Category / Novels

by booksoverlookedblog

The Magician’s Nephew, Chap. 7: Drawbacks of Childhood

In the first chapter of The Magician’s Nephew, C.S. Lewis captures the magic and wonder of childhood. In the seventh chapter, it’s all about the helplessness.

Digory and Polly go on the adventure of their lives, but it involves a lot of waiting around. Polly has to go home, and her parents punished her for getting her shoes and stockings wet under circumstances she can’t quite explain, and is out of the picture for most of this chapter. Jadis ends up getting a horse-drawn cab and is taking a romp around the city with Uncle Andrew. Knowing how dangerous Jadis is, Digory contemplates going after them. However, he’s faced with several limitations. He doesn’t know where they are, and his Aunt Letty would never let him leave the house if he couldn’t tell her where he was going. Besides that, he doesn’t have any money to pay for trams to take him around the city.

When you’re a kid, it seems like everything you do is on someone else’s schedule. You have to depend on adults for just about everything. They’re supposed to provide for you and protect you. Even as we get older and more independent, we still rely on our parents, and (in theory) live by their rules. Driving home the point is Polly, punished and unable to help. It’s a little frustrating that Digory can’t go after Uncle Andrew and Jadis, even though he knows that’s what he should do. Watching Digory sit and wait for them to come back may not be the most exciting thing to read, but it is realistic.

Along with that, there’s another part of this chapter that gave me chills, when Aunt Letty briefly discusses Digory’s mother and her failing health.

‘What lovely grapes!’ came Aunt Letty’s voice. ‘I’m sure if anything could do her good these would. But poor, dear little Mabel! I’m afraid it would need to be fruit from the land of youth to help her now. Nothing in this would will do much.’ Then they both lowered their voices and said a lot more that [Digory] could not hear.

It wasn’t the talking about the obvious foreshadowing about fruit from the land of youth, but the part where the adults lower their voices so Digory can’t hear. I can tell you from experience that when you have a chronically sick relative, conversations like that are a big part of your life. My sister and I would overhear things that we weren’t supposed to, almost always worrying news. We almost never heard the end of those conversations. Either it would get quiet, or I’d become so uncomfortable that I’d somehow make my presence known. Hopefully in such a way that the adults wouldn’t realize I’d been listening in, though I might never know for sure. It turns out they’re a lot more perceptive than I thought. Of course, I used to sneak out of my bed and think that throwing a blanket over my head would prevent my parents from spotting me and sending me back upstairs.

Childhood logic.

I don’t know how other kids in similar situations handled things like this, but I was too anxious to ask my parents questions about what was going on. The information I got about my aunt was either from what they told me directly, and what was overheard. It’s funny, the things grown-ups will say when they think you’re not paying attention. And for something this big, I always paid attention.

Let’s not delve into childhood fear and sadness for a moment, though, and appreciate a very minor, nameless character: the maid. She has no idea what’s going on, and it’s something of a running gag in this chapter.

While Aunt Letty was hurtling through the air, the housemaid (who was having a beautifully exciting morning) put her head in at the door…

‘Oh, Master Digory,’ said the housemaid (who was really having a wonderful day)…

‘Sarah,’ she said to the housemaid (who had never had such a day before)…”

I don’t know why I like this so much. It just makes me smile.

by booksoverlookedblog

The Magician’s Nephew, Chap. 6: Unexpected Plus One

We’re a third of the way through the book, and I’m getting pumped to go back to Narnia! Digory and Polly haven’t quite escaped the clutches of Jadis, but they’re able to escape back to the Woods Between the Worlds and…return to London?

Wait, when do they go to Narnia? No, seriously, I read this, I know Digory and Polly accidentally take the Witch to Narnia. Why are they going back to London?

Well, it turns out I forgot a lot more details in this book than I realized.

The children and Jadis wind up back in Uncle Andrew’s study, and it becomes immediately apparent that Uncle Andrew just got a lot more than he bargained for.

In Charn she had been alarming enough: in London, she was terrifying. For one thing, they had not realized till now how very big she was. ‘Hardly human’ was what Digory thought when he looked at her; and he may have been right, for some say there is giantish blood in the royal family of Charn. But even her height was was nothing compared with her beauty, her fierceness, and her wildness. She looked ten times more alive than most of the people one meets in London.

Maybe that description is a bit cliche now, but I love it. Jadis’s presence also puts Uncle Andrew in his place pretty quickly. I like the contrast between the two. When Digory and Polly see Uncle Andrew in the beginning of the book, they see him as someone fighting and powerful. Compared to Jadis, he’s weak and cowardly. And, it would appear, not too bright, either.

Children have one kind of silliness, as you know, and grown-ups have another kind. Uncle Andrew was beginning to be silly in a very grown-up kind of way.

I’ll give my compliments to Lewis for that one. Not only does he capture the magic of childhood, but also at least one true fact about adulthood as well: that we have no idea what we’re really doing, but pretend that we do.

We also see more of Uncle Andrew’s character; along with being totally unprepared to deal with the consequences of meddling with magic, it turns out he’s pretty lousy at being…well, being an adult. It’s not just the “silliness” of thinking that Jadis would fall in love with him, but you can see it in other details. In one side note, the narrator says that Uncle Andrew has blown through his own money, and quite a bit of his sister’s.

Honestly, I’m a little disappointed that Uncle Andrew ends up being this pathetic. He looks small, literally and figuratively, next to Jadis, and is something of a fraud when it comes to being a true Magician. But he was able to use magic to send the children to another world, and have them return (with an unexpected plus one). Using magic in a world where none exists is pretty awesome, even if he was a schmuck about it. But as soon as Jadis comes into the picture, everything interesting and intriguing about him is out the window.

I guess the moral here is: Playing with magic can be cool, but you’re a jerk and not as cool as you think you are.

That’s a strange lesson.

by booksoverlookedblog

The Magician’s Nephew, Chap. 5: The Queen Said One Word, You Won’t BELIEVE What Happens Next

I remember a fair bit about this book since I last read it. Digory and Polly wake up the evil witch Jadis, and they inadvertently take her to the new world of Narnia. I remember that it was Jadis’s spell that put everyone to sleep, and left Charn in ruins.

What I didn’t remember was how scary Jadis actually was before Digory and Polly found her. This chapter is dedicated to her backstory, and elucidates how Charn became frozen as it is now. Unfortunately, it doesn’t give us an explanation as to why the people sitting outside her chamber start out looking kind and end up looking cruel. I suppose it was just used as a build-up to end in Jadis. That’s understandable, because this is a children’s book. I’m a little disappointed that there’s no (apparent) deeper meaning behind this, because I’m an adult reading a children’s book and expecting more depth than the author provides.

Jadis tells us that she and her sister were feuding for the throne,  giving us images that are a bit…graphic for a children’s novel.

‘I have stood here (but that was near the very end) when the roar of battle went up from every street and the river of Charn ran red.’

Holy hell. I know that children’s literature isn’t sunshine and roses all the time, but that’s pretty dark.

Like Uncle Andrew, Jadis’s backstory has a backstory, and holes that I desperately want filled in. It also shows us that she’s completely evil. I’ve been reading Clash of Kings, and some of the dialogue she has sounds like it would fit perfectly into the Game of Thrones series.

‘Then I spoke the Deplorable Word. A moment later I was the only living thing under the sun.’

‘But the people?’ gasped Digory.

‘What people, boy?’ asked the Queen.

‘All the ordinary people,’ said Polly, ‘who’d never done you any harm. And the women, and the children, and the animals.’

‘Do you understand?’ said the Queen (still speaking to Digory). ‘I was the Queen. They were all my people. What else were they there for but to do my will? [. . .] You must learn, child, that what would be wrong for any of the common people is not wrong in a great Queen such as I. The weight of the world is on our shoulders. We must be freed from all rules.’

It’s probably not fair to compare the two, but that mentality is basically the reason everyone in  A Song of Ice and Fire gets screwed over.

Jadis tells the children that there is a word–a “Deplorable Word”– that is so powerful it would end Charn. The Word itself is a deep, dark secret that only the most powerful magicians in Charn ever knew it. And while we’re comparing Narnia to things that Narnia shouldn’t be compared to, it reminds me of the Monty Python sketch about the funniest joke in the world, which is so funny, you’ll die when you hear it.

Most of Charn’s magicians refused to learn the Word, and it was forbidden to ever use. Jadis didn’t share their reluctance, and set out on an epic quest to learn the Word, and…

‘It was the secret of secrets,’ said the Queen Jadis. ‘It had long been known to the great kings of our race that there was a word, which, if spoken with the proper ceremonies, would destroy all living things except the one who spoke it. But the ancient kings were weak and soft-hearted and bound themselves and all who should come after them with great oaths never even to seek after the knowledge of that word. But I learned it in a secret place and paid a terrible price to learn it.’

…Really? That’s it?

This entire chapter is the story of how Charn ended up in this state, and we don’t get to see the most interesting and intriguing part. Hell, we’re not even told why Jadis was fighting her sister. I would probably read a whole book on Jadis’s rise into power, her learning the Word, and killing Charn with it. That sounds like an awesome story. Or maybe a terribly generic one, but at least I’d get some of my questions answered.

Excuse me, I need to go and write a fanfiction now about Jadis’s backstory.

by booksoverlookedblog

The Magician’s Nephew, Chapter 4: Curiosity Killed the Kids

The first pool that Digory and Polly jump into is the wrong one. The story would be very different if they’d gone to any other world, but then, they’d never make it to Narnia without going into this one first. Polly and Digory enter the world of Charn, and it’s…chilling.

Everything about this world is old and still. They wander through ruins, and there’s absolutely no sound. There’s no people, no animals, nothing but empty courtyards. Even the light in this world is described as feeling old, as well as reddish. That last detail is more unnerving to me now that it was as a kid. I don’t know how much C.S. Lewis knew about astronomy, but the red light makes me think of Red Giants: cool, dying stars, millions of years old. It’s not just an old world, it’s a dying one.

I was a little wary about re-reading the Narnia books at first, because of the narrator. The last book in the series I read, Prince Caspian, I found the narrator so annoying, I wish I could have skipped the descriptions altogether.  Lewis uses an intrusive narrator to tell the story, and he’s not shy about making his presence known. I won’t go as far to say that the book’s written in first person, but every so often someone – referring to themselves as “I” – pops his head in and gives you his frank opinion on the matter at hand. Either there’s not as much of it as there was in Prince Caspian, or it doesn’t bother me as much now. It can be a little jarring, but I don’t actively hate it. It makes me think of a grandfather telling his grandkids this story, which is probably the way Lewis intended it to be. There’s a warmth to it, and it makes me think of my dad, reading this book to me when I was sick. On the other hand, it also allows Lewis to be a bit lazier with his writing, and he sometimes uses it to avoid writing in-depth descriptions, or to fast-forward scenes.

If you were interested in clothes at all, you could hardly help going to see them closer. [. . .] I can hardly describe the clothes. The figures were all robed and had crowns on their heads.

Digory and Polly inspect the rows of people who resemble wax sculptures. It becomes apparent that they’re all set up in a particular order. First come people whose faces are kind, and look like the type of person you might want to have a cup of tea with. But as they continue, the faces get crueler and crueler, until they finally reach the most beautiful – and cruelest – looking person of all.

In a lot of fairy tales (and Disney movies), your inside matches your outside. That is, the more evil you are, the uglier you are. Of course, all the high school outcasts like myself know that the opposite is true, and it’s the pretty girls who are the mean ones. I’m glad to see Lewis didn’t fall into the same cliche of beautiful people being good, and ugly ones being evil. Perhaps it’s too predictable.

It’s been a long time since I read this book, and I’ve forgotten a lot of the details. It’s sort of nice, actually; it’s almost like reading it for the first time again. The order that Digory and Polly find the frozen people in seems important, starting with the kind people and ending with the evilest. I wonder if there’s a point to be made here that I haven’t picked up on, or if it’ll be revealed why they’re arranged in this way. I hope it’s explained.

This chapter also played on a fear that I didn’t even know I had until I read this book. Digory and Polly come across a bell, a hammer, and a poem:

Make your choice, adventurous Stranger;
Strike the bell and bide the danger,
Or wonder, til it drives you mad,
What would have followed if you had.

Polly doesn’t want to ring the bell; she wants to put on her yellow ring and leave this world. Digory, on the other hand, already feels the magic start to work on him. After an argument with Polly, he rings it, mostly out of spite. After a couple paragraphs describing the sounds it makes, the ruins start collapsing around them.

The choice here is that you can either ring the bell, and something terrible will happen, or go crazy wondering what that terrible thing would have been. I think we all deal with “what-ifs” and “might-have-beens”, and they can gnaw away at you. That’s bad enough, but when something is magically cursed to make you perpetually wonder what would have happened if you walked away… well, I’ve never had much willpower, so I would probably give into the temptation of ringing the bell. But the idea of losing my mind, even as a kid, was scarier than the potential risk of whatever would happen when that bell rings. If there’s actual, physical danger, then you can find a way to escape it. If it’s in your mind, how do you fight it, and will you ever be free of it?

Again, this is one of the hazards of traveling to a new world. I’ll have to be very careful not to read any cursed poems that will drive me mad.

by booksoverlookedblog

The Magician’s Nephew, Chap. 3: Pool Party

It took two chapters, but the adventure has finally begun. Digory takes two green rings, one for himself and one for Polly, puts on a yellow ring, and winds up in the “Other Place”. This is one of my favorite things in this book series: the Woods Between the Worlds. Even the name sounds magical.

Digory finds himself, not in Narnia, but in a lush forest. There are shallow pools of water every few feet, and the place is so quiet, it’s as though you can hear the trees growing. As enchanting as it sounds, though, the Woods Between the Worlds scared me as a child. Digory isn’t there long before he starts to forget who he is, or why he came here.  He finds Polly in a similar state, half-asleep, and she doesn’t recognize him. When they see that they’re both wearing yellow rings, their memories are jogged, and they remember who they are and what they’re supposed to be doing.

While I was still hoping that I’d find a magical world in the back of my closet as a child, this scene helped me be aware of all the risks that might entail. I obviously knew that I’d be charging into battle to fight against evil, but I didn’t think of all the obstacles that would come before that. If I ever traveled a magical world, I would have to bring a friend with me, in case I wound up in the Woods Between the Worlds. I also really hoped that friend would be a unicorn.

I love the idea of the Woods Between the Worlds, though. Each pool of water is an entrance to a different world, provided you have your magic ring on. The Woods seem to stretch on endlessly, with pools every few feet. There are so many worlds that the children would just be able to walk into, which is a dizzying thought. As they’re about to try one out, Polly suggests that Digory marks their own pool of water, so they can find their way back home.

I rather like Polly. She seems like the brighter of two, and maybe even the braver.

The Magician’s Nephew was the second-to-last book written in the Narnia series, which means that Lewis most likely hadn’t thought of the Woods Between the Worlds before then. It’s a bit of a shame, I think, because it’s too good of an idea to waste. With endless worlds you could literally jump into, you could spend a lifetime exploring in the Woods and never visit the same place twice. Hence why it’s so important for Digory to mark the pool that will take him and Polly home, when they’re ready. That’s another scary thought: losing your world, and trying for the rest of your life to find the right pool and get back home. Even though that sounds like it would make a great story, that was another childhood fear of mine. When I discovered a new world (because I knew it would happen, someday) I would also have to take precautions to get home. Because as much fun as exploring other worlds is, sometimes you just need to sleep in your own bed.

by booksoverlookedblog

The Magician’s Nephew, Chap. 2: Ethics Review Board

We’ve made it the second chapter, and we’re on the cusp of the true adventure. Digory’s the nephew, and we at last get to meet the Magician. His name is Uncle Andrew, and he’s as close to a mad scientist as the Narnia series gets. He’s got crazy, fly-away gray hair, everyone around him thinks he’s mad, and is, in fact, something of a genius. Before wardrobes and strange cupboards at school, Uncle Andrew figured out a way to send people to someplace…else. He doesn’t quite know what that other place is, but he’s more than willing to use Digory and Polly as his human guinea pigs.

Most of the second chapter is dedicated to Uncle Andrew explaining how he was able to make magic rings that could travel between the worlds. He received an ancient box from his godmother (who was said to actually have fairy blood), containing dust from Atlantis. After many years of study, learning everything he could about magic, he created several yellow and green rings. The yellow would send anyone who touched it to the “Other Place”, and the green ring would, in theory, bring them home again. Before Polly and Digory accidentally found their way into his study, Uncle Andrew had only tested the yellow rings on literal guinea pigs. They all vanished, but none of them returned. Unsuspecting Polly became his first human test subject, when she takes a yellow ring, and disappears from the study, and the universe altogether.

I remember not liking this chapter very much. To me, it cemented Uncle Andrew as a villain in the story (and what nine-year-old likes villains?), and the attention was all on him. When I read it now, I really enjoyed it. In fact, I wanted more.

‘Meanwhile,’ continued Uncle Andrew, ‘I was learning a good deal in other ways (it wouldn’t be proper to explain them to a child) about Magic in general. [. . .] I had to get to know some–well, some devilish queer people, and go through some very disagreeable experiences.’

Okay, so we’re in London, in a world without magic. Uncle Andrew has found a way to use magic to send people to other worlds, and it’s suggested that the way he learned things was not on the up-and-up. Tell me that backstory doesn’t intrigue you. Who are these people, what are these disagreeable experiences? I want to know!  C.S. Lewis should have just skipped writing The Horse and His Boy and given us Uncle Andrew’s story instead.
There’s no room for moral ambiguity in the Narnia series, though, so he wouldn’t be an acceptable Lewis protagonist. And it’s made very clear that even though Uncle Andrew is, in fact, “beastly” for sending Polly to another world without telling her what she’s getting into.

This is exactly the reason why we have ethics review boards. Sure, they might stop you from doing some of the really fun social experiments, but at least you won’t wind up in a different universe when you’re filling out questionnaires with Lickert scales.

Wait, is there actually an experiment out there that can send me to a magical world? SIGN ME UP!

Unless you’re sending me to Westeros.

by booksoverlookedblog

The Magician’s Nephew, Chapter 1: Growing Up is Hard To Do

I’ve always loved fantasy stories, and I think one of the most influential ones in my life has been The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis. All told, I would read the first four (in chronological order) of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; The Horse and His Boy; Prince Caspian. I never quite made it to the three final books, though I owned them all. If anyone ever asked me which book was my favorite (and no one ever did), I would have told them The Magician’s Nephew. It was the first in the Narnia series that I ever read, and it opened up a world of magic to me.

When I was in grade school, my Aunt Linda was sick with ovarian cancer. I spent many weekends traveling to hospitals two or three hours away from home to see her. It was a hard time for me, and I think one of the reasons I really fell in love with fantasy books was because I needed some magic in my life.

Right from the first few pages of this book, though, I realized that it wasn’t just a need to escape that compelled me to read — and love — this book as a child. When the main character, Digory, meets his friend Polly for the first time, she can see that he’s been crying. He explains:

‘And so would you [. . .] if your father was away in India–and you had to come and live with an Aunt and an Uncle who’s mad (who would like that?)–and if the reason was that they were looking after your Mother–and if your Mother was ill and going to–going to–die.’

Well, shit. Already something I could relate to, and we’re only on page six.

I also forgot how quickly children’s books start. Digory and Polly meet, they’re friends, they go explore houses. There’s not much build-up before they reach Uncle Andrew’s study and begin their real adventure.

Now, there’s plenty of criticism about C.S. Lewis, but there is at least one thing he does right: captures the enchantment of childhood. Polly has a secret “cave” in the attic of her house, and it’s a place that I would have loved to have as a child. Re-reading this, I still wish I had a place like this.

 Polly had used the bit of the tunnel just beside the cistern as a smugglers’ cave. She had brought up bits of old packing cases and the seats of broken kitchen chairs, and things of that sort, and spread them across from rafter to rafter so as to make a bit of floor. Here she kept a cash-box containing various treasures, and a story she was writing and usually a few apples. She had often drunk a quiet bottle of ginger-beer in there: the old bottles made it look more like a smugglers’ cave.
 A cozy hideaway, a space just for you to be alone in. And there’s something about making this in her attic that makes it truly child-like. Perhaps because even if I had a hide-out like that as a kid, I wouldn’t be able to fit into it as an adult. If I did, and I returned to it, it would be a place full of nostalgia, certainly, but not a place of wonder as it once had been.

Childhood is a common theme throughout the Narnia series. Peter and Susan get booted out of Narnia at the end of Prince Caspian because they’re too old, and the only people who can save Narnia are children. There’s a little sadness when it comes to leaving your childhood behind, knowing that magic isn’t really real, that you’ll never find a secret world in your closet or get a letter delivered by owl. (My owl with my Hogwarts letter just got lost! I swear!) There’s one passage in the first chapter that captures this exquisitely, when Digory and Polly are discussing what might be in the empty house they’re trying to sneak into.

‘But I don’t expect it’s really empty at all,’ said Digory.

‘What do you expect?’

‘I expect someone lives there in secret, only coming in and out at night, with a dark lantern. We shall probably discover a gang of desperate criminals and get a reward. It’s all rot to say a house would be empty all those years unless there was some mystery.’

‘Daddy thought it must be the drains,’ said Polly.

‘Pooh! Grown-ups are always thinking of uninteresting explanations,’ said Digory.

When we talk about the end of childhood, we talk about children losing their innocence, or gaining responsibilities. Maybe every so often, we should think about their imaginations, too, and keeping our own ones intact.

We all have to grow up, but our imaginations don’t have to be a casualty of adulthood.

by booksoverlookedblog

The Supernaturalist Chap. 9-10: Goodbye from the World of Tomorrow!

I’ve decided to combine this post to include the final chapters of this book, because Chapter 10 is about four pages long. Chapter 9, though, is another one that could have been broken up into at least two, if you ask me. It’s pretty long, probably the longest in the book. And, boy, does it sting.

It’s a pretty common trope for villains to stand in front of the protagonists, explain their plan, and then walk away, certain that our dashing heroes are going to die in whatever death trap that’s been laid out for them. It’s also widely acknowledged that this is a pretty dumb thing to do. That, and I feel like it’s cheating. Suddenly the book (or movie, as the case often is) has to come to an end, and you haven’t figured out a way to explain to the heroes what’s really going on. Or, in this case,  you need to drop one last bombshell on the characters,  and have no way of doing it other than by some good old-fashioned monologuing.

All that said, I’m not entirely against the “now that I’ve captured you, let me explain my heinous plan” speech. The audience gets information, you have an “ah-ha!” moment, and then the heroes get to save the day, equipped with new knowledge. What bothers me about it here is that it’s Ellie Faustino giving them the speech, though the only person who’s surprised she’s behind this is Stefan. Faustino is too smart and too thorough of a character to tell the Supernaturalists her plans and motives, but does anyway. She even adds a little bit of extra information, just to hurt Stefan. Then she leaves them in a vat of acid to drown. That last sentence makes sense if you’re reading the book, I swear. What makes the villain monologue even worse is that she does it for the dumbest reason:

There are two more things you should know, just to punish you for slowing down my plan.

Really? Killing him wasn’t punishment enough?

Worst of all, Faustino could have had them killed then and there, but she decided “slow death by acid” was the better way to go. Even though she had a sniper, just in the other room, who could have shot them all and saved her some time and pain. Once she leaves, the group breaks out, equipped with new knowledge and…hang on a second, this sounds familiar.

Faustino confirms that the Parasites are benevolent and only feed on pain, that the “Parasite poop” mentioned earlier wasn’t causing the damage to the Satellite, and that Stefan’s accident that also killed his mother was set up by Faustino as an experiment. Ouch.

And I will give her credit for just one thing here: she actually didn’t reveal her entire plan. Once the protagonists escape, they uncover the reason Faustino was so interested in the Parasites in the first place. She’s using the ones Cosmo an Stefan knocked out at Clarissa Frayne (which didn’t die after all) to power a nuclear generator.

Another difference between reading this as a kid and reading this now: relying on nuclear power doesn’t seem that awful to me right now. Sure, it’s not without its own issues, like what to do with all that spent uranium, but I also don’t think that using nuclear power is going to end the world as we know it. But I first read this in 2005, when “weapons of mass destruction” was a pretty common buzzword. Nuclear (or “nuke-you-lur”, as was the pronunciation at the time) anything was associated with weapons and destruction in my mind back then.

I’m also not sure how it’s a nuclear generator if it’s powered by Parasites.

As you might have suspected, they beat Faustino, but the Supernaturalists all take a hit. Stefan gets shot by the sniper that Faustino should have used much earlier in the chapter, and ends up dying to free the Parasites trapped in the generator. Such ends our penultimate chapter.

Somehow, even as a kid, I knew that he wouldn’t survive to see the end of the novel. And even as an adult, Stefan’s death still makes me sad.

One thing I didn’t really think about until I re-read this was the story’s main character. I’d always assumed that the title referred to Cosmo. He’s the first character we meet, we follow the story from his perspective, and we can see that he changes from a meek kid to a pretty gutsy one. But this isn’t his story. It’s Stefan’s. Even at the end of the novel, Cosmo’s character isn’t well-defined, but Stefan’s always has been. He was the leader, and he was the one that pushed his group to fight. When another twist came along – and there were plenty along the way – he was directly involved in all of them. Looking at it now, it almost feels like Cosmo is a vehicle to tell Stefan’s story, rather than his own. I wonder if this was Colfer’s intention, or just something that ended up happening.

The final chapter is pretty brief, more like an epilogue, if epilogues were full of nothing but sequel hooks. We learn that Faustino has survived and will carry on her work anonymously elsewhere, and also that there are other supernatural creatures that Ditto sees, a lot worse than Parasites, and that he, Mona, and Cosmo, should rebuild and do something about them.

But it’s been more than ten years since this book first came out, and I have yet to see a sequel. Which is pretty damn disappointing, if you ask me, because I would buy that so fast.

Final Verdict: Keep/Give Away

Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t sell this as a book. I loved it in high school and read it so many times my copy’s pretty battered. Reading it again, I found it a delightful adventure, fast-paced, full of action and humor to keep the story interesting. The only reason I wouldn’t keep this book is because I have a fourteen-year-old cousin who would probably love it as much as I (still) do, and I may hand it down to him. Or possibly find him a copy that isn’t so beaten up.

Coming up next: the over-the-top manhwa Snow Drop!

by booksoverlookedblog

The Supernaturalist, Chap. 8: But Wait, There’s More!

This is the one. The one we’ve been waiting for since Cosmo first escaped the orphanage and joined the Supernaturalists. After all the twists and turns in this adventure so far, it’s all about to come to a head. The gang has located the Parasites’ nest, and it just happens to be in the basement of Clarissa Frayne, the place that Cosmo spent most of his life trying to get away from. He does consider, briefly, not returning with Stefan to plant the EMP, but the thought doesn’t last long. After almost floating off through space for all eternity, he’s unquestionably one of the group now, no longer an outsider.

The two get inside Clarissa Frayne easily enough, and sneak down to the basement with no problem. For once, things are going their way. However, the tracking beads in Cosmo’s skin haven’t entirely shorted out, and his faint pattern alerts our favorite marshal, Redwood, that someone’s sneaking around. Someone who’s supposed to be dead, and who Redwood would love to catch. After the crash in the first chapter, he was demoted to security guard, which sees him watching CCTV for most of the day, alongside his idiot coworker.

We don’t know too much about Redwood, but we know that he’s not dumb, and is pretty sadistic. We also know that he’s probably married, as he mentions someone named “Agnes” a few times. Even though we don’t know anything about her, it’s probably a fair guess to say that he’s not as cruel to his wife as he is to the orphans. Redwood’s not a particularly deep character — really, just a one-shot villain, but I’ve suddenly found myself more intrigued by him than ever before, and it was this line that piqued my curiosity:

He needed to get back on the streets, where he had some real power.

By “the streets”, he means becoming a floor marshal again, and dealing with the orphans directly. It’s already been established that Redwood doesn’t think of the orphans as people, which isn’t all that surprising. My question is just why Redwood is so sadistic. I figure that he’s a monster to the orphans because they can’t fight back, at least, not without serious repercussions. He’s cowardly in that regard, no matter how tough and frightening he thinks he is. I just want to know why he’s wired this way, we he won’t pick on someone his own size. What does he get out of tormenting these orphans?

It’s a pretty pointless question to ask, especially at this point in the book. Like I just said, Redwood is a one-shot villain, whose point in the story is to menace Cosmo. That’s really all we need to know about him.

The mission is going smoothly, unlike every other mission prior, that something has to happen. From the three paragraphs I’ve just dedicated to Redwood, it won’t be any surprise when I tell you that, yep, Redwood shows up right after Cosmo and Stefan plant the EMP. The sleeping Parasites wake up when Redwood attempts to take Cosmo hostage, and ends up painfully smacking the butt of a lightning rod into him.There are thousands of them, and Stefan is left with no choice but to detonate the EMP, knocking out all the Parasites, and Redwood, for that matter. This is such a great scene: a massive amount of Parasites just got wiped out Redwood gets his comeuppance, and the power surge shorted out the tracking beads on the orphans, so they can escape from Clarissa Frayne without being traced. Cosmo and Stefan know that the EMP works, and they can finally do some real damage.

‘Time to go,’ said Cosmo. ‘Now or never.’

‘Now,’ decided the diminutive Fence, leading the no-sponsors into the night, like a modern-day Pied Piper.

Seeing the orphans escape, an effective way to fight the Parasites, and a bully getting what’s coming to him. There’s still some loose ends to tie up, but finally the characters – and the reader – can breathe easy and relax. There’s just one problem: that’s not the end of the book. It’s not even the end of the chapter.

Cosmo and Stefan aren’t able to savor their hard-won victory for long. That’s what kills me about this chapter. Just as soon as something goes right, and they finally getting the break they deserve, they get thrown through another loop, and then another. Three loops, in fact.

With books set in the not-too-distant future, characters usually gizmos which, at the time the book comes out, seem really cool and top of the line. However, after enough time goes by, real life technology is going to surpass whatever neat gadgets those characters have. Mona’s phone is a perfect example of this:

Mona’s phone was a pretty old one, without much in the way of technology. But it did have picture capabilities. Sixty seconds of video or a hundred stills.

The Supernaturalist came out in 2004, when cell phones were becoming more widespread. Reading this when I was fifteen, I would’ve been over the moon to have a Trak Phone, never mind one that can take pictures and video. Now, pictures and video come standard on even the simplest cell phones, and let me tell you — the phone I had in 2007 could take more than 60 seconds of video in one sitting. Saying that Mona’s phone was cheap let Colfer get away with it for a bit longer, but not in 2015. Funny, the small things that wear on my suspense of disbelief.

Mona uses her sub-par phone to capture a video of what appears to be Ditto helping a weakened Parasite, and then all hell breaks loose. Here’s Loop #1: Ditto is in league with the Parasites. Confronting him about this, Stefan suddenly falls through Loop #2: that Parasites take pain only, not life force.

This was another part where fifteen-year-old me wanted to throw the book down, because if it was true, then it was completely mind-blowing. The only reason I didn’t take a couple days off the book then was because I needed to see what happened next, which takes us to Loop #3.

Instead of having the happy ending they deserve, all four of them are captured by Myishi paralegals, and Colfer delivers another throw-away line that I would read an entire book about:

Abracadabra Street was no great challenge for a squadron that had broken into several foreign banks, two crime lords’ strongholds, and a private kindergarten.

Colfer, please make your next book all about high-tech brutes breaking into a kindergarten. Why a kindergarten? These are things I need to know.

by booksoverlookedblog

The Supernaturalist Chap. 7: Spaaaaaace!

I don’t think there’s any rules that are set in stone when it comes to dividing chapters. As far as I can tell, you should make sure that each chapter ends on a note that will make your readers want to know what happens next, and that’s about it. How long or short each chapter is depends on the author and the story. I wish that Colfer had broken chapter seven up a bit more, though, because the chapter length feels uneven with the rest of the novel so far. For instance, Chapter 1 starts with Cosmo wanting to escape Clarissa Frayne, it ends with him doing just that. It’s nice and contained, and propels the story forward. Chapter 7, on the other hand, begins with Stefan sulking as he and Cosmo make their way home, and ends with the Supernaturalists in space. That’s a pretty big leap. There’s enough room for two or three chapters here by the time this one ends.

Stefan finally tells Cosmo his story, too, and it’s nothing we couldn’t figure out. He and his mother were in an accident and badly injured, he watched the Parasites suck his mother’s life energy away until she died. Stefan, in true Angsty Male Lead fashion, blames himself. There were plenty of hints strewn throughout the previous chapters, and his reveal really only serves to add more details to what we already knew – or, at least, assumed we knew. I like to give characters the benefit of the doubt, though, and hope that they’ll surprise me.

Though I didn’t grant this to Snape after reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which resulted in me feeling stupid when I read Deathly Hallows. And I only cried a little bit!

There’s also Cosmo’s awkward flirting with Mona. One great thing about fiction is that it elevates us, and takes us to places we’ve only imagined. We can live vicariously through the characters we cheer on; their triumphs are our triumphs. Our heroes are dashing and handsome and bold, and everything we’re not. Okay, saying the perfect thing at the perfect time is pretty unrealistic, and that’s why characters need to have flaws. We may want to be like them, but we also have to be able to relate to them.

Which is probably why I found Cosmo’s bungled flirting with Mona so cringe-worthy when I was a teenager, and adorable now.

‘Are you coming in, or are you just going to stand there?’ said Mona, without opening her eyes.

Cosmo tried to speak. Say something clever, he ordered his brain.

It’s not going to happen, replied his brain. You have enough spare cells for one word. Make it a good one. ‘Coffee,’ blurted Csomo. It could have been a lot worse under the circumstances.

It was so relatable to me then, because I only wished that I had the courage to talk to the guy I liked in high school. Because he was cute, and popular, and was in a band, and why would he ever want to hang out with someone like me? So, Cosmo, I applaud you, for taking a shot with a girl who you think is out of your league. However bungling a conversationalist you may be.

Mona stretched like a cat, her wiggling toes peeking out from under the unzipped sleeping bags.

‘Little piggies,’ said Cosmo’s mouth before he could stop it. [. . .]

Mona stared at him. ‘Have you ever had, like, a conversation with another person before?’

The story moves on with the Supernaturalists leaving Satellite City, and we see what the world outside the city, and the Satellite’s footprint – look like. Like the “One World Treaty” mentioned a few chapters ago, there are so many things that make me want to read more about the universe this novel takes place in. We’re never told where, geographically, Satellite City is, but outside of it is desert. The narration implies that this wasn’t here naturally, either. It was somehow man made. How? Global warming, nuclear strike, a massive build up of toxins? What turned a (presumably) habitable area into a desert? I want to know these things. Colfer, write a book explaining the basic history of The Supernaturalist universe, kplzthx.

People from the City are legitimately frightened of going to this apparent wasteland. Cosmo and Mona are curious to see what’s outside of the City, but Ditto is pretty uncomfortable with the whole idea.

Ditto shuddered. ‘This place gives me the creeps. You know they don’t have Satellite TV here? Some houses only have ten or fifteen illegal stations. What do they do all day?’

Now, this is where things start to get weird.

To find the Parasites’ nest, our rag-tag heroes need to find a way to track them, and eventually decide to use the Satellite to do so. It’s not something they can do on the ground, though, so they decide to go to space.

Okay, I can roll with a Satellite controlling everything in the city, invisible creatures sucking the life out of people, and rappelling lawyers. What I have a harder time getting behind is space travel. Even if technically they’re actually not going very far out of the Earth’s atmosphere. As a kid, I didn’t like this part because I didn’t think it fit in very well with the rest of the story.

As an adult, I don’t like this part because none of them is qualified to go to space. A big part of my current job is running a space camp for kids, I’ve met (and been hugged by) a real life astronaut, and I know way more about the International Space Station than any twentysomething with a non-STEM degree should know. In other words, I’m a space nerd. Always have been.

So, even though it’s the future and a lot of technology has changed, I’m still calling shenanigans on the space adventure.

First of all, there’s the preflight check. Mona goes through a checklist to determine if the small ship they’ll be using is safe to fly in. Which made perfect sense to me the first time I read this. Mechanic works on engines, therefore mechanic can figure out all engines.

I may not be handy, but I can still figure out basic car stuff: adding various fluids, changing wipers, fixing a flat. But those skills don’t translate to a spaceship. If the “low air pressure” came on in my car, I know exactly what to do. If it came on in the space shuttle, I wouldn’t have a clue what to do, and we would all probably die. It really bothers me that Mona, who’s most likely never worked on a spacecraft of any kind, has enough mechanical expertise to do a prelaunch check on the HALO (high-altitude low-orbit spacecraft) they’ll be using, instead of, say, the guy who actually owns it. I’m pretty sure engine work on cars, no matter how souped-up they may be, doesn’t translate to engine work on spaceships.

Of course, with so much depending on the Satellite, there are plenty of small spacecraft traveling up to it, owned by private companies. The way it’s written, it sounds like going up to the Satellite is just a regular day at the office, even if you’re not one of the “disc jockeys” who are responsible to maintain it.

But the other thing that bothered me about this foray outside the atmosphere is a throwaway line about space suits. It turns out Stefan can’t fit in the one usable suit on board, but Mona chimes in that space suits are one-size-fits-all.

Like Musica’s magical sobriety in Rave Master 2, this one line made we want to do a table flip. Because space suits are not one size fits all, and every. individual. astronaut. gets a suit fitted personally to them. This is how space works.

I think most people would give this a by, but I can’t, and the only reason for that is because I know way too much about space travel as it works right now. There’s plenty to like about this chapter, but this is one thing that I don’t.

On the plus side, we see more and more of Cosmo’s emerging personality. He’s only been with the group for a few days, and as action-packed as they were, he’s still a bit of an outsider. This is the chapter where he seals the deal, by volunteering to put on the suit that doesn’t fit Stefan and going out into space to get onboard the Satellite and use a panel that will sweep the city for energy leaks. The highest concentration of those energy leaks is where the Parasites will be drawn to, therefore, their nest. When something goes wrong with the Satellite, he ends up getting launched into space, and survives only by getting incredibly lucky. If running around on rooftops and learning Stefan’s story didn’t make him a full-fledged member of the group, this certainly did.

Cosmo’s grown from a kid with no idea about his future beyond Clarissa Frayne, and not much of a character himself, to someone pretty gutsy, and loyal to the people who took him in. So much so that he risks his life for their mission. Congratulations, Cosmo, you’re finally figuring out how to be a person, just like we both wanted.