no plants and no animals, and the entire dimension consists of yellowish stone islands floating in a black void. Those islands contain three things: tall and rather creepy creatures called Endermen that attack you if you look at them, giant obsidian pillars with floating crystals on the top of them, and the Ender Dragon itself.

I apologize if I've bored you with that, but it's necessary to establish the contrast. The End, with its black void, bare stone islands, and titanic pillars, feels otherworldly, alien, and (can you guess?) desolate compared to the rest of Minecraft. Oh, and there's no exit portal until you've killed the dragon, so you're kind of stuck there until you do that (or until you die).

The bossfight itself is divided into two phases: breaking the crystals, and killing the dragon. While it's theoretically possible to skip the first phase, it makes the fight way harder, so in practice nobody does it.

The End Crystals atop the pillars send out healing beams toward the Ender Dragon, making the fight significantly harder until you've destroyed all of them. You do that by either sniping them with projectiles, or somehow getting to the top of the pillars and hitting them with something. I'd find significance in that, but I don't think there is any. The crystals and their floating cubes-within-cubes aesthetic do add to the eerieness of the bossfight, though.

(Oh, did I mention that the Ender Dragon doesn't just sit there and wait for you to weaken it? Yeah, it's still flying around attacking you while you're doing that.)

And now, after almost 500 words, we get to the actual dragon slaying. The Ender Dragon is actually not a very complicated boss; at any given time, it's either A) flying around shooting fireballs at you or running into you, or B) perching on the derelict exit portal breathing fire if you get too close. It's mostly black, which makes it kind of hard to see, and it spends a lot of time out of reach of your weapons.

The desolate nature of the bossfight comes mostly from the environment, and the fact that the Ender Dragon itself... doesn't really interact. It almost feels like it's not attacking you, it's attacking through you. It flies at you, but it doesn't change direction or stop or anything when it hits. It's entirely unstoppable; it annihilates most materials just by touching them, and the materials it can't instantly delete, it phases through without pausing. It doesn't have amazing aim with its fireballs, making them often just go past you and explode somewhere to your rear; this may or may not be a programming error, but it reinforces the "attacking through you" nonetheless.

This is the part where I'd normally talk about the boss music (or, rather, where I intend to normally talk about the boss music in the future). But although the Ender Dragon does have a designated bossfight track, "Boss" by Daniel "C418" Rosenfeld, it's not really a dramatic fight theme; there's background noise and random bells and synths, but it doesn't have a melody, and it's pretty quiet. Which means that really the only sounds heard in the fight are the dragon's roars plus the noise from walking and taking damage and shooting things, adding to the emptiness and (yes I know I've been using this word a lot) desolation.

I suspect that if I could play the entire Ender Dragon battle straight through and had time to get fully immersed, instead of breaking it up into 10-ish-minute chunks, this would be a rather haunting and eerie battle. Also if I didn't blanket the entire place in snowmen to keep the Enderman population occupied with things that aren't "getting in the way".

This has been Boss Design Studio. Tune in next time for... not the Wither. I don't plan on fighting that one (at least not properly) for quite a while yet.

"The Hidden Staircase" by Carolyn Keene

This book is less of a "mystery" and more of a "how will Nancy Drew figure out what the audience already knows?" And that's entirely due to its title. If the title is The Hidden Staircase, it stands to reason that the book will involve a hidden staircase, and it's not that much of a leap of logic to conclude that "miscreants using said staircase" is probably the reason a house is suddenly supposedly haunted. Ah, metagaming.

("Miscreants on the hidden staircase", by the way, is exactly the reason why the house suddenly seems haunted. I'd spoiler-tag that, but I firmly maintain that anything I saw coming by page 3 isn't exactly a spoiler.)

There are some oddly credulous police in this town. Unlike the police in most young-detective books, they take Nancy Drew seriously... but almost a bit too seriously. She is an 18-year-old girl with no actual qualifications. Maybe not much goes on in this town, so they have nothing better to do than wholeheartedly believe Nancy Drew when she tells them something weird is going on.

Granted, she's right, but so are all the other detective book protagonists who get ignored because they haven't actually got any evidence. Or who at least have to work a bit harder to convince the police that they're telling the truth.

For me, the most shocking part of this book was that on page 122, Nancy actually said "become ill" in cold blood. (I should explain that, shouldn't I. My grade school grammar textbooks were always weirdly insistent that you should never use "took sick" for anything ever, and that you should instead use "became ill". We mocked this relentlessly, because we customarily use neither of those--we tend to say "get sick" or "come down with [insert illness]"--and we thought "become ill" was clunky and so overly formal that nobody would ever actually say it.)

The staircase is not actually as M. C. Escher as it appears on the cover.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for scary scenes, a "haunted" house, and kidnapping (not of the protagonist).

3 stars. I suspect that if I'd started reading these when I was like thirteen, I would have loved them; however, I'm not thirteen, and so I'm indifferent to them.

(Endnote: "shh i'm hiding" -the staircase)

"Peter Pan" by J. M. Barrie

To anyone who thinks the movies made this book weird (I don't actually know if anyone holds that opinion but it sounds like the sort of opinion people would hold): that's entirely possible, but please keep in mind that the book was already weird.

Speaking of adaptations and retellings and things, could the people writing the retellings stop making Captain Hook cool? He's really not. He's evil, and not even the cool kind.

One thing which I rather liked about the book (and which none of the adaptations I've seen do) is that Neverland is a sort of imaginary-but-also-not place built out of the children's mental worlds. That would be a really interesting thing to explore in an adaptation or a retelling. (Though, personally, I suspect that any Neverland containing my mental world would either be rather boring or utterly terrifying.)

The beginning takes great pains to assure you that no, this was not all a dream. I appreciate that.

Neverland itself reminds me of the island-where-dreams-come-true from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

This review is part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for scary scenes and fantasy violence. And Captain Jas. Hook being an awful person.

3 stars.

(Endnote: Did you know there's actually a sequel? It's about Peter's younger brother, Frying.)