Reviewing "The Mysterious Benedict Society" by Trenton Lee Stewart

When orphan Reynard “Reynie” Muldoon answers an enigmatic advertisement in the paper, he didn’t know what to expect. What he probably did NOT expect, however, was to be swept into an adventure involving three other uniquely-gifted children, a secret mission, dastardly worldwide conspiracies, subliminal messaging, abducted children (and secret agents), and lots and lots of riddles.

Expected or not, that’s what happened. After a few tests, Reynie found himself part of the Mysterious Benedict Society, a team of children hand-picked by the benevolent Mr. Benedict to carry out a vital mission: to go undercover at a shadowy Institute to stop some unidentified—but unquestionably horrible—plan from successfully unfolding.

Somehow, secret messages are being transmitted via television and radio* into people’s minds, and only Mr. Benedict has been able to discover them. Unfortunately, these messages have a protective fail-safe: they convince the people that hear these messages that the messages don’t exist. Only minds that are particularly focused on the truth can detect them at all…which is where the Mysterious Benedict Society comes in.

The Mystery of the Missing Mystery

At the end of December I was nigh-certain I was going to "fail" my self-inflicted appointed reading goal, having been consistently ten books behind schedule since The Brothers Karamazov. (Why I thought that would be a good selection to start out last year, I don't know.) So in desperation, I turned to re-reading some of the Juvenile Fiction I've been meaning to review on this blog. 

It was the T.C.D.C. to the rescue.

"What's a 'teesie-deesie'?" you may ask.

Hattie and Grandma: Two Book Series about The Olden Days

Re-reading old favorite children's books provides an interesting opportunity to revisit childhood experiences and evaluate them from an older perspective. This can sometimes backfire; I may have loved something as a child, but as an adult, the allure is replaced by an underwhelming sense as all its flaws are now more evident. However, I would say the majority of the time it's pleasant to re-read books from Way Back When, especially when it turns out that these books are "Actually pretty good." 

(Past-tense Me, being able to hear this approval from Present-tense Me, can't help but feel vindicated in her choice of literature when this happens.)

“The Swiss Family Robinson,” where the Flamingo and the Penguin Shall Dwell Together, Apparently

As a child, the Disney adaptation of The Swiss Family Robinson was one of my favorites movies my grandma had at her house. Because she only had one or two other VHS to choose from, I ended up watching this movie a lot. There’s just something alluring about a treehouse, and having wild animals as pets, and fighting off pirates.

My mom read the book aloud for school, but I only remembered one part where one of the boys, Ernst, asks to be left in solitude so he can pretend to be Robinson Crusoe, and his dad says he’s already gotten enough experience.

In re-reading it this year, I came to the unfortunate realization that there was a reason this was the only thing I remembered. The book is overall boring.

And, for those who like the movie and haven’t read the book, spoilers: there are no pirates.

Reviewing "Snow & Rose" by Emily Winfield Martin

I’m not sure exactly what “flavor” of fantasy Snow & Rose evokes. All I know is that if you can judge a book by its cover, Snow & Rose’s writing style fits the cover art (and illustrations) perfectly. It’s simplistic, sweet, folksy, sentimental, and tinged by a little bit of Grimm-esque creepiness. It’s a “modern” retelling of the fairy tale Snow White and Rose Red (no, not that Snow White), about two sisters and their adventures with a cranky little man (no, not one of the seven dwarfs) and a benevolent bear (no, children, do not try this at home).

Reviewing "The Little Book-Room" by Eleanor Farjeon

I really liked Eleanor Farjeon’s Humming Bird, a novel geared toward adults. In a completely different way, I also like The Little Book Room, a collection of Farjeon’s short stories for children—most of which are fairy tales.

Like any collection of short stories, some chapters are better than others. Some were sort of sad, like The Miracle of the Poor Island, which reminded me of Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. Others (and these were the ones I preferred) were witty and tongue-in-cheek, similar to E. Nesbit’s Melisande. Here are my three favorite entries: 

Perfect Little Protagonists: from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s “Little Lord Fauntleroy”

 Little Lord Fauntleroy is a quintessential rags-to-riches story of an American boy named Cedric becoming the heir to an English Earl. His father was the disowned son of the current Earl, a crotchety, proud, and selfish man. Through Cedric’s pure-hearted love and generosity, the Earl turns over a new leaf.

Basically, it’s Annie with a British Daddy Warbucks.

Reviewing "The House of Arden" by E. Nesbit

After reading Harding’s Luck and realizing halfway through it was a sequel, I decided I’d better go ahead and read the original story, The House of Arden, while the plot was fresh in my memory. Written by E. Nesbit, both books follow the adventures of children who magically time-travel into somewhat major events in English history, including the Gunpowder Plot, the Napoleonic Wars, and even meeting Henry VIII and Queen Anne (Boleyn).

In The House of Arden the history lesson quality is stronger than in Harding’s Luck, with siblings Edred and Elfrida Arden discovering that they can time travel by reciting poetry and dressing in period costumes. Their goal is the same as in Harding’s Luck: the once-influential and wealthy Arden family has fallen on hard times, having to rent out rooms in their small cottage as their ancestral castle crumbles into ruins. 

Perfect Little Protagonists: from E. Nesbit's "Harding's Luck"

As luck would have it, I began reading this book completely unaware of anything about it except its author—E. Nesbit. The copy I pulled (at random) from my mom’s bookshelf one night when I was desperate for more reading material (at the time my TBR pile was dangerously short for some reason) was an older hardcover with no dust jacket, no blurb on the back, or really any other indication of what sort of book it was. I’ve read several of Nesbit’s other books for children, so I was sort of hoping this one (it had gilt lettering on the spine) was for adults.

It was not, which I realized as soon as I opened it. This copy was full of illustrations that immediately exposed Harding’s Luck as following a boy protagonist through various adventures. Although disappointed that it wasn’t a more sophisticated story, I wasn’t so deterred from reading it. In fact, for the first several chapters I rather enjoyed it….

Dickie Harding is an Oliver Twist sort of character, a young orphan boy living in poverty with his “aunt” (really just his father’s landlady, who took Dickie in as a sort of ward/servant after his father died). Dickie is crippled, uneducated, and generally unloved. His only treasure is a possession given to him by his father, a silver rattle he calls “Tinkler.” Without really understanding what is missing from his life, Dickie longs for love, relatives, friends, and (on a more general note) beauty. 

Perfect Little Protagonists: from Edward Stratemeyer's "First at the North Pole"

In penning this volume I have had a twofold purpose in mind: the first to show what pure grit and determination can do under the most trying of circumstances, and the second to give my readers an insight into Esquimaux life and habits, and to relate what great explorers like Franklin, Kane, Hall, DeLong, Nansen, Cook, and Peary have done to open up this weird and mysterious portion of our globe.

~ Edward Stratemeyer, from his 1909 preface of First at the North Pole

This was the first novel I’d read by Edward Stratemeyer, and frankly it will probably also be the last.
First at the North Pole, or, Two Boys in the Arctic started out promising, introducing the main character Andy as an orphaned eighteen-year old in Maine, and his struggle to survive in a job recession and with the added dead-weight of his lazy Uncle Si. This uncle showed up out of the blue after his parents died, claimed he was his guardian, and settled into a drunken, loafish lifestyle all the while hypocritically cracking the whip over his honest-working nephew’s back. What’s worse, Uncle Si tries to keep Andy from befriending another orphaned youth, Chet, on the flimsy excuse that Chet’s father was accused of embezzlement and forgery, and had run off never to be seen again…which of course proved he was guilty!

The plot thickens when Andy finds out that he has inherited some land in Michigan, which might prove valuable to the mining corporations who want to take control of that territory. Of course the wheedling Uncle Si snoops through his nephew’s things (after sending him out to find a job), and decides to try to sell it to the first land shark that conveniently shows up pretty much the same time he finds the deeds to the land. Andy discovers the plot and runs away into the Maine winter, taking refuge with his friend Chet while he tries to figure out what to do. They have a few adventures in the woods, trying to hunt to survive and so on, and Andy even manages to lose his papers in the vast expanse of snowdrifts.

So far, so good. The story establishes the protagonist as a “good guy” with an oppressive uncle and difficult challenges ahead. But here the story wavers, because Stratemeyer suddenly remembers the title of his novel, and needs to figure out a way to redirect the plot northward rather than towards Michigan. So he introduces a professor and an explorer. They meet the boys (again, conveniently), and during their conversation the idea of travelling to the North Pole comes up.

Perfect Little Protagonists - Introduction

It’s almost always the case that the protagonist of a story is a “good guy.” That’s why the word “protagonist” is often used interchangeably with “hero.” Strictly speaking, though, a protagonist can be a “bad” person, as long as the reader still roots for him or her. Crime and Punishment features a murderer as its protagonist, yet Raskolnikov is more sympathetic as a murderer than the dogged and manipulative Petrovich who is the policeman investigating the crime.

Subversion and inversion of this concept of “protagonist = good” may be more common in novels aimed at an adult audience. But for children, this concept is sometimes taken to the extreme: the protagonists are perfect to the point of being annoying. This is especially true for older juvenile fiction (pre-1960s), where the “moral of the story” is so heavy-handed that the story itself is sometimes unreadable. 

Feudin’ in Floridy: Lois Lenski’s "Strawberry Girl"

When I was about ten my family moved into a duplex with my grandma. One of its best features was that it had a big backyard. One of the downsides to this feature was that the yard was not fenced in, and therefore was combined with half a dozen other backyards to form a sort of vast green space.

Due to some logistical issues my family ended up living in my grandma’s basement for about seven months while we waited for the previous occupants to vacate our side of the house. Perhaps because of the cramped quarters, or perhaps because there was nowhere to store it, my Dad set up our swing-set before we were even properly moved in.

The other neighbor kids had started to think that we had built the “playground” for them. They would come and use it all the time without asking. Some lady even brought her grandkids to push on the swings. Not that we begrudged them using it (being new in the neighborhood, I was desperate for new friends and was all too willing to share my swingset with them), but my parents became concerned that someone was going to get hurt—fall off the swing, for instance—and then because it was on our property we’d be sued.

So, a fence went up. Actually, the main reason for the fence was because we had dogs who were used to being left outside in the summer. But the neighbors did not take it well, feeling that we were “hogging the playground” to ourselves!

All of this reminded me of a book I had read not too long before the move: Strawberry Girl. This novel by Lois Lenski was fairly well-known when I was a girl, but recently I decided to reread it to see what my younger self found so appealing.

When in Doubt, Try JFIC

It’s been somewhat of a dry spell in my reading life lately. (Granted, my “reading life” is rather redundant, as reading is inextricable from my “regular” life.) I fell seven books behind in my Goodreads Annual Challenge. SEVEN! Unheard of! Perish the thought!

Not helping was the fact that I accidentally left Henry VIII as the last of the Shakespeare plays for me to read--and it was SO boring! This would have struck me as impossible, considering the rather colorful life of Henry VIII, except I remembered that Shakespeare was writing during the reign of his daughter Elizabeth I…and therefore probably cut out the juicy drama in order to preserve her patronage and his head. I will say that it was somewhat amusing, Shakespeare trying to please everyone by making all the characters (Queen Katherine, King Henry, Anne Boleyn AKA “Bullen”) over-the-top noble and innocent rather than crafty and power-hungry politicians. And the end of the play is basically “Hey look Elizabeth I has been born and is now blessed with awesomeness forevermore!”

That said, I was glad to have finished off that most recent, and ultimately disappointing, stack of books next to my bed, and so excited to pull some other books off the shelf that showed more promise.

Along with Manxmouse that my mom read aloud to me, there have been a few books from my childhood I’ve been thinking about recently. These were books I read just as I began to read independently, and I remember reading them over and over…except I couldn’t remember the name of one of them. I knew it had a little girl in it who was excited about going to school…it was set in “olden times” (viz., 1900 or older).

With a little more digging in my memory (“I think the cover was green…), and with an open search browser, I was able to hunt down the title of the book: Schoolhouse in the Woods by Rebecca Caudill.  

Reviewing "Manxmouse" by Paul Gallico

...for all his small size and defenselessness, when it came to doing something for others, there seemed to be nothing Manxmouse would not dare.

~ Manxmouse by Paul Gallico, page 111

Most epic stories follow heroes—usually warriors—who go on adventures, quests, and journeys where they protect the weak, defeat monsters and villains, and eventually earn their glorious reward and a place in legend and history.

Manxmouse: The Mouse Who Knew No Fear by Paul Gallico is an epic tale, but its protagonist is a mouse—a fearless, good-hearted mouse, but still a mouse—and the story follows him on a rambling adventure where he protects elephants and tigers and defeats his own fate, before settling down into a happy ending that isn’t quite the norm for epic legends. 

Books and the Natural World

I recently finished reading two books about animals, the semi-fictional The Wolfling by Sterling North, and the coffee-table companion to the documentary series, Blue Planet II by James Honeyborne and Mark Brownlow.

Why do I do this to myself? I love animals, but reading about them is often depressing. Almost every
dog-centered novel ends with the dog dying and a little of my heart with it. Even nonfiction zoology
books aren’t immune to this, because endangered species make me feel so helpless and wish I could
change the world.

Sterling North is probably most famous for his excellent book Rascal, a memoir of one summer in his
boyhood when he raised a pet raccoon. North’s writing style is wonderful, not only artistic in his
descriptions of the natural world, but also exciting. In The Wolfling he goes back further than Rascal’s
setting of Wisconsin during World War I, and explores the life of a boy named Robbie in 1873.
Based in part on research and reminiscences of North’s father, The Wolfling is nevertheless fiction,
calling itself a “Documentary Novel.”

Reading Nostalgia: Peggy Parish's "The Key to the Treasure"

Peggy Parish is an author best recognized for her multitude of Amelia Bedelia books, wherein a cheerful and VERY literal-minded maid gets into all sorts of scrapes with her misunderstandings of common figures of speech. These books are great ways for children to learn how to read—and how to enjoy reading and wordplay.

The Key to the Treasure is the next step, being longer and more complex than the Amelia Bedelia Easy Readers, yet still retaining a sense of fun that helps transition young readers from “See Spot Run” to longer chapter books.

The story is about three siblings—Jed, Liza, and Bill—as they go spend the summer with their grandparents. Their planned adventure of building a tree house is continually put on hold due to rain throughout the story, causing them to pursue another, less conventional adventure. Just before the Civil War their great-great-great-grandfather created a mystery for his children to solve while he was at war, in order to distract them from worrying about him. The treasure hunt was to have led them to three artifacts that were part of a family collection of Indian relics, including a doll, a war mask, and a shield. The first clue, however, was mistakenly destroyed, and for generations the mystery remained unsolved and the treasure lost.

Reading Nostalgia: Marguerite de Angeli's "The Door in the Wall"

I remembered nothing about The Door in the Wall except it was set in the Middle Ages and its protagonist was a boy who lost the use of his legs—both things which can be determined by the front illustrations or the back cover.

Ten-year-old Robin is the son of a knight and a lady-in-waiting. When his father goes to war and his mother is called to serve the Queen, it’s arranged for Robin to become a page to Sir Robert de Lindsay. Unfortunately before a messenger can come to fetch Robin to begin his new life, Robin falls ill with a vague fever that claims the use of his legs. As if that weren’t bad enough, his home town is stricken with the plague, and Robin finds himself alone and helpless in his own home.

Reviewing Hans Brinker (or, The Silver Skates) by Mary Mapes Dodge

Winter Landscape with Skaters on a Frozen Lake by Dutch painter Anthonie Beerstraten

Mary Mapes Dodge’s classic, Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates is one of the (many) books I remember my mom reading to my brother and I when she home-schooled us. From that original reading I remembered the main character, Hans Brinker, his sister, the skating race with a prize of the silver skates, that they lived in Holland, and that his father had been brain damaged from a fall off the dykes and was the only one who knew where their money had been hidden, thus causing them to live in abject poverty for a long time.

I remembered liking the book, and so decided to re-read it this winter, as the atmosphere is appropriately frigid for reading a story centered around an ice-skating contest.

Except, much to my surprise upon re-reading, the contest—and the silver skates themselves—figure very little into the plot.

Reviewing "The Swoop!" by P.G. Wodehouse

“It will be news to the Man in the Street to learn that, with the possible exception of the Black Hand, the Scouts are perhaps the most carefully-organised secret society in the world.”

The Swoop is one of the few PG Wodehouse stories that does not involve:

     a) A love-stricken chap

     b) A beautiful girl

     c) An overbearing aunt

     d) Theft or attempted theft at a stereotypical country house

In fact, it is very unlike most PG Wodehouse books I’ve read, in that it doesn’t include a lot of the twists and turns and mistaken identities and broken engagements and other convoluted situations from which Jeeves is ever extricating Bertie Wooster.

Instead, this story is about Clarence Chugwater and his fellow Boy Scouts as they oust an invasion on England from…well, everyone. Despite being different from the other books I’ve read by Wodehouse, there are still the hijinks, the lightning-quick wordplay, and the over-the-top characters.

Picture Book Read-Along

My sister made an audiobook recording for a school project, and to my delight chose one of my favorite picture books, What Do You Do With a Kangaroo? by Mercer Mayer. She recruited friends, family, and classmates as voice-actors, incorporated sound effects, and the result (in my completely unbiased sisterly opinion) was pretty awesome.

What I didn't realize was that she posted this audiobook to her YouTube channel.* Had I but known, I would have shared it earlier. As it is, I know now, and so I'm sharing it:

This is one of those "listen and read-along" audiobooks, and thus doesn't include the illustrations in the video. To enjoy the full experience, you can purchase the picture book online, either on Amazon.com or AbeBooks. 


*Blatant nepotistic plug for my sister's YouTube channel. See, I did it again!