STACKED

books

Darkwood, by M.E. Breen

|

A few posts back, Kelly mentioned that she wondered whether book bloggers just love all books that they read, because she rarely comes across a negative review. Normally, I choose to spotlight the books I think are particularly well-done and would recommend to others, but I think it’s also important to discuss books that others have liked, but that I didn’t find especially engaging. M.E. Breen’s Darkwood is one of those books.

Annie lives in Howland with her aunt and uncle, who aren’t particularly nice people. Both her parents are dead, as well as her older sister. When she overhears her aunt and uncle planning something very unpleasant for her, she decides to flee into the forest, despite the fact that she is sure to come across dark creatures called Kinderstalk who are notorious for gobbling up children.

I was initially excited about Darkwood. It garnered a starred review from Kirkus and a favorable review from Booklist. I also love the cover – the illustration of the protagonist, Annie, reminds me a little bit of the covers of Garth Nix’s Abhorsen trilogy, which I love. The book also seemed to have the dark fairy-tale feeling that permeated Nix’s excellent books. When I read the first chapter of Darkwood, my excitement grew. Annie’s horrid aunt and uncle were immediately fleshed out, and I loved the creepy sense of foreboding I got from the setting, a world where night falls immediately on the heels of day with no evening in between. Breen also set up some nice mysteries that I looked forward to solving.

Unfortunately, my excitement didn’t last. Annie’s travels into the forest are derailed by a trip to the Drop, where children are kept as slaves to mine precious ringstone, and then a trek to see the King of the land where various events occur without any apparent connection to other side plots. Even after I had finished the book, I had a hard time understanding how all the pieces fit together, or if they were meant to at all. Moreover, I felt no real connection to the characters, and Breen’s writing didn’t strike me as particularly beautiful or deep. (A good counter-example, in my opinion, is Shannon Hale, who could write about paint drying and still impress you with the beauty and depth of her words.)

Middle grade and young adult literature can and should be deep. Just because the book is written for young people does not mean it can sacrifice good characterization and eloquent writing for a fast-paced plot. In Darkwood, there’s too much going on and not enough development to make it engaging. It feels like Breen tried to force a half dozen different ideas into one novel without sufficient development of any of these ideas. Because of this, the novel feels jumpy and disjointed. Additionally, it seems that Annie was meant to be a strong, smarter-than-she-appears female protagonist, but she seems to mostly react to events that happen to her instead of choose to be proactive. When she does make a decision, it’s inexplicable. For example, Annie chooses to leave her traveling companion who has taken her on a much-needed visit to the King – why? Annie’s reasons are inscrutable, and my cynical answer is “plot development.” Annie’s leave-taking places her once again in danger, and danger seems to be Breen’s currency. The hallmark of a good adventure tale is that the adventure happens for a reason.

That being said, I can see middle-graders enjoying Darkwood due to its exciting plot. It is filled with action: chases and wolf attacks and daring escapes. It’s got a fair number of twists and some parts certainly are exhilarating. At some points Breen is able to bring back that ominous mood I felt at the beginning. Then again, I can also see readers being confused about the jumpy nature of the story and the inability to really identify with Annie, who seems to not have much personality. I think Breen’s ideas are more intriguing than a lot of what I’ve read in middle grade fantasy lately, which is why I felt so disappointed that the book fell short of its potential.

Where the Wild Things Are – Adaptation Discussions Continued

|


I was reading through my favorite blogs this past week, and I noticed a particularly interesting entry on Pitchfork about the upcoming movie version of Where the Wild Things Are. Of course, seeing the Pitchfork is music-centric, the entry was talking about the music in a “Behind the Scenes” montage. Being a book nerd, though, I was even more interested in the actual content of the video, especially because it features Maurice Sendak, the author of the book.

Sendak reveals his criteria for adapting his book. Evidently he was involved with Spike Jonze’s production from the very beginning, but the movie was definitely the director’s very different vision.

The video addresses all sorts of interesting issues – how do you make a full length feature from a small children’s book? What kind of inspiration can people draw from a work of art? What makes a book a classic in the first place? And I love how Maurice Sendak gives a shout-out to the librarians who became “pushers” of his critically maligned work.

Finally, I just had to quote Maurice Sendak’s final statement about the movie. This is a perfect way to adapt another work – allowing it to take on a different identity without losing the soul of the original work.

There will be controversy about this. But the film has an entire emotional, spiritual, visual life which is as valid as the book. He [Spike Jonze]’s done it like me whether he’s known it or not, in a more brilliant, modern, fantastical way, which takes nothing from my book, but enhances, enriches my book.

I thought Stacked readers might find this video relevant, especially after our last post inspired some discussion about the nature of adaptations. We’ll see if this movie lives up to the high praise of Sendak – I look forward to it.

Unreliable Narrators

|

I started listening to the next Amelia Peabody book – The Hippopotamus Pool – a few days ago. It started out a little differently than the previous books. Instead of Amelia diving right in to the narrative without much preamble, the “editor” of Mrs. Amelia Peabody Emerson’s personal diaries sprinkled her own commentary via footnotes throughout a rather lengthy introduction by Mrs. Emerson herself that recounted the major events of the previous books. It served a dual purpose: catch the reader (or listener, as in my case) up to speed on the pertinent events of the previous books that would impact the events of the current one, and make us laugh. Take this passage:

Text: “The date of my birth is irrelevant. I did not truly exist until 1884, when I was in my late twenties.”

Footnote: “This is not consistent with other sources. However, the editors were of the opinion it would be discourteous to question a lady’s word.”

The “other source” the editor refers to is in fact the first novel in the series, when Miss Peabody tells her readers that she is thirty-two years old in 1884. The editor points out other inconsistencies throughout the introduction, and they all made me grin. While I love Amelia all the more for it, it also made me wonder…exactly how much should I take her at her word? Is her dashing husband really all that dashing, or is he only dashing when seen through her eyes? (Isn’t the latter much more romantic anyway?) It helps that the editor is voiced by Davina Porter, who is one of my top five favorite audiobook narrators.

A few other famous unreliable narrators include Dr. Sheppard from Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Briony Tallis from Ian McEwan’s Atonement. I have varying levels of tolerance and appreciation for stories with unreliable – or outright dishonest – narrators, and it depends on the purpose of the character being written in such a way. With Amelia, it’s done for comedic effect, and I love it. In Atonement, it seems as if Ian McEwan did it to make me cry (it worked). Oh, and to bring up all those fancy meta-fiction issues while he’s at it. I thought it was brilliant, and it helped lessen my antagonistic feelings toward Briony. (I also thought the movie adaptation was just as good as the book, a quality that is very rare.) I can just imagine Dame Agatha patting herself on the back and grinning slyly when she first devised the events of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I’m still undecided on whether I believe what she did was a genius move or a dirty cheat. Then again, it can be argued that fiction needs to be related by a less than honest narrator in order for the fiction to be honest at all, another one of those true oxymorons.

If you’re interested in reading books with a narrator who may not be entirely trustworthy, check out the three I’ve mentioned above and the few below:

Odd Thomas, by Dean Koontz
Odd Thomas (not short for Todd) is a twenty year old fry cook who sees dead people. It’s much better and much less creepy than the Sixth Sense, and Odd as a narrator is engaging, likable, and honest – usually. In the first installment (it became so popular it blossomed into a series), Odd must stop some very bad men from perpetrating something horrible upon his small California town. Unless you have a cold cold heart, the ending will make you cry.

The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, by Jon Scieszka
I outgrew picture books very early on in my reading life, but this is one that I returned to many times. Scieszka is just so clever with everything he writes. Here, Alexander T. Wolf sets the record straight – he was not an evildoer who huffed and puffed, he simply had a very bad cold. And the pigs were rude anyway. Telling classic stories from the point of view of the “bad guy” has always been popular, but no one has done it better than Scieszka.

The Banned and the Banished, by James Clemens
You probably haven’t heard of this series. I don’t blame you if you haven’t – it’s a fantasy that is typical of its genre, with a lot of magic, black-hearted villains, and young good-looking heroes. It’s the kind of stuff that I just eat up. The editor prefaces each book with a notice that everything you will be reading is false, the author of the book is a traitor, and in order to even be allowed to read his/her lies, you must be an advanced scholar, put your thumbprint on the page, and swear to tell no one what you have read. It’s up to you to determine which person – the editor or the author – is the unreliable one. This aspect of the series is what hooked me, although it tells a very entertaining story too.

While searching Goodreads and Librarything for books tagged as unreliable narrators, I came across James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces. Two Librarything users had tagged this nonfiction book, now notorious for its falseness, as having an unreliable narrator. I suppose in the strictest meaning of the phrase, it’s true. But there’s a sense with fiction that it’s okay for the writer to deceive us – it’s not the writer who’s doing the deceiving anyway, is it? The deceitful one is the narrator, who we all learn in grade school English classes is a separate entity from the author. So perhaps I should give Christie a free pass after all – Dr. Sheppard is the one who pulled the wool over my eyes.

What’s your take? Do you like reading books with unreliable narrators, or would you prefer it if the narrator just told it to you straight? Did you want to strangle Christie after she so blatantly and inexcusably broke one of the primary rules of detective fiction? What are some other books with unreliable narrators that I should check out?