letters and sodas: booknotes

“Frank and Jess thought Own Back Ltd. was an excellent idea when they first invented it. Three days later, they were not so sure” (1). That’s how this book starts, and reading those sentences, you know you’re in for a lesson-learning sort of book, but this being Diana Wynne Jones, it’s not too heavy-handed. Own Back Ltd. starts over Easter break, when Frank and Jess are bemoaning their lack of pocket money: they broke a chair, and their pocket money’s been stopped. It’s Jess who thinks of it first, wondering if “people pay you to do bad things for them” (p 2). Frank agrees that people must, and later that night the two of them make a notice advertising their new business: “Own Back Ltd./Revenge Arranged/Price According to Task,” for starters, and then, for good measure: “All Difficult Tasks Undertaken/Treasure Hunted, Etc.” (3). Though business is slow at first, things pick up quickly, and (surprise surprise) Jess and Frank soon find themselves in over their heads.

It starts with Buster Knell, the town bully, becoming their first customer: Buster wants revenge on Vernon Wilkins, an older kid who’s just knocked Buster’s tooth out. (The tooth was loose, anyhow, and Vernon was just fighting back after having been terrorized by Buster’s gang of friends, but Buster doesn’t quite see things that way.) Frank and Jess are a bit concerned: how on earth are they going to get a tooth from a kid who’s older and bigger and stronger than they are, and who’s brave enough to fight back to the town bully? But they’ve made a business deal, and can’t exactly say no to Buster, so they figure they’ll give it a try. When Frank and Jess show up at Vernon’s house, Vernon’s sitting on his front steps; his mom is just inside; his three baby sisters are playing in the mud next to the steps (and the youngest toddles over to Jess, smiling delightedly). The scene, as the book puts it, “could not have been less like a tooth-hunting expedition” (12). But Vernon, luckily, has a younger brother with a loose tooth, so that solves Frank and Jess’s first problem.

Things just get worse the next day, though, when two odd little girls from the neighborhood tell them they want revenge on Biddy Iremonger, who, they say, is a witch. Whether Biddy’s a witch or whether, as Jess’s mum says, she’s “just a poor old creature, and a bit wrong in the head,” this sounds like bad news (21). And when Jess starts to worry that Buster and his gang have given Vernon’s brother’s tooth to Biddy, for her to use in her witchcraft, things look even worse still. Jess and Frank’s next customer, at least, is easier: Martin Tailor, a rich kid who wants to get the two odd little girls (who used to live in the house where his family lives now) to leave him alone. But everything’s all tangled together, and Jess and Frank and Martin and Vernon, and even Buster and his gang, end up having to face Biddy, who’s set on reminding them all that revenge is “witch’s business,” not child’s play.

While this book is not as complex or nuanced as Dogsbody or Fire and Hemlock, or as endearing as Charmed Life or The Lives of Christopher Chant, it is a sweet and fun read with some details that made me smile, like the “tooth-hunting expedition” sentence quoted above, or like when Jess, at one point, says something without really thinking about it and then ends up “catching up with the conversation and discovering she meant what she said” (102). (I love that way of describing the situation, which feels really true to me: you say something in a sort of knee-jerk way, someone questions you on it, and then as you think it through and articulate things more fully, you realize you did indeed mean what you said, even if you couldn’t initially have said why.) The writing seems self-conscious sometimes—there’s lots of “as Jess said afterward,” which I found sort of jarring, but I love how Jess, on two different occasions, uses storytelling or a knowledge of stories to solve problems—first when she distracts Frankie and Jenny (those two odd little girls) from their crankiness by telling them a story, and then again at the end of the book. I also appreciate the descriptions of the setting, the sense of place: this book is set in England near Easter, a Britain of potting sheds and allotment gardens and “a marshy, tangled, waste strip beside the river where everyone threw rubbish,” a Britain where spring is “blank and bleak as winter,” rainy and wet and grey (4-5).

In non-book-related news, I’m a bit behind on all things Internet at the moment: I was in San Francisco for vacation from August 24-31, which was delightful. Eventually I’ll catch up on reviewing what I’ve been reading lately, and I might also write about San Francisco bookshops: I visited lots of them (though I restrained myself and only bought one book on my whole vacation, in part because I didn’t have much luggage: traveling with just a backpack + a messenger bag means being cautious about what one buys!).

19-year-old Polly is supposed to be packing, getting ready for another year of college, but she’s been reading instead. As she reads, she pauses and realizes a funny thing: though the cover on the book, which is similar to a picture that hangs above her bed, is familiar, she’s sure the book used to be called something different, and she’s sure that it used to contain different stories. She flips through it and can’t find half the stories she remembers having read in it, which makes her panic a bit: she wonders if she’s dreamed those other stories, or if, somehow, she has two sets of memories, like one of the characters in the book does. But this makes no sense: “Why,” she wonders, “should she suddenly have memories that did not seem to correspond with the facts?” (p 4). So she leaves the suitcase empty and tries to remember, thinking back to the pictures that hangs above her bed and how she came to have it. It started when Polly was ten, with a strange and dream-like adventure: Halloween, and too little sleep, and running through back gardens with a friend. Then, somehow, a funeral, and a game of make-believe with a friendly stranger, a man named Thomas Lynn.

I love the scene right before Polly meets Mr. Lynn, how it captures the way children play, while also capturing something not quite everyday, something odd:

Nina and Polly scrambled through garden after garden. Some were neat and open, and they sprinted through those, and some were overgrown, with hiding-places where they could lurk. One garden was full of washing, and they had to crouch behind flapping sheets while somebody took down a row of pants. They were on the edge of giggles the whole time, terrified that someone would catch them and yet, in a dreamlike way, almost sure they were safe. (p 11)

Without saying much more about the plot, there is so very much to like in this book, which has roots in the stories of Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer. There’s a great story-in-a-letter, early in the book, and indeed a whole often-epistolary friendship, and lots about storytelling, imagination, and heroism and choice. I like how, when Mr. Lynn gives Polly a book of fairy tales, she’s unimpressed, though he promises that each story “has a true, strange fact hidden in it, you know, which you can find if you look” (p 177). And there is lots of really pleasing writing, whether ordinarily/satisfyingly descriptive or thought-provoking/interesting thematically. Like: this made me grin, because you can so picture it: “Mr. Lynn lived in a very Londony house, with steps up to the door, regular windows, and a stack of bell-pushes beside the door” (p 70). Or mm, this bit, from when Polly’s in a school play: “she had a sudden sense, as she turned, that she was part of a transparent charmed pattern in which everything had to go in the one right way because that was the only way it could go. [...] The pattern had been there always, even though they were all making it just at that moment” (pp 208-209).

I feel like I cannot properly express how good this book is: the plot is exciting and the end is wonderfully satisfying (like: can’t stop reading for the last 60ish pages) and the whole thing is just so well put together and well-described; all of it feels like a story very well told and well integrated: the ordinary school and home bits, Polly and her awful parents and her excellent grandmother and her various friends, and then also strange magical bits and sinister bits and adventure-y bits. And without saying too much about the end, how much do I love books that remind you that there isn’t just either/or, that there are other ways and other places, if you’re only looking for them? I love them lots, yes.

Like Dogsbody, this is a book that was first recommended to me by Megan, though it was Jenny’s excellent Diana Wynne Jones Week that inspired me to finally get around to reading it. (Thank you both!)

Edited-to-add: PS: I was reading this book on the sidewalk in SoHo today (waiting for my boyfriend, who was browsing in a juggling store) when I overheard this guy on his cell phone saying, “I’m sipping some champagne,” which made me look up amusedly, because he was emphatically not sipping any champagne. He was standing on Broadway, and it was 90 degrees out, and he was drinking a VitaminWater. OK, maybe he was being metaphorical or it was a standing joke with whoever he was talking to, but I thought it was funny. I guess he saw me glance at him, and somehow thought that was an invitation to come talk. So he said, “Excuse me, what book is that?” and OK, that’s reasonably friendly and certainly non-threatening, so I found myself weirdly trying to explain this book to someone who probably does not know DWJ’s work and probably does not normally read kids’ books/YA. At one point I definitely said something about how (SPOILER ALERT, but not really if you know what Tam Lin is about) there are fairies in the book but they’re not, you know, little people, and he said something along the lines of, “so, uh, the fairies are, uh, like, fairies,” and I sort of looked puzzled and then my boyfriend came outside and I was very glad. The end.

What if the stars weren’t just distant balls of gas: what if each one had, or might have, a “denizen,” a being who inhabited its sphere? What if these denizens had their own lives, their own politics, courts, and jealousies? That’s part of the premise of this novel, which the flap-copy describes, sort of cheesily but also accurately, as a book that is “a tense, exciting, science-fiction fantasy, a thriller, and a touching dog story all in one.” Sirius, the dog star, has been found guilty of murder, though he’s sworn his innocence, and he fears he’s going to be sentenced to death. But instead, he’s given a very unusual sentence, one he hadn’t realized was possible: he’s banished to Earth, where he’s born as a puppy, and he’s tasked with finding the Zoi, the murder weapon he’s accused of having used, which seems to have landed there. On Earth, his dog-nature and his celestial-being nature coexist in a dog’s body, so he’s a regular dog with regular doggy personality traits and desires, but he’s also Sirius, dimly aware of his past as a flaming star, able to talk to the sun and the earth, and aware that he’s supposed to find something that’s lost. He ends up being found and taken home by an Irish girl named Kathleen who’s been packed off to live with English relatives because her dad’s in jail for being a terrorist (this is the 1970s). Kathleen’s life is none too happy, and Sirius isn’t exactly welcomed into the household either, but he’s clever and loyal and manages to navigate life on earth quite well.

I love how precise and funny and tender a writer Diana Wynne Jones is. At the start of the book, when Sirius is ranting in court about how he’s not guilty, he’s not just ranting, he’s fulminating (from fulmen, lightning). Polaris, because he is a Cepheid (yes, I had to look that up) has a stutter. And I love how she imagines her way into a puppy’s viewpoint and then a dog’s: just after he’s born, Sirius sleeps with the other puppies in his litter, “wedged warmly among the other creatures, against a great hairy cliff” (p 6). When he sees a trio of cats for the first time, we get this: “He woke up, stretching his back pair of legs and his front hard and straight, to find there were hostile, alien things nearby. These creatures did not speak. They had no language exactly. But they felt things so firmly and acutely that Sirius knew what they meant just as if they had spoken” (p 15). Also excellent: Sirius’s friendships with old folks, Sirius’s ultimate friendship with the cats, and Sirius’s discovery of ice cream. (Regarding the last: “A very small boy reached toward him with a fistful of cold, sweet, white stuff. Sirius ate it all. And that was that. Having discovered ice cream, Sirius could think of nothing else for a while” (p 124).”)

I was excited to read Jenny’s post announcing that she was going to host a Diana Wynne Jones week in August. I loved Charmed Life as a kid, and more recently I’ve enjoyed re-reading Charmed Life and reading The Lives of Christopher Chant and Howl’s Moving Castle for the first time. But my book list tells me I read those books in 2008 and 2005, meaning I hadn’t read a book by Diana Wynne Jones in way too long. Megan told me ages ago that I’d like Dogsbody, so now seemed like the time to read it, and I wasn’t disappointed. I like how all the different plot threads/areas fit together, science fiction and myth and ordinary life; I like how this book is fast-paced and exciting but also well-written, and written with care. (It was one of those books I stayed up late to finish; it was also one of those books where I sometimes had to remind myself to slow down, so as not to miss the pleasing details.) Next up: Fire and Hemlock!

I grabbed this book from the shelf on a whim on a day when I was headed to the beach: I wanted something that wasn’t heavy (literally or metaphorically!) and that wasn’t a book I cared about keeping spotless. Something that would be an interesting story, something that would be unlikely to make me want to write anything down or look anything up, and something I wouldn’t mind getting sandy or sunscreeny or wet with salt water, rain, or condensation from the liter of seltzer in my bag. So, this book it was, and I swam and sunned and swam some more and then happily read about 50 pages of it before pausing, looking up at the sky, and noticing that it was a whole lot darker than it had been when I started reading. So much for spending the whole afternoon at the beach. Luckily, I had a short walk to the train, and didn’t get caught in any downpours. Back at home, I happily started reading again, after a break for coffee and conversation and word games on Facebook and a glass of red wine, because this book is sweet and charming and made me want to keep reading, but didn’t seem, at first, to be one of those drop-everything books where the rest of the things I want to do cease entirely to exist.

So, the story. Ella is the daughter of nobility, and lives in a world with gnomes, elves, centaurs, ogres, and fairy godmothers. Right after she’s born, a fairy (not her fairy godmother, who’s much too smart for such idiocy) curses her while trying to give her a gift. “Ella will always be obedient,” the fairy says, and Ella is—she has to be, even when doing as she’s told is against her own self-interest. She tries to resist orders sometimes, but she can’t, she physically isn’t able: so she gets good at finding loopholes, figuring out ways to follow a command but not really doing what the other person wants. This serves her well enough at home, and all is pretty much right in Ella’s world until her mother dies and her father sends her off to finishing school with two awful twits whose mother clearly has designs on Ella’s father. This being a retelling of the Cinderella story (early in the story, Ella meets the kind Prince Charmont, aka Char), you can see where this is going.

I like the funny and sweet details of this book, like Ella talking about sliding down the banisters of the manor with her mother (when no one else was around, of course), or Ella describing the soup that the house’s cook has just made, how the cook “had gotten the carrots at their sweetest, carrotiest best,” and how “weaving in and out of the carrots were other flavors: lemon, turtle broth, and a spice I couldn’t name” (p 23). Or this, when Ella’s father has decided on finishing school because maybe they’ll teach her how to walk more quietly, like the small girl she is rather than like the small elephant she sounds like: “I left. On my way out, I said, “Perhaps small elephants cannot be admitted to finishing school. Perhaps small elephants cannot be finished. Perhaps they . . .” I stopped. He was laughing again.” (p 32). Or this, just after Ella leaves home on the way to school:

“I would never embrace a cook.” Hattie shuddered.
“No,” I agreed. “What cook would let you?” (p 50)

And I like that Ella and Char have personalities, are both funny and clever and playful, are people rather than just fairy-tale characters. Perhaps not surprisingly, by the end this book had turned into a drop-everything-and-read book, and I like it enough that I’m actually keeping my copy of it, at least for now: I’d picked it up thinking I’d read it and then put it in my building’s lobby for someone else to find, but now I don’t want to!

After reading Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan back in May, I ended up checking out three John Green books from the library, wanting to read more of him, thinking I liked his literary voice. Looking for Alaska was OK: hugely readable but also a bit over-dramatic/too much of an “issues” book for me. I liked the offbeat humor of An Abundance of Katherines more. Paper Towns, though, is far and away my favorite of John Green’s solo works. The plot has some similarities to Looking for Alaska: smart/nerdy guy falls for crazy/unpredictable/smart/hot girl, but Paper Towns is laugh-out-loud funny in a way that Looking for Alaska only occasionally is, manages to be suspenseful and exciting without being melodramatic, and is also very much a self-consciously smart book: there’s a whole lot of Walt Whitman in these pages.

Because the story’s a mystery, complete with clues that the characters have to follow, it’s hard to say much about the plot without saying too much, but: Quentin Jacobsen, aka Q, is a well-adjusted high-school senior. (His parents are both therapists, so he thinks about well-adjustedness more than you might expect.) He’s smart, he’s well-behaved, he’s content with his daily routines: he has a perfect attendance record at school. But he’s also totally in love with his neighbor, Margo Roth Spiegelman: they’ve known each other since age two, and were friends as kids, but now she’s popular and he’s not and so they don’t have occasion to hang out much, until she shows up at his bedroom window at midnight and talks him into accompanying her on a late-night revenge adventure (her boyfriend’s been cheating on her with her best friend). Margo is simultaneously pushy/awful/selfish and really great; hilarity ensues, and then Margo disappears. She’s left home before, so no one’s too concerned at first, but days pass and she doesn’t come home and Q begins to worry.

I like how Q learns about himself and about friendship as the book progresses: how he realizes he’s not as much of a scaredy-cat as he and others might have thought, and how he realizes that other people are, well, people, with as much of an inner life as he has. I like how he reads Leaves of Grass—first just looking for clues, but then really reading it, thinking about the world and multiplicities of voices and multiplicities of metaphors and how the way we choose to see the world shapes us. I like the unabashed lyricism this book sometimes has, like when Q, talking about someone who died, says this:

I always thought of it like you said, that all the strings inside him broke. But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ships sink, or maybe we’re grass—our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is alive. We don’t suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you’re imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the grass, you’re saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications. Do you know what I mean? (p 301)

Colin Singleton has just graduated from high school, but he worries he’s already past his peak: he was a child prodigy, but doesn’t really know what he’s good at, aside from learning languages and remembering facts and anagramming phrases, and he fears he won’t actually amount to anything. And to make things worse he just got dumped a girl named Katherine. Which might not sound like the end of the world, but it’s the nineteenth time he’s been dumped by a girl named Katherine, because girls named Katherine are the only ones he ever dates, and he always gets dumped. So Colin’s at a bit of a crisis point. But the answer, sometimes, is just a change of scenery: so instead of learning Sanskrit over the summer (as his dad suggests), he lets his best/only friend, Hassan, talk him into a road trip. Except they only get from Chicago to Tennessee. There, in a middle-of-nowhere town called Gutshot, they meet a girl who’s about their age and her mom, who likes them right away and promptly offers them summer jobs working on an oral history project she’s just starting to put together. Humor and romance and Eureka moments ensue, plus footnotes, plus math: Colin comes up with and tries to perfect a “Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability,” a function that will let him graph his nineteen relationships with Katherines but will also predict, in any relationship, who’s going to dump whom and when.

I like how John Green writes—this book is funny, and Colin’s utter different-ness is often used to humorous effect, like:

“I’m behind on my reading,” Colin explained.
“Behind on your reading? All you do is read,” Lindsey said.
“I’ve been way behind because I’ve worked so hard on the Theorem and because of oral historianing. I try to read four hundred pages a day—ever since I was seven.” (p 109)

But there are lyrical bits, too, especially at the end, as Colin learns that connections between people, not just ideas, matter, and realizes that storytelling is sometimes a more useful skill than math.

Miles Halter leaves Florida at the start of his junior year: he’s headed for the Alabama boarding school that his father also attended, but it’s not really out of tradition that he’s going, and it’s not that he’s had a particularly traumatic high school experience thus far. I mean, he’s a nerd, and doesn’t really have any friends, but he’s been basically OK with that. Except not really. Miles loves reading biographies, and is especially fond of learning people’s last words, and one set of last words attributed to Rabelais, “I go to seek a Great Perhaps,” resonates with him. Miles senses that there’s a “Great Perhaps” out there and hopes that attending Culver Creek might help him start to find it.

So: he shows up at boarding school, ends up with an unpopular but smart and friendly roommate, and finds himself in a circle of friends that includes said roommate (Chip, aka the Colonel), a guy named Takumi, a girl named Lara, and centrally, a girl named Alaska, the Alaska of the title, who’s smart and hot and funny and who, clearly, quickly becomes the object of Miles’s fantasies and affection, even though she’s dating a college kid. So we have these kids, and we have their normal lives at school, but it’s clear from the back cover copy and from the way the story itself is structured—divided into a “before” and an “after”—that some big event is going to upset the ordinariness of high school life. Which it does, leaving Miles and his friends struggling to figure out the how and the why of what exactly happened.

This was kind of a guilty pleasure book for me: it’s not badly written but it’s not super-literary either, and there are plot points that are overly obvious/that make you wonder why Miles, who at one point notes that his “general social strategy” consists of “listening quietly,” didn’t pick up on them sooner. And it’s easy to find fault with the characters, how it feels like you don’t really get to know some of them (what does Takumi like, other than hip-hop? what is Lara like, other than pretty and quiet and Romanian?)—although partly that’s to do with the first-person narration, too: Miles really doesn’t get to know Lara very well, even though he briefly dates her, so neither do we. But mostly I was too busy reading this book quickly over the course of two days to quibble with it much, and I’m still looking forward to reading more John Green.