REVIEW: Bob - Wendy Mass and Rebecca Stead

• Year first released:  2018
• ISBN of the edition I read:  1250166624
• Publisher of the edition I read:  Feiwel & Friends
• My rating (out of 5):  4

First and foremost, I have to say: I find this book's name to be deeply unfortunate. Just try to search online for Bob and see what comes up. On Amazon, the book is the 15th result. On Barnes & Noble, it's the 19th result...on page 2 (so 39th overall, basically). And on Google...forget it. I didn't have the patience to scroll enough to figure it out.

So, despite the fact that it's only a few months old, Bob isn't the most findable book out there. It's worth finding, though. (Luckily for you, I've made it easy by giving you not only the authors' names, but also that B&N link at the top. You're welcome.)

Bob is a rather adorable book about some sort of little critter named Bob who's been hiding in Gran's closet for the past five years waiting for Livy to return. Luckily for him, the book begins with Livy's return. (Gran is Livy's grandmother who lives in Australia - whereas Livy lives in Massachusetts - hence why it's taken now-11-year-old Livy so long to return.)

Unluckily for Bob, though, it turns out that Livy completely forgot about Bob in the time since her last visit.

So begins Livy and Bob's quest to figure out what precisely Bob even is (is he a zombie? a chicken? - of course he's not either, but the two ideas are woven into the book in fun ways), where he comes from, and why Livy forgot everything about him over the course of the past five years.

At only about 200 pages - and with smaller-than-normal paper size and larger-than-normal font - Bob is a quick read. (I read it in less than a day.) This quickness is mostly to its credit, but it also hides Bob's biggest flaw:

There isn't a whole lot of note that happens in the book. It certainly doesn't feel slow, but once the adventure really kicks off, I suddenly felt as though I'd just finished reading a rather lengthy prelude. And since the adventure kicks off about three-quarters of the way into the book, that's a lot of prelude. Again, it wasn't in any way a bore to read - it was cute in the meantime, and passed by quickly enough - but I still had to ask: shouldn't the heart of this adventure have started a bit sooner?

Instead we have a nice, simple, but somewhat featureless story for about 150 pages, then a fun, energetic adventure for about 50. It's not overly jarring, but it feels unbalanced.

Having dual authors as it does - and added to the fact that I've not read any other books by either author - I can't identify which author is responsible for what parts of the book. It's told in alternating voices - the odd chapters are from Livy's perspective, the even from Bob's - so perhaps one author wrote all of Livy, and the other all of Bob(?) I couldn't tell you. Either way, though, regardless of who wrote what in the book, the entire package comes off with a sweet, consistent tone that was warming to read. Even if the first 150 pages felt a bit flat compared to the final 50, they were still pleasing to spend time in.

I don't know that I see Bob becoming a classic, nor "standard" reading for children. (And it is very much a children's book - there isn't necessarily a lot for adults to be captivated by here.) Regardless, it was still a pleasant, endearing read that I was glad to have experienced.

On Madeleine L'Engle's Time Quartet

I can't recall when I first read A Wrinkle in Time anymore - I'm pretty sure I was in middle school at the time. I had to read it for a class assignment, I believe. And if I recall, I didn't necessarily love it, but I enjoyed how smart it made me feel. I mean, after reading it, I became someone who knew what a tesseract was. So. There.

(Mind you, a tesseract is actually a real thing, but it's nothing like what it is in Wrinkle. But of course I didn't know that at the time. Oh well.)

I read it again some years ago (I think about 10 years ago), and liked it quite a bit more than the first time around. That's when I decided - finally - to give the rest of the series a go.

Now, with the Wrinkle in Time movie (finally!) upon us, I have to say: yes, I'm excited for the movie. Based on what I've seen and read about it so far, it seems like the creators might be on to something special with it. But the rest of the books (after Wrinkle) were...well, underwhelming, to put it kindly.

This happens often with sequels/series, of course. (Especially, for some reason, movie sequels. It's not quite as bad with book sequels, but still too often.) Sometimes it's hard to say exactly what goes wrong with subsequent titles. They just don't have quite the same magic as the first entry, I suppose.

It's sadly, painfully clear what went wrong with Wrinkle's sequels, though. So let's explore that.

A Wrinkle in Time was an incredibly visionary book that took place throughout several corners of space and time. And, importantly, as the plot goes on, its scope increases exponentially - in fact, compared to other books, the rate of increase is much faster and larger than average. What begins as a search for a missing father quickly snowballs into an enormous spiritual war spanning space and time. Books just don't explode like this very often; it's to L'Engle's credit that she handled it so deftly.

Then we get to the second book, A Wind in the Door.

Well then. Let's begin with a synopsis of the plot from Wikipedia (accessed 1.29.18):

Main character Meg Murry is worried about her brother Charles Wallace, a 6-year-old genius bullied at school by the other children. The new principal of the elementary school is the former high school principal, Mr. Jenkins, who often disciplined Meg, and who Meg is sure has a grudge against her whole family. Meg tries to enlist Jenkins's help in protecting her brother, but is unsuccessful. Later, Meg discovers that Charles Wallace has a progressive disease that is leaving him short of breath. Their mother, a microbiologist, suspects it may be a disorder of his mitochondria and his mitochondria's farandolae, (fictional) micro-organelles inside mitochondria.

One afternoon, Charles Wallace tells Meg of a "drive of dragons" in their back yard, where he and Meg thereupon discover a pile of unusual feathers. Later, Meg has a frightening encounter with a monstrous facsimile of Mr. Jenkins. That night, Meg, Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin O'Keefe discover that Charles Wallace's "drive of dragons" is an extraterrestrial "cherubim" named Proginoskes (nicknamed 'Progo' by Meg), under the tutelage of the immense humanoid Blajeny, who recruits the three children to counteract the Echthroi.

Meg's first task, on the next day, is to distinguish the real Mr. Jenkins from two Echthroi doubles, by identification of the (potential) goodness in him despite her personal grudge. The protagonists then learn that Echthroi are destroying Charles Wallace's farandolae, and travel inside one of his mitochondria, to persuade a larval farandola, named Sporos, to accept its role as a mature fara, against the urgings of an Echthros. 

...because all of that makes perfect sense, and sounds like one cohesive book, doesn't it?

False. The book is a jumbled mess which begins with a down-to-earth-bullying situation and ends in a veritable Magic School Bus episode in which they shrink and travel through Charles' blood. Oh, and there are dragons and angels and some sort of immature amoeba along the way...or something.

All of the space and time mysteries from Wrinkle have disappeared. The deeply unsettling social commentary from the cookie-cutter-esque planet, the majesty and wisdom of the Mrs W's, the intricate workings of the tesseract - all gone the way of the dinosaurs. Now we have...well, that.^^^

The third book in the series - A Swiftly-Tilting Planet - plays out in a nominally more interesting way...at least until you stop and think about the synopsis, which is, basically:

Nuclear war is imminent. Luckily Charles Wallace (now 16 years old) is given a magical...you know, incantation/recital/abra-kadabra thingy which he chants outside one night until a unicorn comes to take him back in time, where he telepathically links up with various people in the past in order to change the present and prevent the war. (Which is, of course, clearly the most effective way to head off a nuclear war. Props to him.)

No really. That about sums it up. I wish I was kidding.

I mean, Swiftly was cohesive, at least.

Oh, and the fourth book - Many Waters - you ask? That's the one in which two of the minor characters from the other books finally get their turn at an adventure, by going back in time to the age of Noah (of the ark-builder variety) to...well, who knows why they're there, actually. Help herd the animals, I guess. Oh, and they help fight off the evil shape-shifting demons - here called Nephilim - who like to disguise themselves as animals, and occasionally try to seduce teenage boys.

(At this point, I'd insert an emoji for a a dry, sarcastic sniff, if only there was one.)

Really, though: what on earth went wrong? How could L'Engle have started with something so brilliant and moving and bigger than space with Wrinkle, then turn it into a Magic School Bus episode, then a time-travelling unicorn, and finally a replay of Noah's Ark with pedophilic demons?

It's a mystery, to be sure.

If you're scratching your head and thinking WTF? - well, friend, so am I.

Hopefully they won't bother making the sequels into movies. My wish that that they'll nail Wrinkle, then quit while they're ahead.

REVIEW: The Halo Grower - Ryushiro Hindemith

• Year first released:  2016
• ISBN of the edition I read:  0989488926 (sorry for the Amazon link this time - this book isn't available via Barnes & Noble)
• Publisher of the edition I read:  Corinthian Editions
• My rating (out of 5):  2.5

As you've noticed, sometimes I have a hard time figuring out exactly what I want to say about a book. Whether it's because I have mixed feelings about the book, or else because I struggle to find the right words/examples to explain how I feel about it (whether good or bad), sometimes it can be difficult to express.

This is not one of those times.

The Halo Grower is not a bad book, per se. There were plenty of elements to it that were generally interesting and worthwhile.

What Hindemith did wrong, though, he did very wrong. And, considering that it's the main conceit of the book, there's really no way around discussing it at length.

Before explaining, it's worth pointing out: The Halo Grower isn't an especially well-known book. (In fact, I suspect it's self-published, though I haven't verified this yet.) I discovered it in a list on goodreads.com, which listed it as one of the "most difficult" novels in English. Naturally, I was curious. Before picking it up, I didn't know what about the book made it so difficult. After beginning it, the answer came quickly...

Ryushiro Hindemith has a much better vocabulary than you and I do. (That, or he just has a mighty thesaurus, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.)

This fact alone isn't a problem. It's a good thing, in fact. Considering that a person's vocabulary is the number one measure for determining their IQ, Hindemith is clearly in the realm of genius.

Rather, the problem is that Hindemith wants to make sure that we absolutely know he has a better vocabulary than us, to the point where he's clearly just showing off.

Every single page is packed with words you've never seen before. Many of them are, in fact, real words. Others weren't exactly extant before Halo, but still make sense in the way that he used them (adding prefixes or suffixes to change the type of word they are, etc.).

Here, for example, is a very limited list of words from The Halo Grower which I'd wager you haven't come across in your readings:

• blepharospasmic
• Buddhamaniacal
• cathexes
• centuplication
• chirospasmic
• clerestories
• ectomorphic
• eigengrau
• epeirogenic
• etiolated
• Husafellian
• ignivomitus
• karmavention
• lachrymations
• lagophthalmos
• lethologica
• narthex
• neurapraxia
• nevi
• nystagmus
• plantarflexion
• pulchrified
• pyrocumulus
• sanctoliloquy
• sanctomaniacalism
• sanctomegalithic
• shadowgraphical
• stelliferous
• stygiophobia
• synapectomy
• telamonic
• telamons
• triboluminescence
• tritanopia
• vitruvian

Again, this is only a tiny sampling of Hindemith's crazy word choice. In fact, I pulled all of these from just the final 15 pages of the book. (This is merely because I didn't think to start making such a list until I was nearly done reading the book.)

Clearly the vocabulary through Halo is what classifies it as one of the "most difficult" novels in English. Really - how many of these words have you seen before, friends?

That said, I didn't have any trouble following the book. No, I had never seen any of these words before either, but most of them are pretty clearly guessable in context. I only stopped to look up the definitions of one, maybe two words while reading. (Neither of which are actually on this list I shared - they appeared earlier in the book.)

What troubled me more than the use of these rare, complex words, is that Hindemith clearly went out of his way to use them - well out of his way.

If "lachrymations" truly was the best word to use in the context of the sentence, I wouldn't mind in the least.

I'll spare you the trouble of looking it up, though: "lachyrmations" is another word for "tears." Yeah, tears. Like, those drops of water that come out of your eyes when you cry.

Never once in the entire book does Hindemith say that his character "cried" or "shed tears." Nope. The character shed "lachrymations." (He shed them rather often, in fact.)

Oh, come now. This is just plain silly, isn't it?

And it's precisely this silliness that shows us the truth: Hindemith is trying to be difficult. He's purposefully going out of his way to show off his vocabulary.

Yes, I like to learn things as I read. I suspect you do, too. I'm not particularly interested in having an author brag to me about his vocabulary for 250 pages, though. It's a little unbecoming.

Friends, here's a pro tip for you: when you're writing your best seller, let your main character cry. Don't make them lachrymate.

So then. How was the book beyond this asinine word choice, you ask?

Meh. It was fine. The overall setting was quite intriguing. Ironically, though, the plot didn't really go anywhere. (This is ironic because the book is, more or less, a Buddhist cosmological epic about creation and reincarnation - which means that the plot goes everywhere, so to speak - and yet, it doesn't really amount to much. Rem - the main character - basically just comes up against one hurdle or another [actually, mostly one hurdle over and over again] during his creation process, and...well, that's about it.)

I enjoyed picking apart The Halo Grower, accepting the challenge of discovering and understanding this insane vocabulary. It was a fun literary exercise, if nothing else. As well, the setting was vivid and vibrant and of personal interest to me; it's a theme that isn't touched on often, and was worth exploring for that reason.

Aside from these things, though, I really don't know that I can recommend it to anyone. If you want to accept the challenge of Hindemith's word choice - or if you're interested in a peculiar, modern look at Eastern cosmology - then sure, give it a shot, I guess. Otherwise, it's hard to say who else this book might be for.

REVIEW: The Buried Giant - Kazuo Ishiguro

• Year first released:   2015
• ISBN of the edition I read:  978-0307271037
• Publisher of the edition I read:  Knopf
• My rating (out of 5):  3.5

Considering that Ishiguro just won the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature, it seemed to me that it was high time to read one of his books. And based on the fact that Pico Iyer (another author whom I respect) referred to The Buried Giant as "invincible," this seemed like a grand place to start.

It was and it wasn't, I guess. There was plenty in Buried to like, but "invincible" is certainly too strong of a word. 

Though it's most accurate to call Buried a fantasy, that label would likely give one the wrong impression. Yes, there are knights in it. Yes, there's a dragon that must be slain. There are several references to Merlin (and magic generally), and everything about it feels very medieval. If we can go a bit deeper than these elements, though, Buried is actually more like a drama which happens to include some fantasy tropes. 

The crux of the plot rests on an elderly couple, Axl and Beatrice, who decide that it's time to visit their son in a faraway village. And so they set out on a journey to find him, only to come across various adventures and misadventures along the way. But their adventure is superficial; the truer themes of the book are about familial bonds, the weight of memory, sacrifice, the things we hold on to. 

These are all important ideas, and they're handled exceedingly well in Buried. Even if some of the events and conversations feel a little more metaphorical than they need to be, there's really no mistaking the larger themes and ideas that Ishiguro wants us to garner from his book. In fact, I will happily claim that Ishiguro handles the use of themes more deftly than most authors today - a major plus, to be sure (and, I suspect, one of the reasons he won the Nobel Prize).

Throughout their adventure, there is a litany of smaller stories which Axl and Beatrice either experience first-hand or else hear of from other characters, which all somehow relate to the overarching narrative. It's in these smaller stories that many of the themes truly shine. It's also in these, though, where a few of the book's largest stumbles reside.

Each of these stories - the story of the mysterious boatman and the woman with the rabbits, the adventure at the abbey, and the confrontation with the dragon Querig, to name a few - are interesting enough, and add a particular weight to Buried. The connections between them, though, is a bit lackadaisical. Each of these subplots holds water on its own, but when thrown into the overall plot, just how separate they really are begins to shine through.

For example, I highly enjoyed the episode in the abbey (which comprised about one-fifth of the book). It was disturbing, well-paced, and full of surprises and concepts that made it a fantastic little story. Its connections to the plot as a whole, though, felt a bit too loose to really justify its inclusion. Yes, the abbey was a day in Axl and Beatrice's adventure, but...why was it in their adventure at all? As a reader, the fact that I wonder why this episode happened doesn't sit right with me. 

This is unfortunate, because, again, the whole episode was great - probably one of my favorite parts of the book. This doesn't necessarily mean it belonged in the book, though.

So it is that the parts of The Buried Giant are each impressive on their own, and certainly carry a strong gravitas to them. Unfortunately, the gravity of everything that isn't such a subplot doesn't quite hold them all together, though.