F, L, T, U, V...all the letters that are left for me!
E is for Lissa Evans and her 'tween book, Horten's Miraculous Mechanisms (published in the UK as Small Change for Stuart). I was browsing with Max in the Tween Room in our library--where they put the fiction for kids like him: ready for more advanced reading but not necessarily ready for young adult situations or language. As you might predict, the room is heavy on sci-fi and fantasy. (Can I just get a shout out for the Noah Webster Library that is so cool as to have a Tween Room, and many awesome other things? It's on my list of the top ten reasons to live here.)
I picked this up because of the cover mainly but was intrigued by the setting of magician's tools that is at the center of this mystery. Our hero, Stuart Horten (S. Horten or Shorten), is a young boy moved to his father's childhood town, discovering the family mysterious disappearance of his great-uncle "Teeny Tiny Tony Horten". Tony set up an elaborate puzzle, involving the various coin-op mechanisms (weight-guessing machines, toffee-distributing machines, puzzle boxes, etc.), before disappearing in hopes that his nephew (Stuart's dad) would find the secret. It falls to Stuart to puzzle it out, as Stuart's father is simply not that kind of boy (and, as a parent reading this, one thing that is lovely is the sense in which it is OK that Stuart's dad is one kind of man and puzzler--crosswords--and that Stuart is different and that's ok too).
This is sort of in line with a number of tween puzzle novels, like Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliett and Shakespeare's Secret by Elise Broach (both of which I read back when Brynnen was 10 and we were buying books at the Scholastic Book Fair at school). The puzzles are not presented for the reader to solve, however; we live them through Stuart.
While Stuart himself is an engaging character, several others are quirky without depth, especially the nearly identical triplets (April, May, and June), and the villain, Jeannie, and her henchman, Clifford. I doubt I would care that much if I were ten, but I did care because I'm not ten.
Finally, the twist of real magic at the end of the book was jarring. There is no sense of magic as being real in this world; we focus on the machines and the tricks of magicians so much that the idea that magic could have a real component doesn't seem to work for me. Again, I wonder if this is because I'm an adult and want to have some sense of the magic alive in the world BEFORE the plot twist at the very end. Maybe, if I were 10 and reading this, I would just fall into the reality of the magic and its possibilities the way Stuart does.
Ultimately--read this when your 10, not...more.
Sunday, September 20, 2015
Tuesday, September 8, 2015
Fran: X is for Xinran
I discovered the short read, Sky Burial, by the Chinese journalist and novelist Xinran, while (obviously) searching for an X.
Shu Wen is a Chinese woman who loves and marries another Chinese doctor, Kejun. It is the 1950s and the People's Liberation Army is off to Tibet to liberate the territory for China. Her husband is sent to care for soldiers and soon she receives a notice of his death. Irregularities in the notice and her grief compel her to trace his path, in hopes of finding him (or greater news of his death). The path is not smooth however and she finds herself apart from the soldiers, meeting a Tibetan woman Zhouma who also speaks Chinese who becomes a friend and counselor, living for years with a Tibetan nomadic family, and--eventually--finding news of Kejun decades after the end of the war.
The book is clearly balanced on several themes--straight up love/romance of a woman drawn to her husband even past death, women's class/social place in both China and Tibet, belief and experience of other cultures. The friction and misunderstanding Mao's China has and creates during the Cultural Revolution is replaced for Wen by living in Buddhist Tibet for 40 years but the story is punctuated by smaller incidents of confusion. The sky burial referenced in the title is the Tibetan practice of allowing vultures and scavenger birds to eat the corpse, a practice that the "modern" Chinese find abhorrent; it is that misunderstanding that causes the tragedy of Kejun's life and death, the hermit Qiangba's "death" and salvation.
But it seems to me that this is also framed in the context of storytelling--Wen tells her story to Xinran (who tells it to us). The (lack of ) story of Kejun motivates Wen to go to Tibet and to spend her life searching for it. The story of Zhouma and her lost love, a groom dubbed Tienanmen, interleaves with Wen's. The inability to share her story past language and cultural boundaries drives much of the actual plot. And it is a story at the end--when Qiangba tells her what happened to Kejun--that resolves the crisis.
An interesting and quick read. As a Westerner though, I wondered how much of my suspicion (shared by this reviewer) of narrators (Xinran herself most particularly for telling us this remarkable story--how could it be true? what is she leaving out?) and the experience of Wen living in nomadic Tibet for 30+ years (how could she not learn of the outside world sometimes? how could she bear this isolation? what's missing in Wen's story?) is founded on cultural misunderstandings of storytelling and translation.
Shu Wen is a Chinese woman who loves and marries another Chinese doctor, Kejun. It is the 1950s and the People's Liberation Army is off to Tibet to liberate the territory for China. Her husband is sent to care for soldiers and soon she receives a notice of his death. Irregularities in the notice and her grief compel her to trace his path, in hopes of finding him (or greater news of his death). The path is not smooth however and she finds herself apart from the soldiers, meeting a Tibetan woman Zhouma who also speaks Chinese who becomes a friend and counselor, living for years with a Tibetan nomadic family, and--eventually--finding news of Kejun decades after the end of the war.
The book is clearly balanced on several themes--straight up love/romance of a woman drawn to her husband even past death, women's class/social place in both China and Tibet, belief and experience of other cultures. The friction and misunderstanding Mao's China has and creates during the Cultural Revolution is replaced for Wen by living in Buddhist Tibet for 40 years but the story is punctuated by smaller incidents of confusion. The sky burial referenced in the title is the Tibetan practice of allowing vultures and scavenger birds to eat the corpse, a practice that the "modern" Chinese find abhorrent; it is that misunderstanding that causes the tragedy of Kejun's life and death, the hermit Qiangba's "death" and salvation.
But it seems to me that this is also framed in the context of storytelling--Wen tells her story to Xinran (who tells it to us). The (lack of ) story of Kejun motivates Wen to go to Tibet and to spend her life searching for it. The story of Zhouma and her lost love, a groom dubbed Tienanmen, interleaves with Wen's. The inability to share her story past language and cultural boundaries drives much of the actual plot. And it is a story at the end--when Qiangba tells her what happened to Kejun--that resolves the crisis.
An interesting and quick read. As a Westerner though, I wondered how much of my suspicion (shared by this reviewer) of narrators (Xinran herself most particularly for telling us this remarkable story--how could it be true? what is she leaving out?) and the experience of Wen living in nomadic Tibet for 30+ years (how could she not learn of the outside world sometimes? how could she bear this isolation? what's missing in Wen's story?) is founded on cultural misunderstandings of storytelling and translation.
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