Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

The first third of The Third Mushroom had me worried.  Melvin was being snarky, Ellie was enthusing over science, there was take-out for dinner…was it just going to be more of the same?  Because while that can be fun, it’s rarely enough, you know?

I shouldn’t have worried.

Third Mushroom ended up being a lovely story about hard choices, different kinds of friendships, and the importance of having people to remember with.  There are pets; there are fruit flies (with and without wings); there are malteds; and there are piles upon piles of dirty clothes.  What matters most, however, is that Mushroom completes what begins in The Fourteenth Goldfish, in a poignant and satisfying way.  The two are a near-perfect pair.  Now–if you’ll excuse me–I’m off to decide if we’re having takeout for dinner.

I finished reading Eunice Tietjens’ Boy of the South Seas last night, and I have to say–my strongest feeling about it is relief.

As in, I’m glad to be done.  What’s next?

It’s not that I hated it, you understand–it was fine.  It just wasn’t any better than fine.  Boy was a Newbery Honor book in 1932, back when stories of young people from faraway places made up a significant portion of the winners, and I’m guessing it won because it was the first book about a Polynesian boy to be published in the U.S.  (I’m guessing this, mind.  I haven’t researched, but I sincerely doubt there was an abundance of books about Polynesian young people in the 1930s.)  I googled the author and she was actually born in Chicago (Tietjens was a married name); apparently she traveled extensively in Asia, but that’s not exactly Polynesia, is it?  I’m generally pretty good at judging books in their historical context, but there were a few phrases that were still grating.  (“Teiki, who like all simple primitive people, was not afraid of silence…”)

As far as the plot, well–Teiki accidentally stows away on a schooner that carries him far from his island.  He ends up on Moorea, where he is eventually adopted by a loving woman and her family, and then finds a mentor and new life direction in an unexpected place.  A phrase at most is spent on his real father’s inevitable grief at his son’s disappearance, and after Teiki finds his mentor, his adoptive parents are almost entirely out of the picture; as a parent, I found this grating as well.  To be frank, Boy of the South Seas feels like a romanticized look at island life by a woman who did some basic research and leaned quite a bit toward the ‘noble savage’ ideal (even if ‘savage’ isn’t quite the right term in this case).  Unless you have a fascination with historical portrayals of the Pacific Islands and their inhabitants–OR a Newbery-related goal–I’d probably skip this one.

Have you ever read Jennifer L. Holm’s The Fourteenth Goldfish?  Because as of tonight, I have.  And it’s weird.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s good-weird.  And funny-weird.  But seriously, when you’ve got a 11-year-old main character whose mother is a drama teacher (divorced from Ellie’s father, the actor, although they’re still friends) with the hippest wardrobe in the house, and whose grandfather, a scientist with his own fan club (in Helsinki!), has reversed the aging process, turned himself into a teenager, and moved in with them, well–you’ve got a weird book.

Here’s the thing, though–it’s Jennifer L. Holm.  And so it totally works.  Melvin (the grandfather/sullen teenage boy) is snarky, blunt, and crotchety in a disturbingly perfect old-man-teenager kind of way, and Ellie is a beautifully normal 11-year-old, dealing with changing friendships, parental expectations, and some unexpected life upheavals.  Add in the question of whether aging ought to be reversible, a performance of the same play Auggie Pullman sees his sister in, and an awful lot of take-out, and?  You get a touch of well-written, strange, and (often) hilarious magic.  If that works for you, you should absolutely read this book.  (If it doesn’t, just try something else by Holm instead.)  Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to the sequel!

I’m going to give myself a free pass for the 1st, because back-to-back posts are tricky, and I only manage it sometimes when a month has an odd number of days.  Plus, I’ve been doing all the things.  Anyway.

Today I finished listening to The Unbreakable Code, the second book in Jennifer Chambliss Bertman’s ‘Book Scavenger’ series.  (Have I mentioned how much I want ‘Book Scavenger’ to be an actual game?  Because I would TOTALLY play it.)  Now, there are two kinds of series, right?  There are the ones where each book reads a fair amount like a standalone, and then there are the ones where the books continue where previous books leave off.  This one feels a bit like a hybrid; the mysteries are solidly standalone, but the character development is most definitively linear–chronology is absolutely important here.  Maddie, Mr. Quisling, and Matthew all grow into more important characters in this second installment, and Emily’s family’s living situation alters as well.  San Francisco continues to feel like a major character, which was more fun for me here because I read Russell Freedman’s book on Angel Island relatively recently.

As for the mystery?  I’m getting on the old side to unreservedly embrace stories of kids solving mysteries that adults have been unable to crack for decades, but it was a fun read, and the ‘who’s the bad guy’ question was handled in a way that I was impressively not annoyed by.  (Misunderstandings that lead to false conclusions drive me nuts if they drag on for a significant length of time.)

My mystery-mad 12-year-old is going to love it.