The City of Dreaming Books

Who does he think he's writing for, this Walter Moers, with his 160,000 word, self-illustrated tome about a bookish dinosaur who dreams of becoming the greatest writer in Zamonia? Who would want to read such a monstrosity? A bunch of eighth grade boys in Damian's class, that's who. The Zamonian tales are their newest enthusiasm, and a strange one it is.

I read this book because Damian insisted.  He had already insisted I read Rumo & His Miraculous Adventures, a previous Moers novel about a Wolperting (dog-like, lightning-fast fighter) who becomes a great hero of Zamonia, following his sweetheart even to the depths of the underworld.That book struck me by its pure, unending inventiveness and remarkably graphic violence.  Characters range from one-eyed Demonocles who eat their victims alive to Shark Grubs with their swollen maggot-like bodies and fourteen little arms to the Copper Killers, ruthless mechanical warriors patched together from dead soldiers and their weapons.  Despite its profusion of dangers and strange stories, Rumo wore me out, and it took me a long time to finish. 

Then it was on to The City of Dreaming Books.  I'd like it better, Damian insisted, because it was about literature. And so it is. All the dinosaurs of Lindworm Castle fancy themselves as writers, so when Optimus Yarnspinner's authorial godfather dies leaving him the finest story he has ever read, young Optimus (only 77 at the time) sets out for the city of Bookholm to find the story's anonymous author.

Bookholm is a city of publishers, bookstores, critics, and bibliophiles, built above collapsed catacombs full of ancient and often fabulously valuable books. Poor Optimus, naive, stuffy, and a bit slow on the uptake, is in over his head. He has read all Bookholm's lore, but he's a lousy judge of character or danger, and before long he's exiled and wandering in the deadly catacombs, where greedy Bookhunters would just as soon take off his head and the mysterious Shadow King sighs and kills.

But the journey of the hapless dinosaur - a writer who has never yet written anything worthwhile - is also a story of the quest to become a writer. Optimus has read just about every great piece of Zamonian literature. Now he's trying to have some life experiences as well. He's hypnotised, poisoned, crushed, pursued, attacked, imprisoned, taunted, befriended by the gentle Booklings... and throughout it all he remains largely a passive observer, noticing telling details and literary references while barely escaping with his life. Then he falls under the power of the dreaded Shadow King, and his true literary apprenticeship begins.

Witty, playful, violent, excessive, often terribly dark, and written in archaic style ("Dear Reader"), The City of Dreaming Books seems hardly likely to delight either a teenager or an adult writer. But in the end, its sheer celebration of the power and possibility of literature does both.  What writer can help but sympathize with Optimus, reading for days in the Library of the Orm, transfixed by the beauty and power of books?  Surely there's a twinge of recognition when he constantly introduces himself as a writer, albeit one who has not yet written anything. And in the end, when Optimus escapes fire and horror to see for the first time the Alphabet of the Stars, we fervently hope the inspiration of the Orm will animate him for a long time to come.

Flatterland, a book review

Over the holidays, I read Flatterland by Ian Stewart. Stewart is an English mathematician and contributor to a branch of geometry called "catastrophe theory." Sounds fun, eh?

The subtitle of Flatterland is "Like Flatland, only more so." Stewart wrote it as a sequel to and extension of Edwin Abbott's 1884 geometrical satire, Flatland. One hundred years after the events of the first book, Victoria Line, great-great-granddaughter of the original A. Square, reads her ancestor's book (against her father's express prohibition) and finds in it a code for summoning a visitor from Spaceland.

Instead of a Sphere, Victoria receives a visit from a Space Hopper, a creature who helps her visit not just many dimensions higher than the third, but a number of other strange geometric worlds. In one she sees fractals everywhere. In another, parallel lines converge. In another she can see herself in the distance. Her investigation into curved space leads into a discussion of quantum physics and relativity, a theory the Space Hopper insists is poorly named, since it's based on the one thing that isn't relative - the speed of light.

So how's the book to read? My 8th grade son read it before me, and he found it mind-twisting and thought provoking - hard, but worth it. For me, with a year of college physics and no math beyond calculus, it was surprisingly accessible. Yes, it's difficult to visualize the worlds Stewart describes, but he assures us it's difficult for mathematicians, too. And its's fun to toss these ideas around lightly like oddly-shaped objects to juggle. The format consists mostly of dialogue between the Space Hopper, who is a little bit self-satisfied, and Victoria, who is by turns a stubborn teenager, a dense student, an independent reasoner, and an inspired explorer of new intellectual landscapes.

I wish the discussion of fractional dimensions were more thorough: I felt I almost had it when the story moved on. I enjoyed Moo-bius the Cow and the Klein bottles. Topology was fun to dip into, as was the discussion of infinity and parallel lines. The section on quantum physics and relativity took me back to the weirdest, most fun parts of physics. As for the story itself, while the plot is not enthralling, it's sufficient to carry the exploration of mathematics.

Who would like this book? Anyone who would like his or her mind stretched in weird ways. I'd recommend it especially for kids in grades 8-10 who like math even if they don't like calculation; people who like visual puzzles; and people like me who want their ideas of math and science tickled by new ways of thinking about and trying to visualize shape and space.

More than anything, Flatterland is valuable because it shares with us the freaky, imaginative side of mathematics and demonstrates that math is not just a matter of plodding through more and more difficult algebra and calculus. Instead, mathematics can become a great playground for the imagination.

Does anyone have another playful or challenging melding of math and literature to recommend?

A great surprise review

Today I received unexpected notice of this great, sarcastic review of Lost in Lexicon in Open Letters Monthly Review.

I didn't know about this online review of arts and literature, but I like their mission statement:

Open Letters is dedicated to the proposition that no writing which reviews the arts should be boring, back-patting, soft-pedaling, or personally compromised. We’ve all had the experience of reading a review that sparkled—one that combined an informed, accessible examination of its quarry with gamesome, intelligent, and even funny commentary.

I think this review sparkled. And I wonder if Steve Donoghue always reads with a basset hound on his lap.

Cute Eats Cute, a book review

Cute Eats Cute by C.B. Murphy is a cynical, funny, and surprisingly tender-hearted social satire and coming-of-age story. In a Minneapolis suburb, community discord over whether hunters should cull a burgeoning deer herd in the local nature reserve becomes a vehicle for dissecting a multitude of modern America's social divisions. Talk radio, New Age religion, eco-sentimentalism, pop psychology and macho hunter culture all come under Murphy's microscope.

Fifteen-year-old Sam's hippie parents want him to call them Jeff and Elissa, but they agree on little else. Elissa is an eco-feminist, a vegan, and a newly converted Wiccan, while Jeff, an officer with the Department of Natural Resources, swerves ever closer to a manly hunting culture. Sam and his band of high school friends are convinced that killing deer is cruel and harmful to the earth, and they decide to Do Something. The Something escalates from street theater to sabotage. When Megan, the object of Sam's lust, asks him to infiltrate the hunters' camp, Sam finds himself bouncing wildly among people with different belief systems and affiliations.

Sam's undercover mission allows Murphy to poke fun at a medley of characters, from the activist lesbian who wears a gas mask for her Environmental Sensitivity to the bow-toting Christian Hunters of Men. A family eco-therapist urges Sam to pass through an initiation and be on the lookout for a spiritual guide, but Sam can't figure out whether to follow a radical ecoterrorist who may or may not be advocating human sacrifice. Meanwhile his parents are on the verge of divorce, his friend Ryan always says the least helpful thing, the alluring Megan thinks he's gay, and Holly, the fourth member of their gang, gets pregnant. How does a girl who would do anything to stop the murder of deer reason about abortion?

In Murphy's pitch-perfect and very funny dialogue, characters talk past each other as if they're speaking code and never seem to arrive at truly common understanding. Sam's observations of the people and places around him are astute, but his own teenage cluelessness and confusion come through with increasing clarity. From its hilarious beginnings, the book moves almost imperceptibly to a more serious level where Sam has to make real choices with real and at times disastrous consequences. A strong action climax brings the book to a close, and if Sam's emotional confusion never entirely clears, maybe that's just a realistic reflection of what it means to live in a greyish, imperfect world. This book was great fun to read, and I recommend it highly to teen boys and adults.

The Penderwicks at Point Mouette, a book review

I just finished reading the third book in Jeanne Birdsall's delightful ongoing adventures of the Penderwick sisters. Batty, Jane, Skye, and Rosalind now range in age from five to thirteen, and while the sisters' widowed father is off on his honeymoon and Rosalind gets a vacation in New Jersey, the three younger sisters and their fatherless friend Jeffrey go to stay on the coast of Maine with their favorite aunt.

As the Oldest Available Penderwick, Skye, 12, almost buckles under the responsibility of keeping everyone in the family alive and whole. A series of disasters occurs, with one sprained ankle, one bloody nose, one bad case of writer's block, and one broken heart. And all of these small disasters are only the prelude to the summer's biggest event, a revelation that has the potential to be life-changing.

Although Skye's early panic seems overdone for my taste, as the speed of the action picks up, so does the conviction of the writing and the quality of the humor. Birdsall's humor always arises naturally (and seemingly effortlessly) from the characters' quirks and special qualities. Other children's writers who want to inject humor into their work could do a lot worse than study to Birdsall's technique. Such writers could also benefit from noticing the way she juggles four points of view and multiple sub-plots.

When Birdsall sought a publisher for her first Penderwick book (which went on to win the National Book Award), a number of editors turned it down for being old-fashioned. The Penderwick sisters don't spend their time instant messaging, and the institutional world of school with all its tropes of bullies and cliques never appears in these books. The Penderwicks' world is the world of free time and independence. The girls write books, toast marshmallows, view seals, sell golf balls and search for moose. They clean the house and try their hand at cooking. Somehow the four of them, despite occasional clashes, manage to stay devoted to one another without ever seeming saccharine. The sisters are not goody-goodies: they're lively and contentious and full of conflicted feelings and dramatic expression. I think any 8 to 12 year-old reader would enjoy getting to know them.

March, a book review

My family has been immersed in the Civil War lately. Damian is about to go on a school trip to Gettysburg, so he's been reading The Killer Angels, and we've all been watching the Ken Burns PBS series on the war. Then a couple of weeks ago I picked up a copy of Geraldine Brooks' Pulitzer prize-winning novel March, which recounts the war experiences of Mr. March, the fictional father of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women.

It's a wonderful novel, suffused with the innocent, stuffy, self-righteous and self-doubting conscience of Mr. March. March writes poetic, judicious letters home to shield his family from the confusion and horror the war brings him. At the same time his narration moves between the present and past, as he recalls not only his first shaming realization of slavery's true nature but also courtship, wealth, and the slide into idealistic poverty. While March believes that the war serves a noble cause, he finds very little nobility in the mud and ordure, lust and vengeance that surround him. Sometimes he seems a man too caught up in idealism to see the people nearest him as they reaaly are.

Then there's Marmee, the saintly mother of Little Women. (Brooks quotes her mother telling her, when at the age of ten Brooks read Alcott's classic for the first time, "Nobody in real life is such a goody-goody as that Marmee.") Brooks's Marmee is a passionate woman with a temper worse than Jo's. She loves her husband, but the two of them, trying to live up to each other's ideals, often misunderstand each other. Forever the dutiful wife, Marmee is nevertheless furious with her husband for going to war, for becoming ill, and for hiding the truth of his inner life.

Perhaps most compelling of all is the character of Grace. Beautiful and cultured, Grace is a slave, companion to the plantation mistress when March first meets her. During the war she becomes a nurse in the Washington hospital where March lies delirious from "bilious fever and pneumonia" after war and vengeful Confederates have laid waste his dreams. Grace has the dignity and courage of someone who has always faced reality in a way March has been unable to do.

In a way, this book reads as the coming-of-age story of a forty-year-old man. March is a book about war, ideals, marriage, and our failure to communicate with those we most love. Closely observed, psychologically astute, and written with simple elegance, this is a very fine book. I recommend it.

Enna Burning, a Book Review

Enna Burning is the second book in the Bayern fantasy series of Shannon Hale, Newbery Honor-wining author of Princess Academy. I haven't read The Goose Girl, which is the first Bayern book, but part of what I wanted to learn from reading this one is how to handle a sequel so that it's accessible to those who haven't read the first book while not being repetitive for those who have. Hale manages this partly by focusing on a new protagonist, Enna, a forest girl who befriended the goose girl Isa (now queen) from the first book.

Enna has returned to live in the forest with her brother Leifer after the death of their mother, but she's restless for life in the larger world. Then Leifer discovers an ancient vellum telling him how to summon and control fire, and the need to burn begins to consume him. When Bayern is invaded by its neighbor Tira, Leifer's skills turn the tide of battle, but he dies in the fire. In mourning for her brother, Enna succumbs to the temptation to read the vellum herself. Soon she finds that fire is an uncontrollable addiction. Enna becomes secretive and obsessed as she breaks promises to herself, makes bigger fires, more often, and even begins to burn people alive -- all the while telling herself she's only doing what's right for Bayern.

This book has lovely descriptions and likable, complex characters. As Enna changes, so do those around her: gentle Finn becomes tougher and more manly; Queen Isa suffers from the effects of her own wind-calling power. And then there's the charismatic Tiran captain, Sileph, who captures Enna and uses drugs, loving words, and persuasion to seduce her toward despair and treason.

A great strength of Enna Burning is the freshenss of its sensory detail and the beauty of its descriptive language. The crunch of snow underfoot sounds like rodents munching; Enna's hand, as she creeps up to a Tiran camp, becomes numb touching the frosty ground. The descriptions of Enna's interactions with fire are frightening and convincing.

A novelist has to master time and space, persuading the reader she is always in control. Here Hale fares a little less well. Time in the first half of the book, especially once Enna begins her burning, moves slowly and rather aimlessly. She burns some Tiran tents; time passes; she goes out again. Meanwhile everybody else holds war councils. Clunky transitions occur: "Enna turned her back on the south and followed Isi inside to prepare for a war council, one of many that autumn." Just that suddenly, we move from a scene that reached no real conclusion to more distant narration eliding a long span of time. The same disproportion, though this is a quibble, appears in the map at the front of the book. We're told that the forest is two days' journey from the capital, while to reach the desert land of Yasid takes two months; the map shows the two distances as not that different from one another.

Once Enna falls captive in the Tiran camp, the narration picks up speed. A prisoner, unable to act for herself, Enna undergoes a fierce moral struggle. For the reader, watching Enna struggle against and succumb to Sileph's blandishments makes for painful suspense. Then, after scenes of escape and war that would serve as climax for another book, we move into a long journey to Yasid in search of healing. The resolution, while a little too neat, reaffirms the value of deep and enduring friendship.

This is a tough book, with its harrowing portrayal of addictive need and debasement. Most disturbing of all is the fact that Enna burns a lot of people alive. For some reason, even though readings expect that a fantasy may show killing in war, this grisly kind of killing, and the fact that the heroine embraces it, makes the story unusually dark. Perhaps readers will receive a good reminder that war is never all that purely heroic. Nor is the mayhem sprung on the reader without warning. Hale gives a fair taste of what's to come in the two-page prologue, which shows a fire-witch fleeing through the forest from the destruction and murder she has caused. Shannon Hale never promised us a story that was all flowers and light.

Wolf Hall, a book review

Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel, is one of the most convincing and enlightening books of historical fiction I've read in a long time. Covering a constantly popularized time period through the eyes of a widely maligned protagonist, it tells the tale of Henry VIII's pursuit, marriage, and gradual disenchantment with Anne Boleyn. Mantel's point of view character is Thomas Cromwell, whom we know from Man for All Seasons as the toady lawyer who profits from his lack of principle, even as Sir Thomas More goes nobly to his death.

What Mantel does is paint a surprisingly touching portrait of Thomas Cromwell, a low-born and self-educated man who, because he's an astute and honorable businessman and because he's unfailingly loyal, rises to great heights among nobles who scorn him. A man of sincere affections, he stands by his beloved mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, long after it seems politically suicidal to do so. When his beloved wife is ripped away from him by the plague in a single day, he manages to go on bleakly caring for his expanding household of extended family, servants and apprentices, but never marrying again.

Cromwell is a complicated man who always manages to turn a profit (though we know that someday he, too, after years of faithful service to the king, will be executed). He's a rough man, abused as a child, a street fighter who is sad to learn he has "a face like a murderer." He treats those he loves with great gentleness. Those he dislikes or opposes he treats with velvet gloves, though his ruthlessness grows as the years go by. Still, in a time of religious violence and brutality, Mantel's Cromwell can't stomach the practice of torturing and burning heretics, while Thomas More considers doing so a not unpleasant duty.

For me one of the great pleasures of this book was the atmosphere it created of sixteenth century London, a growing city, dirty and damp, spread out, still half rural, not yet the center of the world. Another pleasure was the way the book portrays religious feeling. Cromwell reveals little of his own belief, but gradually he seems to become more of a Protestant, believing that the people themselves should have the right to read the Gospels. Henry VIII sincerely wants the Pope's approval of his marriage to Anne Boleyn; to be excommunicated is a fearsome fate.

The book is not a quick read. It has a huge cast of characters: even the indispensable five-page listing at the beginning doesn't cover them all. In debunking the myth of Thomas More, I think Mantel may have gone too far, making him thoroughly unpleasant, stingy, arrogant and coldly cruel not only to heretics but to his own wife. Most difficult of all for the reader is Mantel's narrative choice of a very close third person point of view. She brings us so close to Cromwell's own thoughts that the book constantly refers to him as "he" rather than "Cromwell," even when there's another "he" in the sentence. No matter how attentive you are as a reader, there will be times you can't be certain which "he" is referring to whom.

But all in all, this is a great, deep, satisfying read, like a good night at the theater, rich in pageantry, language, and emotion that you'll remember for a long time.

Notes from a Liar and Her Dog: a book review

Gennifer Choldenko's Notes from a Liar and Her Dog tells the story of a Ant, who is such a misfit in her family that she's certain the grown-ups she lives with are not her real parents. As the only brunette and the only troublemaker between two blonde sisters who know how to please their parents, she feels close to no one but her Chihuahua mix and her smelly, artistic classmate Harrison. As a result of her alienation, Ant hides her intelligence and good grades, lies indiscriminately, and hides her dog in her jacket pocket whenever she can.

I can't remember ever before reading fiction with such a convincingly frightful set of parents. Ant's mother betrays no patience or compassion for her unhappy child. Instead, she sees her middle daughter as almost an interloper in her otherwise happy, well-behaved family. But the veneer of family happiness is thin: all of them are tense and unsettled, waiting for their father to reject yet another job and uproot them to move to a new city once again.

Just Carol, Ant's art teacher, tries to intervene. But Ant's mother angrily rejects Carol's approaches, and when Ant is finally allowed to join Carol in volunteer work at the zoo, Ant blows her chance not once but twice.

What makes this book compelling is the strong voice of its unhappy narrator, a girl with a loving heart who makes herself as tough as she can on the outside while longing for approval and support on the inside. Despite Ant's propensity for lying, her narrative voice is frank and full of integrity. She's fighting to hold onto her sense of self among people who appear to scorn her.

The book is a masterful portrait of a warped family system, where one child has become the scapegoat for a host of family troubles. Despite the webs of deception and poor judgment Ant weaves around herself, Notes from a Liar and Her Dog suggests that people can change, and even the most painful relationships can become more rewarding with heroic effort on all sides.

This is a great book for a thoughtful kid, or even for a kid who sometimes feels maligned and misunderstood. And who doesn't feel that way sometimes? I highly recommend it for ages 9 to 14, and it might be a great conversation-starter for parents and children to read together.

The Writing on the Wall, book review

Wendy Lichtman's novel The Writing on the Wall is the most recent addition to my small collection of middle grade novels with a mathematical theme. It's a well-written school story where eighth-grader Tess's fascination with mathematics plays a key role.

Tess loves math, and she likes to make mathematical analogies for people and dilemmas in her everyday lift. For example, she calls her friend Sammy "s to the fifth" becasue Sammy inflates everything and often says things five times. Miranda is "the absolute value of m" because, like the absolute value of a number, Miranda is always positive.

The plot centers around a series of mathematical clues left as graffiti on the back wall of a church across from Tess's school. The clues seem to point to a crime, and they also seem to be aimed at Tess as the one person who can decipher them. Tess, who is being tormented by a boy named Richard and needs the distraction, finds herself drawn into the mystery to the degree that she ignores a strong warning from the principal and starts writing some graffiti of her own.

So on the one hand, this is a mystery story with codes and clues. On the other hand, it's the story of a usually obedient and responsible student drawn into careless delinquency becasue of her obsession with numbers and with being in control. Consequences follow, and Tess has to do some re-thinking of her own motivation.

A real strength of this story is that the characters, adults and kids alike, are well-drawn and believable. One of the best is Mr. Z, the snide computer teacher. Tess is an observant narrator, though not, as she realizes, an intuitive one. The math she presents in this book will be clear and accessible to students in grades 5-8, and it's well woven into the story.

This is the second book about Tess and math, so the earlier one, Secrets, Lies, and Algebra, is worth checking out, too.

Hoppergrass, a book review

Hoppergrass is a YA novel about a fifteen-year-old boy sent to a southern reform school in the late sixties. Although uneven in its narration, Hoppergrass eventually delivers a strong tale of courage, self-assertion, and redemption.

Bowser is a middle class kid sent to The Hill for reasons we don't learn until the end of the book. With an uncertain sentence before him and worries about whether he is mentally disturbed, Bowser cultivates a reputation for violence and relies on his white gang--kids with names like Snicklesnort, Babyback, and Evan--to watch his back. When he develops an unexpected friendship with a huge black boy named Nose, he keeps it secret, fearing his reputation will take a hit.

Then Evan is killed in an accident and Nose is wrongly accused of manslaughter, set up by the sadistic staff member the boys call Shorty Nub. Bowser, enraged and confused, has to figure out how to save his friend from prison.

This book has its share of flaws. Although Bowser narrates the book, for the first third of it his flat affect and detached style keep the reader at a distance. Even thereafter his motivation and simply what's happening are sometimes unclear. Hoppergrass is populated with too many blank, venal adults to keep track of easily. Among the adults, only the villain Shorty Nub and two rare good adults, Miss Lovitt the librarian and Mr. Woodrow the maintenance man, emerge as full characters.

Still, the kids are well-drawn, and the book addresses a theme I haven't seen in youth fiction before: the tendency to space out and feel confused as a way to duck responsibility when moral decisions get tough. Bowser does it with drugs or daydreaming, and he has to learn to struggle against the temptation: "I decided to make myself as strong and clear as I could and not allow myself to space out into story time."

Author Chris Carlton Brown has taught teens both at a psychiatric center and in special education, and he writes with authority about troubled boys protecting themselves with toughness and swagger. One caution: the authenticity of the story means that this book carries a heavy load of violence, crude sexual references, smoking, drug use, and delinquent behavior. The kids' innocence and hope hides deep under a tough exterior, but it's there, and without sentimentality Hoppergrass shows how it sometimes struggles to emerge.

Snowball's chance, a book review

Last year, as he was studying George Orwell's Animal Farm in school, Damian told me he'd heard of a book called Snowball's Chance, a parody sequel that was a send-up of capitalism. It took me a while, but I finally ordered the book for him. Since it came this weekend, when he's away climbing a mountain, I read it first.

Sad to say, I was disappointed. John Reed, the author, is a New York resident who wrote Snowball's Chance in a two-week frenzy just after the Twin Towers fell. For some reason, in the midst of that traumatic time, he conceived a strong aversion to George Orwell, blaming him for a Cold War mentality that, in his view, led people in the West to make wrong-headed choices that unleashed environmental degradation, inequality, and war. I think this interpretation is woolly-headed, worthy of Orwell's sheep: after all, what Orwell tried to do was to speak out against Soviet totalitarian communism in order to allow true socialism to have a chance.

The premise of Snowball's Chance is intriguing and sounds as if it's going to be fun. Snowball (Trotsky), chased off and vilified in Animal Farm by the Stalinist Napoleon, returns after Napoleon's death to transfifure the farm into a capitalist heaven. He changes the Animal Farm slogan from its degradedform - "Most animals are equalish" - to the much more Republican-sounding, "All animals are born equal. What they become is their own affair." But what in fact he establishes is a kind of crony capitalism.

The book starts off in a promising enough manner, as the animals once again alter their view of history and truth to embrace the New Farm Order. But soon the themes become heavy-handed. Pollution and garbage dumps besmirch the landscape, a crime wave rolls in, industrial accidents claim lives, consumerism makes the farm animals fat and lazy, and immigrant animals are given the worst jobs and made to live in slums. The animals build two more windmills, called the Twin Mills. Animal Farm becomes Animal Fair, glitzy, trashy, and so costly that the residents have to take out loans, introduce a cash economy, pay taxes and utility bills, and forget their farming roots.

Meanwhile, in a side plot that I found more intriguing, beavers in the forest nurse their grievances, remembering a mythical time of beaver ascendance and steaming over the way the greedy inhabitants of Animal Farm steal their woodland home's main resource, water. Moses the Raven, who tried to lull the creatures of Animal Farm with his visions of Sugarcandy Mountain, regales the beavers with tales of Sugarcandy Lodestar, where beavers who die in service of the ancient Beaver Code will be rewarded with 1600 virgin saplings. So much for subtlety.

The story hurtles to an inevitable clash- complete with self-immolating squirrels and a highjacked Ferris wheel plowing into the Twin Mills. Snowball's Chance ends with the farm animals urging one another to take a violent revenge.

All of this is good enough, but it's clumsily done. I suppose the heavily sentimental depiction of Benjamin the donkey may be meant to parody Orwell's sentimentality in portraying the faithful horse Boxer. In the same way, Reed exaggerates Orwell's rather distant reportorial voice, but he takes it too far. There are too many sentences like this one: "Yet, apparent as it may have seemed that the security of the Twin Mills had been compromised, the pigs argued persuasively that Mr. Frederick was already under court order not to set foot on Animal Farm-and, that the legal (hence financial) repercusions of either him or Pilkington sallying forth a single toe onto the grounds would be so severe as to thwart even the most stalwart enemy."

So I was disappointed. In an interview on Wikinews, Reed indicates that Animal Farm had its fifty years of relevance, but is now out of date, speaking from an outdated Cold War paradigm. Snowball's Chance is much more up to date, but I wager it's Animal Farm schoolkids and adults alike will still be reading fifty years from now.

Schooled, a book review

Schooled, by Gordon Korman, is a middle school book with humor and heart. Cap and his grandmother Rain are the last two members of a sixties-style commune named Garland, where they live without money, television, or other trappings of the competitive, materialistic life Rain disdains. Homeschooled, Cap hardly knows any other people until the day Rain breaks her hip falling from the plum tree and he drives her to the hospital. While she’s recovering in a rehab facility, he’s taken in by a social worker and attends a school named Craverage (or, as the kids prefer, C Average) middle school.

Cap’s pacifism, trustfulness, and general naivete make him completely unprepared for the social jungle of middle school, where the cool kids immediately target him as the greatest loser ever. Bullying can get to be a tiresome theme in middle school fiction, but these bullies have some imagination: besides lodging spitballs in his long hair and leaving disgusting things in his locker, they arrange for Cap to be elected school president. Once he's elected, they continually summon him to bogus press conferences to explain how he’s going to solve class problems.

Earnest and friendly, Cap never takes offense. Told the president’s job is to learn the name of all 1100 kids in the school, he sets out to do so. He wears tie dye shirts and corn husk sandals, practices tai chi in the courtyard, endures the disgusted insults of his foster sister, and watches a TV soap opera for clues on how school really works. Before long, he starts to win other students over, but that’s before he gets hold of the student activities checkbook and starts giving away all the money meant for the Halloween dance.

The story of a naïve, good-hearted homeschooled student entering the fishbowl of public school may remind readers of Jerry Spinelli’s Stargirl, and with good reason, but there are differences. Cap is really something of a holy fool, transforming the people around him. Instead of having a single narrator, Schooled has multiple narrators taking different chapters: Cap, the social workerwho takes him in, her daughter, the tormentor and head jock, the former dweebiest kid in the school, a popular girl, and even the principal. Second, while Stargirl’s popularity rises and falls, Cap’s travels pretty much in one direction, without Spinelli’s overtones of loss and regret.

I know a teacher who read this book aloud to her seventh grade class. It’s a good choice. Funny, thoughtful, and cleverly observed, Gordon Korman's Schooled is well worth the time of a reader 10 to 14 years old.

Still Alice, a book review

A friend passed this book on to our family after she finished reading it with her twelve-year-old daughter, an exercise they undertook in memory of a grandmother who had died from Alzheimer's. The next to read it was my 21-year-old son, who told me, "This story is so sad. I could totally see this happening to our family."

Alice Howland, a cognitive neuroscientist specializing in linguistics, is a 49-year-old tenured Harvard professor when she begins to experience memory lapses and periods of disorientation. When she can no longer attribute her problems to stress, she pursues medical advice and receives the devastating diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer's, a genetic disease. A woman who has always reveled in the life of the mind, she now faces inevitable decline, loss, and death. Over the course of the next two years, her downhill course accelerates, as she oscillates wildly between increasing confusion and moments of clarity.

Alice isn't a terribly sympathetic character at first. Ambitious, career-focused, and self-satisfied, she is a merciless critic of her third child for skipping college to pursue an interest in acting. Nor are her family angels: on hearing of their mother's diagnosis, the first reaction of all three children is to wonder if they'll get Alzheimer's, too. And her husband finds her disease so threatening he often reacts with annoyance or a cold distance.

Yet no reader can fail to connect with Alice's sorrow and terror as she contemplates being avoided, pitied, and ignored, and as she worries about the day to come when she'll no longer recognize her loved ones. All the character relationships evolve in convincing and imperfect ways over the course of the book.

Still Alice is rather clunkily written. Early on, it suffers from too much exposition, with character and relationships too often explained rather than shown. The early dialog, especially between clinician and patient, often feels wooden and didactic rather than individualized. But the writing gets better as the book goes on and Dr. Genova delves more deeply into Alice's own disconnected experience.

Besides, this isn't really just a novel. It's a wake-up bell for all of us who may someday face a dementing illness, and a call for understanding and compassion for all those who are currently suffering from one.

Word Nerd: a book review

Word Nerd, by Susan Nielsen, tells the story of a twelve-year-old misfit who finds friendship through Scrabble. Put that way, it doesn't sound exciting, but this book is a great read, with a wry eye for character and relationships.

"The day I almost died, the sky was a bright, brilliant blue--" So Ambrose begins his story. He's an awkward, nerdy boy with a mother so insanely protective that until kindergarten she made him wear a kid harness with a leash whenever they went out. They've moved from Canadian town to Canadian town, and he's made friends in none of them. Finally an inventive and ignorant trio of bullies almost kill him, and his mother decides he'll study at home through a correspondence course. (She keeps him away from computers because of the danger.)

Partly out of boredom, Ambrose becomes fascinated with his landlord's son, who has just returned from prison. Cosmo is a struggling ex-addict with a debt problem hanging over him, a foul mouth, and a lousy attitude. But mutual exploitation leads eventually to friendship between the two lost males, and their relationship is brightened and complicated by the presence of Amanda, leader of the local Scrabble club. As Ambrose the word nerd's Scrabble rankings climb, so do his social skills, his skills of self-defense, and his bravery, until a final confrontation with Cosmo's creditors threatens to ruin everything.

What makes this book so charming is the voice of Ambrose, by turns mature, resigned, childish, and deaf to social niceties. Some parents may be turned offby the seriously bad language of Cosmo and his associates, and I found Ambrose's frequent use of childish potty terms distasteful, but all in all, this story of how an unlikely friendship leads an awkward boy to self-understanding and advocacy could become a favorite of any child, and not just the word nerds among us.