"Masterminds: Payback" by Gordon Korman

I was wrong. None of these people have superpowers.

I do, however, continue in my opinion that I'd be fine with it if the series were just about Eli and Tori, to the exclusion of the other four |(or five)| protagonists. They're the Jessicae (see my previous Masterminds post), and I'd happily read a series just about them.

For people who have been taught morality all their lives, these kids' moral compasses are remarkably shot. They take to lying and stealing and skulduggery really quickly. Original sin showing through, I suppose. For all that, they |don't stay in their life of crime at the end, so that's a point in their favor, I guess|.

Probably the single most charismatic character in this book is |Bartholomew Glen, the notorious (and fictional) serial killer. He's thoroughly evil, and he's in the book for like six pages, but one can hardly take one's metaphorical eyes off him during those six pages|.

|"Crushed to death by a manta ray"| is not a |villain death| I've ever seen before. Are |manta rays| even |heavy enough| to |crush someone|? I don't know. |Here, I'll go three for three on the| potato soup |jokes in my reviews of this series|.

As this is the final book in the series, I shall now talk about the series as a whole. It's, well... it's not the worst series I've ever read, though some of the plot points (coughBookTwoEndingcough) are frankly implausible. As I've been saying, the protagonists take to immorality a tad quickly for my liking, and their competence at stealing and hacking and breaking-into-places is somewhat baffling. But there's basically nothing inappropriate in the entire series, so it's got that going for it. The worst is a rather tense woodchipper incident, in which absolutely nobody is harmed.

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

3 stars.

(Endnote: Who's "Back", and why do we have to pay him?)

"Masterminds: Criminal Destiny" by Gordon Korman

I would be just as happy, if not happier, if Malik and Amber weren't in this story at all.

Perhaps I should explain that a bit. This book has four POV characters: Malik Bruder, Amber Laska, Eli Freiden, and Tori Pritel. Malik and Amber are the tough ones, and Eli and Tori are the smart ones; the second pair, together, fill the role of the Jessica for me. Unfortunately all the characters get about an equal amount of screen time, so I have to sit through Malik's and Amber's chapters to get to those of Tori and Eli.

(Explanatory note: The "Jessica" is the one POV character I actually like in a book of multiple POVs. I'll often read said books mostly to get to their parts, and just read other characters' POVs to get to the Jessica's chapters. It's named after the character Jessica from the Mr. Terupt series by Rob Buyea, who ended up being almost the sole reason I was still reading that series.)

I like Eli, and I like Tori. They're both interesting to read about, and I can relate to them. But I don't like Amber or Malik nearly as much, perhaps because they're angrier, more violent, and less... uh... rational? They seem to me like less compelling characters, but your mileage may vary.

If anybody has superpowers, then they haven't manifested yet, aside from one incident on Page 13 where Eli briefly gains the power to literally fly. This is never mentioned or utilized again.

These kids are definitely not beating the |evil clones of criminal masterminds| allegations. So far they've run up normal theft, grand theft, grand theft auto, breaking, entering, breaking and entering, driving without a license, assault and battery, threats of violence, freight train hopping, innumerable traffic violations caused by learning to drive from videogames (yes, really), juvenile delinquency, trespassing, escaping police custody, |breaking a notorious criminal out of prison|, abduction (I think), and jaywalking. Not in that particular order.

The climax involves the kids |breaking a notorious criminal (who's also one of their clone sources) out of prison, which turns out to be an evil plot by the people behind the cloning; they manipulated the kids into breaking him out because he's actually one of them|. The trouble with that is |the kids' decision to break him out of prison hinges on a lot of mostly uncontrollable factors that all have to line up perfectly: the kids have to decide to go back to the town of Serenity, they have to decide to search the abandoned factory, they have to actually find the one piece of evidence planted for them, they have to manage to deobfuscate it, they have to decide to go visit this specific guy in prison, and they have to pull off the breakout itself. And not many of those can be planned for, especially because the villains have no actual contact or influence (even covertly) with the kids for almost the entire book|.

|But if you're going to have a "You thought you were foiling my plans, but you've actually just fallen into my trap!" moment, it has to feel earned. You can do that in one of two ways: either the actions the heroes take are the only ones they realistically would, or the villain has to have a hand in basically every place the heroes might turn away from the desired course -- basically, they have to be manipulating every decision the heroes make along the way to the villain's desired outcome. [Now I shall say| potato soup |to confuse people who didn't highlight the spoiler tags.] Unfortunately, neither of those is true here; there are many times when the kids might just as easily have done something else, and looking back, I can't see any villainous influence in any of them. So... that could have been done better.|

(I was critiquing the ending in the above two giant redacted paragraphs.)

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

3 stars.

(Endnote: There's also a companion short story, "Masterminds: Criminal Density", about stealing neutron stars.)

"Masterminds" by Gordon Korman

Why, why can't we have an idyllic, crimeless town/city/enclave/whatever without it actually being some sort of dystopian plot? Why is the plot always "the utopia is secretly evil" and not "evil threatens the utopia"?

While I vastly prefer the latter, I don't actually dislike the former as much as the above paragraph suggests. I think it's a tad overused, but it does work. Which is good, because this book is one of the first type of plots-that-involve-a-utopia.

Speaking of plot. Masterminds is about five kids who live in the town of Serenity, New Mexico. It's idyllic and peaceful, unlike the outside world with its alien concepts of "poverty" and "fighting", and nobody even knows the words for bad things like murder. Pretty much the sole employer in the town is a factory that makes traffic cones.

It is, of course, also all a lie. The tagline "A perfect life. A perfect lie." on the cover kind of spoils that. It's actually |a giant nature-versus-nurture experiment|: our five protagonists are |clones of notorious (and fictional) criminals|, and the people running this |illegal experiment| are trying to |see whether raising them in an environment entirely free from bad influences will make any difference in whether or not they turn out evil|. The protagonists may also |have superpowers, but if they do, nobody's superpowers have properly manifested yet by the end of this book. I have, however, made a joke about| potato soup.

Yes, it's kids versus adults. Not my favorite trope, but it's not a deal-breaker for me. And the kids are thirteen, which last I checked is not twelve.

For people who have been raised in an idyllic, crimeless town, these kids take to stealing things and sneaking around and general skulduggery very quickly. They're really not beating the |evil mastermind| allegations.

This suffers a bit from being the first book in what was clearly always intended to be a series, so it ends a tad early for my tastes, leaving a bunch of plot threads unresolved. It takes almost the entire book just to |get out of the town|. (Though if I recall correctly The Giver also took almost the entire book to do the same, so I can't complain too hard. But The Giver also never gave me feelings of "this is getting boring, can we please move on with the plot already.")

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

3 stars.

(Endnote: The way the title is formatted makes me almost want to call it MasterMinds instead.)

"The Schwa Was Here" by Neal Shusterman

A schwa is the upside-down "e" symbol. It's used pretty much exclusively in phonetics, and it makes a sort of "uh" sound.

Don't worry, this isn't a book about typography. It's actually about Calvin "the Schwa" Schwa, a teenager who makes you forget about him. Not on purpose, it just sort of happens. Unless he's pointed out to you, or he points himself out to you, it's really hard to remember him. He's just so eminently forgettable, so much so that people will often forget he's there in the middle of talking to him. Or talking about him. Or writing about him.

He's not the main character, though. That honor goes to

The Schwa Was Here isn't actually a book about the Schwa. Well, it is and it isn't; he's definitely prominent, but he's not the protagonist. The protagonist is Anthony "Antsy" Bonano, a normal and non-forgetfulness-inducing teenager. There's also an incredibly curmudgeonly old dude, the old dude's blind granddaughter who accidentally induces a love triangle, and various minor characters.

Speaking of the love triangle. Love triangles just fill me with a certain je ne sais quoi... I think it's called "annoyance"? This one does at least get resolved fairly quickly, unlike some I could mention (coughKeeperoftheLostCitiescough), in that it doesn't take like ten books and counting. But it still annoyed me while I was reading

This book seemed like it was going to end unsatisfactorily, and then it didn't. The ending, originally bittersweet and somewhat hollow, is made abruptly better by the final two pages.

The chapter titles are quite funny. I like them.

Did you notice that |on the cover, the author's last name is spelled with a schwa where the schwa sound is|? I didn't until |I was like a third of the way through the book|, and I think it's a neat detail. Especially how |you miss it at first, but then you notice it and it was there all along|... it just ties in so nicely with the story.

How many times have I started writing this post? Somehow I keep forgetting about

So yeah, the book was good enough and interesting enough that it inspired... *gestures vaguely at the above post* this from me. It's sort of the blogging version of performance art, I guess?

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A stern T for some crude humor and a veiled sexual reference or two.

4 stars.

(Endnote: I think I've cracked the code. The Schwa is actually Kilroy. They were both Here.)

"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.")

"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.)

"Secret Coders" series by Gene Luen Yang

The purpose of this series is, if not entirely, at least primarily to teach kids coding. Well, a bit of coding. By the end of it you can do a lot of stuff with turtles in the Logo programming language, and you learn about some of the principles of coding.

Book 1: Secret Coders

Yeah, this is one of those series where the first book has the series title.

I really like how they used actual turtle-shaped robots for the in-universe turtle graphics. ("Turtle graphics" is a term for pictures drawn by having a pointer move around the screen drawing lines, rather than by some other means.) I'm pretty sure most of the series's initial audience wouldn't get that joke (as I didn't on my first read-through), but it's funny if you know what those are.

There's a character in this, Josh, who's... how do I explain Josh? His reactions to everything are funny, partially because he's kind of clueless but takes everything seriously. Except it's seriously-for-Josh, so he does things like ask the angry janitor to please not feed him to piranhas.

(Our other two main characters are Eni, a deuteragonist, and Hopper, the protagonist. Eni's the dark-skinned one, Hopper's the girl, and Josh is the one with weird spiky hair.) 

Book 2: Paths & Portals

The title refers to Path Portals (in-universe, this means patterns on the floor where you have to program a turtle to walk around them in order to open up a secret door).

We get the first whiff of our minor antagonists and later minor allies the rugby team in this book. I'm not entirely sure why this presumably American school has a rugby team instead of, say, a football team, but it doesn't really matter.

We also get the first whiff of our first BBEG, Principal Dean. ("BBEG" is a roleplaying game term that stands for "Big Bad Evil Guy" [or, as necessary, "Big Bad Evil Girl"].) He's not actually in the "main villain" slot for very long.

Book 3: Secrets & Sequences

In which we're introduced to the Giant Flying Turtle which is actually a Giant Flying Laser Turtle. And in which Principal Dean gets kicked out of the villain chair by the actual villain of the series, Doctor One-Zero.

He actually has some interesting motivation. He used to be your bog-standard try-to-take-over-the-world supervillain with a robot army, but he's reformed. Sort of. Someone told him to use his super-genius status to make people happy, and he did. But by "make people happy" he means "give people a potion that rewires their brains so their sole desire is to see the color green."

Book 4: Robots & Repeats

This one sets up some stuff for later books, most notably the Turtle of Light (who is briefly named Josherella by Josh, before Eni names it Light-Light) and the fact that Doctor One-Zero's super potion, "Green Pop," does a supercharged Diet-Coke-and-Mentos thing when shaken.

This also reveals that Mr. Bee, the coders' mentor who I forgot to mention until now, has no nose and is from an alternate dimension. Which isn't Australia. (That bit will make more sense if you read the Favorite Lines section.)

There's a digression into ASCII encoding for a bit here, when the characters have to decode something written in ASCII.

Book 5: Potions & Parameters

This book ends with the protagonists about to use regular polygons to open a portal to another dimension, and that's rather a weird sentence.

And there are flying antigravity turtles. We use them, the new command we've learned that makes things go in circles, and the fact (established in Book 4) that Green Pop sort of explodes when shaken to ruin his stockpile truck of it. I don't think the flying antigravity turtles see much use in the final book.

Speaking of which,

Book 6: Monsters & Modules

The flying antigravity turtles do not see any use in this book.

The other dimension does get visited, though. It's Flatland (originating in this book), a two-dimensional universe from which Professor Bee hails.

I really like that this series has an in-universe reason for the random coding challenges sprinkled throughout the books. It makes it to where they have a plot purpose rather than just "kids learn to code yay!"

Overall Notes

I should probably clarify: "secret coders" does not mean people who make secret codes, it means coders (i.e. programmers) who are secret.

These books are really rather short, enough so that I had trouble making some of the books' sections longer than a sentence or two.

If you want to get someone interested in coding, these books would probably be a good vector for that.

The art is by Mike Holmes, who also did the art for the Wings of Fire graphic novel series.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A soft E10+ for some cartoon violence.

4 stars.

Favorite lines:

    "Who are we?"

    "Stately Academy Rugby!"

    "And do we fear anything?"

    "Well--"

    "Usually not--"

    "but snakes--"

    Page 65, Paths & Portals. It's the rugby team.

    Mr. Bee: "Where I'm from, noses are rather rare."

    Eni: "And where is that, exactly?"

    Josh: "Australia!"

    Hopper, facepalming: "Such a dummy."

    Page 9, Robots & Repeats. Follows close upon the reveal of Mr. Bee having no nose.

    "Ducks aren't supposed to have teeth! That's cheating!"

    Page 89, Robots & Repeats. Josh, reacting to a duck-shaped robot which suddenly revealed that it has teeth.

    "You kids are taking Advanced Chemistry?"

    Page 31, Potions & Parameters. It's a random NPC doctor who doesn't believe that those kids are taking Advanced Chemistry. (My high school course in Advanced Chemistry caused me to quote this relentlessly for a few weeks.)

    "With regular polygons, we're going to open a portal to another dimension!"

    Page 79, Potions & Parameters. This one is Mr. Bee.

    "Quiet, B. Square!"

    Page 89, Monsters & Modules. It's the Circles from Flatland, who've been convinced that Doctor One-Zero is actually escaped criminal B. Square.

(Endnote: Despite what you might think, there isn't a secret seventh book named Dungeons & Dragons.)

"The Nest" by Kenneth Oppel

This is rather a creepy book.

Its villain wouldn't be out of place in the Hollow Knight universe, because the villain is bugs. More specifically, supernatural wasps led by a wasp queen who would slot right into the Hollow Knight pantheon.

Basically, our protagonist's baby sibling has birth defects and keeps being about to die. But then some angels visit the protagonist in a dream and tell him that if he agrees to let them help, they can fix the baby. Except they're actually evil supernatural wasps whose method of fixing the baby is to kill it and replace it with a changeling.

There's also a Spookyman who keeps wandering around offering to sharpen people's knives, and a different Spookyman who calls the protagonist's younger sister on her toy phone. |Actually, they're the same Spookyman, who's apparently either one of the wasp changelings or one of the babies the wasps killed. Or possibly someone who had a sibling killed and replaced by the wasps, tried to stop it, and died in the attempt? It's definitely one of those, but I don't know exactly which one|.

The cover of the hardcover book does this cool thing where the words are written on a lower layer than the dustjacket, so they're barely visible normally (at least to me; I got this from the library so it has one of those transparent plastic covers) but if you push the dustjacket back down onto them you can see the words properly. I thought that was cool.

The titular "Nest" refers to the wasp nest that the evil supernatural wasps are growing the replacement baby in.

Kenneth Oppel writes a lot of very unique stuff. So far I've reviewed a steampunkish airship book, a graphic novel about bats, and now... whatever this is. And I know he's also written at least a book about Frankenstein (the doctor, not the monster), not to mention all the other stuff I assume he's written that I don't know about.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for some body horror and entirely too many wasps.

3 stars. 

(Endnote: Everything I come up with for this endnote seems like it would go better in the main body of the review.)

"The Wednesday Wars" by Gary D. Schmidt

The Wednesday Wars is a book about a 1960s schoolboy who has interpersonal interactions, makes friends, and discovers that Shakespeare doesn't have to be boring. That's one of the most stereotypical book-review sentences I've ever written, but I couldn't figure out a better way to start it, so there you are.

 

The titular Wednesday Wars refer to the fact that our protagonist Holling Hoodhood is the only person in his entire class who's neither Catholic nor Jewish (he's Presbyterian) and therefore doesn't have a reason to not be in school on Wednesdays. So he's stuck in his English class with a teacher who (at least at first) he's pretty sure hates him; after all, what other reason could she have for making him read Shakespeare outside of class? 

 

They're not super antagonistic for super long, although there are some clashes over Shakespeare when the teacher wants Holling to read it for the Literary Value, and Holling wants to read it for the murder and the interesting new things to shout at people. Most of the plot comes from Holling's day-to-day interactions with the people around him (the teacher, his classmates, his parents, his attempted-flower-child sister) and the world around him (his school, the escaped rats in his school, a school bus, et cetera). Though when I say "plot" that should really have some air quotes around it, because this is slice-of-life so it doesn't really have a proper plot.

 

(Not that that's necessarily a bad thing; not having a properly plotty plot is pretty much the entire basis of slice-of-life. Which this is. Just because it doesn't have a plot per se doesn't mean it's bad.)

 

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

 

4 stars. 

 

Favorite lines:

 

    I mean, a potion to almost kill you? She drinks a potion to almost kill you? Who would drink a potion to almost kill you?

    Page 134. It's Holling describing his low opinion of Romeo and Juliet.

 

(Endnote: Toads, beetles, bats light upon thee!) 

"Harriet the Spy" by Louise Fitzhugh

I was not expecting to like this book this much.

It's about an eleven-year-old named Harriet, who isn't an actual spy. She just has a notebook in which she writes everything she thinks about everyone. Then |she loses her notebook, her friends find it, and nobody likes her anymore because she wrote her actual thoughts about everyone. And most of those are... let's say "brutally honest".|

(I thought it was going to be a kid-spies book, but no, it's a coming-of-age book.)

Most of my enjoyment of the book did not come from the plot. Most of my enjoyment came from the characters. As it turns out, I am a sucker for characters experiencing Emotions™. (This may possibly relate back to my review of Darkbeast and the principle that I read fiction to feel things.)

This review is part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: Uhhhhh... E10+?

4 stars.

(Endnote: I must confess that I occasionally backdate these slightly if I forget to post one on schedule or don't quite have it done. This is more for my peace of mind than anything else.)

Mini-Reviews 16: Tons of #9 Coal

Just Listen by Sarah Dessen

The main characters of another of Sarah Dessen's books (This Lullaby, I think) cameo in this one. I thought that was neat.

It's about a girl who's trying desperately to pretend everything is fine and hold things together while everything falls apart around her, and also a guy who's into weird music and who she maybe (okay definitely, this is a romance novel) likes.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for discussion of an eating disorder (and possibly also a suicide attempt), an in-the-past and mostly offscreen sexual assault, and swearing (including one instance of The Cardinal Swearword).

4 stars.

Tags for this one: 4-star, a kissing book, DRAMA!, modern setting, rated T15+, romance, school drama, YA

Bitter End by Rex Stout

 

It's another Nero Wolfe book. A novella, this time. I read this on a tablet in an airport, which is not my favorite way or place to read books, but it was good enough that I liked it regardless.

 

Basically, someone puts quinine in a can of liver paté (no idea what paté is but I assume it's some kind of meat paste thing) that Nero Wolfe subsequently eats. He Does Not Like This and begins a personal quest to find whoever did that and make them pay.

 

I don't have tons to say about this, but I do have some favorite lines to share.

 

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A stern T for violence (people getting shot at and stuff, plus it is a murder mystery).

 

4 stars.

Favorite lines:

 

    "I am under no obligation to catch murderers indiscriminately."

    Page, uh, I have no idea? This is an ebook and it doesn't like telling me the page numbers for whatever reason.

 

     "Some news for you. [NAME REDACTED] is under arrest: they just took |her| away from here. Mr. Wolfe would like to have |her| prosecuted for feeding him quinine, but the cops prefer to try |her| for murder. [REDACTED]'s guilty of both."

    Page nobodyknows. Page numbers are a mess in Ebooks, it's one of the reasons I don't like them as much as actual paper books.

Tags for this one: 4-star, mystery, rated T

Silverwing by Kenneth Oppel (illustrated by Christopher Steininger)

 

Content warning: This is a book about bats. If you don't like bats or are afraid of bats, don't read it.

Basically, a young bat's clan of bats is migrating south after the young bat (our main character) accidentally provoked some owls into burning down their home tree. Then he gets separated from the clan, goes on an a bunch of adventures, and meets the girl deuteragonist. She's not really a love interest, though that may change as the series goes on.

The book is actually pretty creepy. The art doesn't help, but the story features such delightful things as a rat civilization, a cult of bats who can sort of transform into humans, and these carnivorous jungle bats that try to eat whatever they can get their hands on (including some pigeons and the deuteragonist).

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for all that stuff I mentioned above.

3 stars. Could conceivably have been 4 if it hadn't kept talking about evolution.

Tags for this one: 3-star, adventure, modern setting, rated T, talking animals

(Endnote: And the boss man said, "Well bless my soul!")

"Artemis Fowl: The Last Guardian" by Eoin Colfer

This book is basically one long final battle, and as such, it's a fitting climax to the series.

[Unmarked spoilers ahead.]

It starts off with Opal Koboi (again) enacting her Very Definitely Real Final Master Plan, involving having herself killed (the "herself" in question being a past version of herself who tagged along with Artemis when he returned from the past in The Time Paradox) and also stuffed down a nuclear reactor so when she explodes from this actual time paradox it doesn't destroy anything important. Except because this is Opal Koboi's Very Definitely Real Final Master Plan™, it actually turns her into a ridiculously powerful magic person.

The usual gang (that being "Artemis, Holly, Butler, and eventually Mulch Diggums, possibly with Foaly support") assembles to stop her from opening some magic gates and unleashing ancient obliterate-ALL-the-humans! magic. Artemis's brothers (of The Fowl Twins fame) also feature in this one, though mostly because they got possessed by some ancient ghosts Opal also unleashed.

This is pretty much the best way the Artemis Fowl series could have ended. It completes Artemis's character arc, it defeats recurring villain Opal Koboi for good this time, it (briefly) brings back stuff from all the way back in book 1... my only quibbles, really, are the somewhat ham-fisted "this is how the world went on spinning after Opal Koboi blew up half the tech in it" epilogue parts. (To be clear, it's not the fact that they were in there, we needed to know how it worked. It's how the author chose to do those that irked me.)

I think this post would also be a good place to talk about the overall arc the series took in quality. It started off quite strong with the original Artemis Fowl, dipping very slowly down from Arctic Incident through Eternity Code to Opal Deception before hitting another peak with Lost Colony. Then it dove off a cliff into Time Paradox, crawled out of the ground with Atlantis Complex, and came back strong for this one. Did that make sense? No? I can do a ranking later if anyone wants.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T. It's good to know this series didn't pull a Mr. Terupt and steadily increase in content level over the course of it.

4 stars. 

(Endnote: I'm not actually sure who the titular Last Guardian is. Maybe the ghost of the original guy who set up the ancient obliterate-ALL-the-humans! magic in the first place?)

"Artemis Fowl: The Atlantis Complex" by Eoin Colfer

In which Artemis has an incredibly annoying alter ego.

He's come down with the titular Atlantis Complex, which is a mental disorder criminals with magic get. In his case, it manifests as an irrational fear of the number four, an irrational love of the number five, severe paranoia, and (eventually) the aforementioned incredibly annoying alter ego. That last is named Orion and he's pretty much the opposite of normal Artemis in every way.

This one jumped fewer sharks than The Time Paradox, possibly because there aren't tons of sharks left to jump. It's better than that one, but it's still probably my second least favorite volume. This is Orion's fault.

Artemis's extremely fancy phone has a bunch of mini-programs, or "mi-p's", on it. Tech-savvy readers may recognize these as what we now call "apps". This isn't a Renamed Concept Rule, though, because the book was written in 2006, and mobile apps started being a thing sometime around 2008. So rather than cumbersomely renaming apps, this book actually predicted their existence.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for fantasy violence and Orion being weird. 

3 stars.

Favorite lines:

    "No," said the centaur with absolute certainty. "And I say that with absolute certainty."

    Page 137.

    [for context, there's a giant squid trying to crack open Artemis's sea helmet]

    The noise was exactly what Artemis had always imagined it would sound like if a giant squid tried to crack his sea helmet.

    Page 293.

    Any first-day chemistry student could have told Ragby never to put sparks near a mystery gas.

    Unfortunately, Ragby had never met any first-day chemistry students...

    Page 326. 

(Endnote: The author's name is actually pronounced "Owen," not "Ay-oine" or "Ee-owen" or anything like that.)

"Artemis Fowl: The Time Paradox" by Eoin Colfer

Ah yes. The Time Paradox. The only volume of the entire eight-book Artemis Fowl series I do not personally own.

Let me explain.

Now that we have the eighth type of fairies back (as of The Lost Colony) and can do the big magic again, the fairies have the capability to do things like time travel. Which is good, because Artemis's mom is dying of a sickness or something, and in order to save her, he needs a very specific species of lemur. Don't ask me why.

Unfortunately, back when he was still evil, he caused that exact species of lemur to go extinct. Again, don't ask me why. So Holly and present!Artemis go back in time to stop past!Artemis from extinctifying the lemur, which leads to more time-travel-based shenanigans.

And this is where the book gets weird, and it doesn't stop doing so. I would be entirely unsurprised to learn that this was written with the goal of "make Artemis/Holly shipping less problematic;" normally it's super weird and kind of creepy because Artemis is like 15 and Holly is like 80, but this one solves (well, "solves") that by physically re-aging them until they're both biologically the same age. Doesn't really get rid of the mental age gap though, which is where like 87% of the problematicity comes from.

Also, somehow past!Artemis is more competent than present!Artemis? I found that pretty hard to believe. There's also weird stuff with people who want random endangered animals to go extinct if they aren't useful, which is actually |Opal Koboi's fault. Somehow.|

This book's sole saving grace is that it does manage to be plot relevant, with |time-traveled past!Opal| featuring majorly in book 8.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A stern T for being weird.

2 stars.

(Endnote: For all the title says, |book 8|'s time travel is |a lot more paradox-y and confusing|.)

Mini-Reviews 15: It's The Long Title Song!

Handbook of Consolations for the Fears and Trials that Oppress Us in the Struggle with Death by Johann Gerhard 

I thought this book was some sort of grief counseling, for when someone you love dies.

It is not.

This book is for when you are the one dying, or when you're talking to someone who is, and you/they are struggling with your faith. It's written in the classic ancient-greek-philosophy-instruction style of "Student: I have a question, and it's this! Teacher: I have an answer to that question, and it's this."

It's quite good. If I'm ever dying of sickness, someone please send me a copy.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for discussion of death.

4 stars.

Tags for this one: 4-star, Christian nonfiction, nonfiction, rated E10+

The Story of Be by David Crystal

I got this out of the library on a whim because it looked interesting. It was, in fact, interesting.

While I (as a firm believer in the Tower of Babel) disagree with it on where languages came from, most of the rest of it is pretty informative.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for sexual references ({T15+ish describing the "sexual be", as in "being with someone"}).

3 stars. Not amazing, but it's definitely not bad.

Tags for this one: 3-star, nonfiction, rated T15+

The Innocent by David Baldacci

I have now read a thriller. Yay me.

It's about this special forces assassin guy who gets almost assassinated himself (repeatedly), then teams up with a teenage girl who's been having a bad time in foster care and whose parents have just been murdered. Because person or persons unknown keep trying to assassinate the both of them, and also keep assassinating other people who they try to get evidence from.

Also known as "489 pages of the plot thickening and 57 pages of 'oh yeah, it's all coming together.'"

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: M for mostly offscreen sexual content between two adults (which I skipped over anyway), strong language (though no Cardinal Swearwords that I recall), and semi-graphic violence. This is a book for adults.

3 stars.

Tags for this one: 3-star, modern setting, rated M, thriller

(Endnote: I'm really starting to run out of titles for these things.)

"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.)

"Away" by Megan E. Freeman

Any y'all remember Alone way back in 2023? I do. This is the sequel slash companion novel.

It follows four random kids caught up in the evacuation, including one of the members of Maddie's aborted secret sleepover from Alone. Unlike in the first book, they're not alone for the entire thing; they get stuck in a refugee camp.

Oh, we also get more context for the backstory behind the "imminent threat" in this book. |It's California's fault.| They're having a |chronic drought| because they decided to |cram far too many people into a literal desert|, and for some reason they thought the best course of action was to |pipe the entire Eldorado River out of Colorado into California. Instead of doing sane things like, y'know, building seawater treatment plants or not having so many people in a literal desert|.

|While the plan is completely and utterly ridiculous, at least it makes more sense than "oh the government wants to steal a bunch of land that it then doesn't do anything with."|

(The |Eldorado River| is a real thing, by the way. I looked it up. Unlike in the book, however, it's |not in Colorado at all; it's in Alaska|.)

I have no idea why the cover is a guy in a Spiderman hoodie standing on a car. It doesn't have tons of bearing on the story.

The characters range from 12 to 15ish, a nice change from the Eternal 12-Year-Old Syndrome in most middle-grade fiction. Another nice change is that it explained why none of the adults are taking action against the evacuation or |noticing the signs that it's not real|.

I was not immersed in this book as much as I was in Alone. This is my own fault; I purposely held myself out of the story somewhat because I wasn't in the mood to wander around remembering the book for days afterward. That said, this book is also probably not as intrinsically immersive as Alone is; the viewpoint jumps around a bit (did I mention there are four main characters?) and, because there are actual conversations thanks to having more than one character, there's some prose. Well, sort of; it takes the form of film scripts. Though it's still mostly in verse, the inclusion of dialogue made it less... impactful, somehow? Or maybe that's just my experience differing because, as mentioned, I intentionally prevented myself from getting fully immersed.

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

3 stars. Would have gotten 4, but there's a woman pastor who features semi-prominently in one of the characters' lives, and I happen to believe that's unbiblical.

(Endnote: |And California would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for those meddling kids.|)

"City Spies: London Calling" by James Ponti

This one's better than the last one, I'll give it that.

Its plotting is a tad weird. For most of the book there's essentially two plots, one about someone trying to screw with the upcoming royal wedding of fictional people (feat. Kat, Sydney, Brooklyn, and Monty the adult) and one about finding the missing sibling of one of the City Spies (feat. Paris, Rio, Cairo, and Mother the adult). They do eventually mesh together toward the end.

This volume also introduces one of the classics of spy fiction: the mole hunt.

My main beef with the narrative here is their supercomputer, Beny, |developing into a cloud-based machine intelligence and returning from the dead (well, destroyed)... somehow. (I use "machine intelligence" to refer to things like GLaDOS from Portal, Jane from Ender's Game, and Jarvis from Marvel--basically, sentient computers that used to be called "artificial intelligence" before generative AI came along and ruined that term.) That was the main shark this story jumped, as the series is otherwise pretty realistic, but we don't have truly sentient computers yet.|

Other than that, it's mostly good. I liked the reveal that Clementine, Mother's estranged wife (don't worry, Mother is a guy; he picked the name as something of a joke, I think) |was actually going undercover to spy on the bad guys, not actually joining them|.

The series seems to be building toward a conclusion with this one. It also ends on a tiny bit of a cliffhanger (really more of a monkey-bars-hanger; nobody's actually in danger, but the book isn't wrapped up yet). I think we have at most three more books to go. (I may also be dramatically wrong.)

My secondary beef with the narrative is the fact that unlike the last few, we don't have a strong sense of purpose in this one, possibly as a consequence of the divorced plotlines.

Katherine Kathmandu "Kat" NoLastCodename continues to be my favorite character. My brain still insists her full name is Katherine.

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

4 stars.

(Endnote: Despite the title, London [neither the city itself or a new City Spy named London] never calls anyone on the phone.)

"The Wonderland Trials" by Sara Ella

"Alice in Wonderland, but dystopian" was not a concept I ever expected to encounter. And, if somebody pitched it to me, I wouldn't expect it to be good.

And yet, I encountered this, and it was good. I've seen it described as reminiscent of The Hunger Games, which is something I can't judge because I've never read The Hunger Games.

It's about sixteen-year-old Alice Liddell, who lives in dystopian England. (It's realspace that's dystopian in this, not Wonderland.) People with the mysterious Wonder Gene are banned (yes, they banned a gene, it's weird) because they are supposedly cooler than other people and can access the mysterious pseudo-alternate dimension of Wonderland.

They've also banned... some technology? They have trains, but smartphones (aka "pocket screens") and earbuds aren't allowed. They still have books, sort of, but all the books are terribly made and not very good.

My favorite part of this book (other than it being about people who are older than 12) is the hilarious nomenclatorial references to various Alice in Wonderland characters. Such as Minister Mocktur Telle, the scientist Katherine R. Pillar, and the love interest Chess Shire. Not to mention the more obvious ones like Madi Hatter.

Oh, I suppose I should describe the plot too. Alice's older sister Charlotte is arrested for having the Wonder Gene, and Alice tries to find her before getting involved in the Wonderland Trials (a tournament thing held every year to determine the Queen of Hearts's successor, which nobody has ever won).

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

4 stars.

(Endnote: It also namedrops Minecraft in an illegal book about the games of the past.)

"The Burning Tree" by Helen Dent

It's a tree... THAT'S ON FIYAHHHHHH!

Actually, the Burning Tree is not, in fact, on fire. |Yet.| What it does do is randomly curse people for no apparent reason, until it kicks off the plot by sending the main character's sister into a coma. (This is apparently the first time it's done this to someone.) To try to reverse this, the main character, Ellie Caster, |sets it on fire in an attempt to get rid of it. Unfortunately, this just makes everything worse|.

This one is magical realism more than anything. It's not played scary enough to be horror, and the magic isn't understood enough in-universe to be urban fantasy. Those three (magical realism, urban fantasy, and horror) are sort of the trifecta of "modern setting but it has magic".

Anyway, the book is set in a small town inhabited mainly by three huge extended families: the Casters, the Levys, and the Finches. The Casters and the Levys super hate each other, and the Finches are just kind of there. Unfortunately for Ellie Caster's blood pressure, she has to work with her nemesis Charlotte Levy when the Burning Tree starts causing problems. And also a guy named Curtis Finch, the cousin of Drew Finch, Ellie's crush (who has a crush on Charlotte, not Ellie, causing even more drama).

It's engaging enough to make me stay interested throughout the whole thing, and its main plot twist was twisty enough that I didn't see it coming. Which are my favorite type of plot twists. It's possible that I've just read so much middle-grade fiction that based on the blurb and the first few chapters I can throw several general roadmaps out into the ether, and one of them usually broadly matches the plot of the book.

When I can't do that (like with this book, which is actually YA, not middle-grade), or when there's an out-of-nowhere plot twist, is when I get pleasantly surprised. (Or unpleasantly, as with things like "turns out the love interest is secretly the main villain").

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fight scenes. I'd play a videogame of it, though I'm pretty sure players on their second or third (or eighth, or ninety-second) playthroughs would use their metaknowledge to try to sequence break (going to places and doing things before they'd happen if you play the story normally). I think it would be hard to stop that while still maintaining verisimilitude, but it's probably possible.

4 stars.

(Endnote: As far as I can tell, Helen Dent is no relation to Arthur Dent of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fame.)