Fran: E is for Evans

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.