Charming time travel adventure for kidsI don’t read much children’s literature, but occasionally I’ll try a classic book that was intended for a juvenile audience. Children’s literature prior to World War I was generally written at a higher reading level than much of today’s kid-lit (think Treasure Island, for example), so today those children’s books of old mostly appeal to adult readers. I had read good things about E. Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet, published in 1906, and decided to check it out. Nesbit (1858–1924; the E. is for Edith) was a prolific British author of fiction for both kids and adults. Unbeknownst to me before I started, The Story of the Amulet is actually the third novel in a trilogy. The events of the first two novels are briefly recapped in the first couple chapters of this third installment, so it’s not hard to figure out what’s going on. In this trilogy, four juvenile siblings discover a creature called the Psammead, or sand fairy, a kind of furry rodent-slug who can talk. The Psammead has the power to grant the children wishes, which leads them into all sorts of adventures.
In The Story of the Amulet, the kids are stuck at home with their nanny for the summer while their mom and dad and baby brother are out of the country. Their biggest complaint is boredom, and they long for their parents to return home to London and pay attention to them. (That’s rather ironic, because every good kid-lit adventure happens while the parents are away.) The children are reunited with the Psammead after finding him in a pet store. For some reason, the Psammead is unable to grant their particular wish, but he informs them of a wish-granting magic amulet, one half of which exists nearby. The children must find the other half for their wishes to come true. The half that they acquire in London, however, does have some powers, including time travel, so they use the first half of the amulet to search for the second.
Nesbit’s writing is really very lively and clever. The kids are quite likable and realistic. They are polite and intelligent without being saints or geniuses. The Psammead also has a fun personality, haughty and condescending, like a cross between The Odd Couple’s Felix Unger and that alien genie who used to hang out with Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble (the Great Gazoo, for those old enough to remember). The story has a touch of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure to it, but smarter. The fish-out-of-water scenarios of time travel generate much amusing humor.
The plot has its faults. It reads more like a meandering series of scenes rather than a cohesive novel. The premise of the amulet is used as an excuse to put the children into time travel situations, but overall, it doesn’t really make much sense. What I mean by that, in the case of a fantasy book, is that it defies its own internal logic. Throughout the book, the Psammead is granting wishes left and right, but for some reason he can’t satisfy the children’s desire to bring their parents home? Likewise, the magic amulet exhibits an almost limitless power to transport people through time and space, but for some reason it can’t help them find what they’re looking for? The final chapter amounts to a weak ending. What happens in the conclusion leads the reader to ask himself: What was stopping this from happening ten chapters ago? Of course, that would have cut short the adventure, and it’s the ride that matters here. The book is good clean fun, and the characters are enjoyable. If you like classic children’s literature, The Story of the Amulet is worth a look-see.
Polish history for 19th century American youthsStories of Poland, a book by Robin Carver, was published in 1834. I don’t know anything about the author, other than he or she was likely a Bostonian who also wrote a History of Boston and The Book of Sports. Carver also did something that probably few Americans of the 1830s could claim to have done—traveled to Poland—which makes him or her relatively qualified to write a book on the nation in question. Despite the word “Stories” in the title, this is a nonfiction book, not a collection of literature. A scanned digital copy can be found at the HathiTrust web site.
Stories of Poland was written for a young audience. Children’s books of the 1830s, however, were apparently a more serious affair than the kid lit of today, since a relatively advanced reading level and substantial attention span would be required for a kid to understand and maintain interest in this book. Carver’s prose is familiar in tone, sometimes addressing young readers directly, but can sometimes be confusing in its relating of events. Most of the historical content is about politics and warfare, with very little softening of the harsh realities for a young audience.
The book contains a dozen engravings illustrating various aspects of Polish life. These are all ganged up at the front of the book, prior to the title page. The text consists of 21 brief chapters, some of which serve as a travelogue of contemporary Poland, such as descriptions of Warsaw and Krakow, a visit to the salt mines, or a fancy ball at the villa of a family of Polish nobility. Most of this travel writing concerns the upper classes, though a brief attempt is made to describe the living conditions of the peasants in their thatched cottages. Carver does succeed in granting the viewer a cursory, sanitized view of what life was like in Poland in the early 19th century.
The majority of the chapters, however, are devoted to tales of Poland’s history, from the 17th century to just prior to the date of publication. These condensed historical narratives read like part history and part folklore, the purpose of which is to present the reader with a series of Polish heroes, including King Jan III Sobieski, King Stanislaw I Leszczynski, Karol Stanislaw Radziwill, Casimir Pulaski, and Tadeusz Kosciuszko (these are the spellings from Wikipedia; Carver’s spellings vary). The narrative also occasionally includes villains, like the tyrant Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich of Russia, brother of Tsar Alexander and tyrant governor of Russian-occupied Poland. Carver gives quite a bit of coverage to the recent November Uprising of 1830, a failed Polish rebellion against the Russians. Antonina Tomaszewska, a teenage military heroine of the Polish-Russian War, is hailed as a sort of Polish Joan of Arc.
This book is unlikely to interest youths of today. It will primarily be of interest to adults intrigued by Polish history. Carver provides only the briefest, romanticized summary of events, the details of which are of questionable veracity. This book can, however, generate enough interest to lead the reader to seek out more info on these historical figures and events from other sources. Carver doesn’t cite any references, except for the material on the November Uprising, much of which was drawn from the account of Major Joseph Hordynski, author of the 1832 book History of the Late Polish Revolution. Though Carver’s book may have been written for children, most Americans are basically kids when it comes to knowledge of Polish history, so Stories of Poland can serve as a primer to those readers who are interested in finding out more.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R345MEFAAAT7UE/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm
Spies and saboteurs in Bayport
The seventh book in the Hardy Boys series, The Secret of the Caves, was originally published in 1929 but totally rewritten and republished in 1965. It is this later version that I am reviewing here.
The federal government is building a radar station on the coast near Bayport. A series of mysterious accidents at the site have caused officials to fear sabotage, so they call in renowned detective Fenton Hardy to investigate. Meanwhile, a teenage girl shows up at the Hardy home seeking a detective to find her older brother, a college professor who has gone missing. With Mr. Hardy busy on another case, his sons Frank and Joe offer to take the young lady’s case. As if that weren’t enough action for one book, the Hardy Boys’ chum Chet Morton has got himself a new metal detector and is dying to explore some seaside caves in hopes of uncovering buried treasure, even though there have been rumors of strange lights and shots fired in the area. Frank, Joe, Chet, and Biff Hooper take a camping trip to the caves, which leads to a spooky adventure.
Early in the book, when the possibility of sabotage is being discussed, a “foreign power” is alluded to but never named outright. Given the time period at which this later version of the novel was published, one can’t help but see this as a manifestation of Cold War paranoia and assume this foreign power is a stand-in for the Russians. It is never stated explicitly, however, and most of the bad guys who feature in the book are either French or American. To its credit, this novel has more memorable villains than many of the other books in the series. Another good thing about this story is that the female characters play a larger role than usual. At one point, Frank and Joe enlist their girlfriends Callie and Iola for some undercover work. Elsewhere, the boys’ lives are saved by a fisherman’s wife. Even Aunt Gertrude contributes to the plot as her request for the boys to buy her a spinning wheel leads to an important break in the case.
The Secret of the Caves is a perfectly fine but not exceptional entry in the Hardy Boys series. I read this with my son, and he enjoyed it well enough, but it seemed to inspire fewer thrills or laughs in him than some of the others, like The House on the Cliff or The Missing Chums. This mystery lives up to typical Hardy Boys expectations but does not exceed them.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R3M5B0RBG02MWN/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm
Better-than-average Hardy Boys adventure
The Melted Coins is the 23rd book in the Hardy Boys series of mystery novels. It was originally published in 1944, when the story had to do with a pirate’s buried treasure. Many of the early Hardy Boys books were revised for republication decades later, however, and in this case a totally different story was created with the same title. In this new version, published in 1970, the Hardys help to recover a sacred Native American artifact. My young son and I have read several of these books together (though not all 23), and The Melted Coins is one of the better mysteries we’ve encountered so far in the series.
This mystery commences in much the same way as most of the Hardy Boys books. The ever-absent detective Fenton Hardy is busy on a case somewhere. Since he can’t be in two places at once, he sends his sons to investigate a second case that has been brought to his attention. Someone has stolen a number of ceremonial masks from the Seneca Indian tribe in western New York State, including one particularly sacred mask that is made from melted gold coins. Meanwhile, the Hardys’ friend Chet Morton has enrolled in courses at nearby Zoar College, so they decide to check out the campus while they are in that neck of the woods. The more they learn about this institution of higher learning, however, the fishier it seems, and they begin to suspect it may be a sham school created to swindle unsuspecting students out of their money. Their investigations take the boys to Cleveland, Ohio and Niagara Falls. Everywhere they go, the boys face danger as the bad guys try to scare them off the trail with threats of violence.
As is often the case with these books, it features three or four different crimes that all end up being related. What makes this one better than most is that it actually all makes sense in the end. Whoever wrote this one under the blanket pseudonym of Franklin W. Dixon did a fine job of tying all the loose ends together. There are still plenty of unbelievable occurrences. In the very first chapter, for example, the boys visit a construction site, where they are allowed to take an elevator up to the top floor and walk around on the steel girders. This provides the opportunity for one of them to almost fall to his death, thus cheaply creating instant suspense. Such sensational happenings can be forgiven in a kids’ adventure novel, however, and at least the solution of the mystery follows a logical course.
The story imparts a good message through the treatment of its Native American characters, who are portrayed positively and about as realistically as one could expect from young people’s literature of this era. The Senecas still celebrate their traditional tribal rituals, but they also hold down modern jobs. The Hardys are welcomed into their homes, and a Native American teenager accompanies the boys as part of their investigative team. Prejudice against the Indians is addressed, and it is made clear that living conditions on the reservation are harsher and more impoverished than the Hardys’ upper middle class upbringing in idyllic Bayport.
Beyond that, there is nothing particularly exceptional about The Melted Coins. It pretty much sticks to the basic Hardy Boys formula, but within that formula it is at least competently written. It is neither as confusing nor as tedious as some of the other books in the series (The Shore Road Mystery comes to mind). Overall my son and I enjoyed it.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R347T24YICJ9ST/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm
Delightful kid-lit classic
I recently read Roald Dahl’s novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with my nine-year-old son. Published in 1964, this kid-lit classic is still delightfully entertaining to children of today, even those who haven’t seen the movie. For adults, it is one of the more enjoyable chapter books you can read with elementary school kids. This is my son’s favorite book by Dahl, and I would have to agree with him.
Willy Wonka is the world’s greatest chocolate manufacturer and a reclusive genius who sequesters himself inside his giant factory. What goes on inside this secretive compound is a mystery until Wonka announces a contest in which five lucky winners will get to tour his factory and win a lifetime’s supply of chocolate. After much anticipation, a poor young boy named Charlie Bucket scores a winning ticket. He and his grandfather get to meet Wonka and tour the factory, along with the four other winners and their parents. This is no ordinary factory, however, but a magical fantasy land and candy lover’s paradise.
While Charlie is the hero of the story and an exemplary behavioral model for children to follow, the other four children are various species of juvenile monster. One is a greedy glutton, one is addicted to bubble gum, another is a gun-toting TV junkie, and then there’s the little rich girl who demands her every whim be satisfied. Dahl doesn’t merely heap all his criticism on these problem children, but saves some of his censure for the parents who indulge them. Through these negative caricatures, the book imparts some good moral lessons to young readers in a very fun and non-preachy manner. Wonka’s workforce, a race of foreigners of unknown origin called the Oompa-Loompas, act as the Greek chorus of the production, reinforcing each lesson in silly poetic song.
As good as this book is, I actually do prefer the movie. That is, the 1971 musical starring Gene Wilder (I haven’t seen the Johnny Depp version). Director Mel Stuart and his team really did a wonderful job with the visuals on that film, going well above and beyond Dahl’s descriptions in the book. The screenwriters made some changes to the story, which Dahl hated, but I actually think are an improvement. For example, in the book Charlie is a relentlessly good boy surrounded by brats. In the film Charlie is not perfect, as few children are. He is tempted to make a mistake by breaking Wonka’s rules, but atones for it with a demonstration of his pureness of heart which sets him apart from the poorly behaved kids. Dahl also disagreed with the casting of Gene Wilder as Wonka, but Wilder’s take on the character is really far more interesting than the Wonka depicted in the book. Dahl primarily defines Wonka by the wonderland that surrounds him, while Wilder brought a manic quality and a scary side to the character that really doesn’t come across in the book.
Children’s literature is not a genre that I personally enjoy particularly, but if all kids’ books were as fun as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I might just be converted. For anyone with young kids, it is an essential addition to your youngster’s bookshelf.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R2V76ZJ0EHUEIP/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm
A mysterious expedition to Africa
I enjoyed the Danny Dunn series when I was a kid, and now I am having fun reading them with my young son. Despite all the changes in science and technology over the past 40 to 60 years, the books in this series have held up remarkably well over time. A child’s scientific curiosity never goes out of style. Danny Dunn and the Swamp Monster, published in 1971, is the twelfth of fifteen Danny Dunn novels by Jay Williams and Raymond Abrashkin. (Abrashkin actually died in 1960, but Williams insisted on crediting him on every volume in the series.) Though the books in the series are consistently good, this is one of the best that I can recall.
For those unfamiliar with the series, Danny Dunn is a teenage boy whose widowed mother works as housekeeper for Euclid Bullfinch, a professor of science (no specific branch, just a scientific jack-of-all-trades) at the local university. Danny and his mom live in the Bullfinch house, which gives the curious Danny the opportunity to observe, assist, and at times co-opt the professor’s experiments and inventions. In contrast to most of the other volumes in the series, Danny Dunn and the Swamp Monster is more concerned with nature than with technology, even though Professor Bullfinch does create an invention in the opening chapters that will get used later in the book. Bullfinch receives a surprise visit from a professional colleague, Dr. Fenster, a distinguished biologist who invites Bullfinch, Danny, and Danny’s friends Joe and Irene to accompany him on an expedition to Africa. Fenster has been investigating tales of a legendary monster known as the lau that reportedly dwells in the swamps of the Sudan. The science that is explored, therefore, is more biological than technological, and the book reads like an adventure that some naturalist explorer like a young Charles Darwin, Alexander Humboldt, or David Livingstone might have had tracking down a new species of animal in an exotic land.
The story does a fine job of illustrating how zoologists would actually go about accomplishing such a task. Though this is science fiction for young readers, it does depict the scientific process in a realistic manner. In the course of their expedition, Danny and his party get to know the local indigenous people, the Nuer. The book sets a good tone for these interactions, respectful and not condescending, and imparts a good message of friendship and cooperation between people of different nations, races, and cultures. The novel has a villain, which allows for some suspense, but the danger never reaches a level to scare young readers. The hunt or for the lau is exciting, and when the creature is revealed, it is pleasantly surprising that the beast is actually within the realm of scientific possibility.
The only problem I really have with the book is its illustrations. If you have a print edition, it will likely include the original illustrations by Paul Sagsoorian. (The recent ebook edition probably doesn’t include them.) While Sagsoorian is a fine artist for this type of book, the illustrations give away too many of the story’s surprises. This book would be a lot more fun if you didn’t know what kind of creature the lau is, yet almost every edition (not just those illustrated by Sagsoorian) features a front cover painting of the lau in all its glory, spoiling the big reveal towards the end. Nevertheless, despite that one caveat, Danny Dunn and the Swamp Monster, and the Danny Dunn series in general, make great reading for kids interested in science (and their parents).
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful" vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R2SOQSE1DCUMD0/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm
Three jumbled mysteries and a lot of fat jokes
The Shore Road Mystery is the sixth book in the Hardy Boys series of mystery novels (those published by Grosset & Dunlap, with the blue spines). The author, Franklin W. Dixon, is a blanket pseudonym for any number of authors who worked on the series. The original version was published in 1928, but then, like all books in the series, the story was significantly revised to keep up with the times, and the new version was rereleased in 1964. It is the latter version that I’m discussing here.
In this installment, the boys have no less than three mysteries to solve. Their father, detective Fenton Hardy, is in New York hunting down a ring of gun smugglers. The Hardy Boys, in their hometown of Bayport, are faced with a string of auto thefts along Shore Road. In addition, one of their school chums has brought to their attention a clue to the location of a mysterious treasure buried by a pilgrim centuries ago. It should come as no surprise to anyone who reads these books that the three mysteries all end up being related.
Though this may be a children’s book, my middle-aged self had trouble keeping up with all the twists and turns in this convoluted plot. There are so many unmemorable villains it is difficult to tell them all apart, and by the end of the book I still couldn’t figure out who all was doing what and how each profited from the schemes they had hatched. Nevertheless, I am reading these books with my nine-year-old son, and there was enough excitement to keep him interested from start to finish. As always, there are plenty of chase, capture, and escape scenes to keep the plot moving, and every chapter ends with a cliffhanger. The amount of unconcern on the part of the Hardy parents, who allow their sons to roam around at all hours of the night chasing dangerous criminals, is truly ridiculous. Towards the end of the book, the boys come up with a plan to catch the car thieves that in real life would have surely ended in the termination of their young lives, but of course, through dumb luck everything works out all right in the end.
The Hardy Boys are meant to stand as exemplars of good manners and breeding, and for the most part they succeed. One thing I didn’t like about this book, however, is the extent to which it makes fun of their “stocky” friend Chet Morton. Poor Chet is the butt of so many fat jokes, both from his schoolmates and from the author, that it really constitutes bullying, albeit a form of bullying that was acceptable in the 1960s. This book includes an entire humorous subplot about Chet being on a diet. He has suddenly developed an interest in botany and decides to take a crack at vegetarianism. The whole thing is just an excuse to make fun of his weight and portray him as a hopeless glutton. Given that most of today’s children are probably heavier than what was considered “stocky” in the 1960s, it doesn’t set a great example for the young readers of today.
My son liked the book enough that he’s already talking about moving onto book seven. The more I get into this series, however, the more I realize how hacky these books are and wonder how I ever enjoyed them so much when I was younger. I guess in the minds of young readers the fantasy of crime-fighting independence counts for more than any coherence in the mystery itself.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R1ZGJG0LEHWCJP/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm
Awfully slow for an adventure novel, no matter how old you are
In Desert and Wilderness, published in 1911, is a novel by Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz, winner of the 1905 Nobel Prize in Literature. The story takes place in northeastern Africa during the 1880s. Though Sienkiewicz wrote other historical adventure novels, In Desert and Wilderness is notable for being the only book he wrote that is intended for a young audience.
Fourteen-year-old Polish boy Stanislas (Stas) Tarkowski and eight-year-old English girl Nel Rawlinson live in Port Said, Egypt, where their widower fathers work as engineers for the Suez Canal. Because of the close friendship between their dads, Stas and Nel are raised almost as brother and sister. When their fathers are called away for various engineering projects, the kids are left at home in the hands of trusted servants. At this period in Africa’s history, a Muslim preacher known as the Mahdi has incited a rebellion against British rule. While the dads are away, Stas and Nel are kidnapped by Arabs who intend to exchange the children for prisoners held by the British. The kidnappers hope to take their little hostages as an offering to the Mahdi in Khartoum. The children, however, set out to escape their captors and undertake an arduous journey to reunite with their fathers.
Though this book may be intended for children, in the typical fashion of a century ago it is in no way dumbed-down as is so much young adult literature published today. Even grown-ups will have trouble keeping up with the intricate political history of Egypt and the Sudan. The series of events that leads to the kidnapping is quite convoluted and tests the patience of readers of all ages. When the captors and captives finally hit the road, it often reads less like a novel than an atlas, each sentence crammed with exotic place names. For a children’s story, there’s an awful lot of realistic violence that’s more suited to grown-up reading. On the other hand, adults won’t appreciate the more fairy tale aspects of the story, in which whatever the children need to survive miraculously falls right into their laps. The book contains some quite thrilling scenes, most involving encounters with wildlife, but they are few and far between, interspersed among long trudges through the desert.
Something else that dulls the excitement of this wilderness survival tale is the fact that the children are accompanied by servants throughout their ordeal. Though the kids show some ingenuity at times, and Stas is good with a rifle, the servants do much of the daily work required to keep them alive. When the children receive help from African characters, it’s never just because the Africans are good people who want to help two kids find their way home, but rather because they are silly, superstitious rubes who view the white kids as gods or benevolent spirits. The whole book is written as a justification of European rule in Africa, where the blacks would be lost without the guidance and governance of the whites.
The story has little to offer girls, as Nel mostly serves as the damsel in distress to Stas’s knight in shining armor. To anyone who has ever read a book by Sienkiewicz, the ending is a foregone conclusion. Adults who read this novel as children may have fond memories of three or four important scenes, but the book is 47 chapters long, and most of those chapters are a bore. Sienkiewicz is a talented writer, so In Desert and Wilderness is not without some literary merit, but it counts among his worst works.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R2R3CEMANLA3QV/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm
Perpetual attempted murder
This is the fifth book in the classic Hardy Boys series of mystery novels written for a young audience. Hunting for Hidden Gold was originally published in 1928, and then, like all of the early Hardy Boys books, it was significantly rewritten by another author and republished in 1963 (Franklin W. Dixon is a blanket pseudonym for any writer who worked on the series.) I’m reviewing the 1963 version, from Grosset & Dunlap’s edition with the familiar blue spine.
After four mysteries set in the Hardys’ hometown of Bayport, Hunting for Hidden Gold introduces a plot element that will henceforth be an important feature of the series: travel. Eventually the Hardy Boys’s adventures will take them to many exotic locales. Here, their first road trip finds them in the mountain village of Lucky Lode, Montana. The boys’ famous detective father, Fenton Hardy, is working on a case there, and in keeping with his usual cavalier attitude toward their safety he calls them to come out and help them with the case. I believe the crime Fenton Hardy is investigating involves an armored car robbery, but it’s barely mentioned in the story. What’s more important is that the Hardys also know a former gold prospector who once struck it rich in Lucky Lode, but his gold was stolen decades ago and never recovered.
Fenton Hardy is after a gang of villains led by a nondescript criminal named Big Al. The gang, who want Mr. Hardy to drop the case, not only try to kill him but also go after his sons. There really isn’t much of a mystery here at all; just chapter after chapter of these thugs trying to kidnap or kill the Hardy Boys. Meanwhile, the boys are searching for Big Al’s hideout. Little if any deductive reasoning is employed in this endeavor. In the course of either fleeing or chasing, as the case may be, the boys stumble upon secret passages and the occasional clue that remind you this is a juvenile mystery story, but really there’s little detective work going on here. It’s just a perpetual cycle of capture and escape, with every chapter ending in a cliffhanger. The boys don’t so much solve the case as survive it. While I understand the writers and publisher felt the need to add dire peril into these novels in order to keep young readers excited, they really went overboard with this one, to the point where the relentless chase scenes just become dull. Even my eight-year-old son thought this one was boring.
The fifth time is definitely not the charm for the Hardy Boys, as this is the worst book in the series thus far. While the previous four volumes did not feature great villains, Big Al is such a generic thug you might actually find yourself longing for the glory days of mildly colorful bad guys like Snattman (The House on the Cliff) or Hobo Johnny (The Tower Treasure). On the bright side, the change of scenery is nice, as Bayport was getting a little stuffy. This book’s setting and its quasi-western storyline at least allow for some wilderness thrills. Hopefully, however, the Hardy Boys’ further travels will inspire mysteries more satisfyingly intelligent than the tediously gratuitous action of Hunting for Hidden Gold.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R23GRVS8TDGM96/ref=cm_cr_othr_d_rdp_perm
Timeless fun for kids and grown-ups
As the father of two young boys, I’m always looking for chapter books to read with my sons, and whenever possible I try to steer them towards the classics, just for an occasional break from Captain Underpants. I’m not one of those grown-up readers who seeks out kid lit for its own sake, but I did enjoy James and the Giant Peach quite a bit. Originally published in 1961, it was the first children’s novel by British author Roald Dahl.
The story is about a young English boy named James Henry Trotter who lives a dark and dreary existence until a stranger gives him a handful of magic “crocodile tongues.” James accidently spills these little green rice-like objects on the ground under a peach tree, which results in the startling growth of the titular gargantuan fruit. After discovering a hole in the peach, James climbs inside, where he finds and befriends a group of intelligent, man-sized insects. Together they embark on a wacky journey that takes them far from home.
As is often the case with the protagonists of children’s literature, James is an orphan. He is forced to live with his two aunts, who serve the same function as the Evil Stepmother or Wicked Witch in many a fairy tale. This pair of harpies makes James’s life a living hell by heaping upon him verbal and physical abuse. Most children to some extent see themselves as persecuted by authority figures who tell them what to do, so young readers will no doubt enjoy reading about how James liberates himself from these two terrible guardians. Dahl takes the aunts’ ill treatment of James to such an extent, however, that some young readers may even find it scary. Another aspect of the book that may not be suitable for everyone is Dahl’s repeated use of the A-word (synonymous with donkey) to describe a stupid person (If I actually type the word, Amazon’s database will reject this review). Sure, it’s not the worst case of profanity, but probably not something you want to add to your kids’ daily vocabulary either.
There really isn’t much of a lesson to learn from James and the Giant Peach, which makes it even more fun. James makes friends along the way, and they work together to solve problems, so I suppose friendship is a theme, but mostly you just follow along on the bizarre adventure and enjoy it for what it is. There’s no heavy-handed moral that Dahl is pushing. For moms and dads, he satirizes Cold War paranoia in a few scenes, but not nearly to the extent that he does in his 1982 novel The BFG. Mostly, James and the Giant Peach is just a weirdly fun adventure with a lot of delightfully silly humor in it. My sons enjoyed it even more than I did and laughed out loud over quite a few passages. Though neither brief for a children’s book nor particularly dumbed-down in its vocabulary, my second-grade son didn’t have any trouble reading the prose, but I think even kids as old as fourth or fifth grade would still get a kick out of the story.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R1IUET7EJJBC8U/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm
A lot like the movie, but with more decapitations
We Kansans have a love/hate relationship with the Wizard of Oz. On the one hand, we’re proud of the fact that L. Frank Baum chose to set the Oz books in our state, a fact that is often played up at tourist sites and the like. (I was surprised to find out that Baum never actually lived in Kansas, considering how frequently he is claimed as an honorary native son.) On the other hand, we’re tired of all the Dorothy and Toto jokes foisted upon us by out-of-state friends and relatives every time the mention of our state comes up. Like everyone else, I’ve seen the 1939 film adaptation, but I had never read any of Baum’s Oz books before. As a 25-year resident of Kansas with an interest in classic literature, I figured it was about time I got around to reading the original text.
The purpose of reading a book after seeing the film is to determine how the original differs from the adaptation, in hopes that some new buried treasures might be unearthed from the text. The verdict on that score, however, is that there is little new to be found here, as the writers of the movie stuck pretty close to Baum’s book. The screenwriters obviously edited the story for brevity, as there are a few kingdoms and creatures that were left out of the film. In a couple cases it also seems some plot elements may have been left out because the special effects of the 1930s would not have been able to depict them satisfactorily. The most inventive example of the latter category would be the Hammer-Heads. Dorothy and friends also encounter a few talking forest creatures, such as a mischief of field mice and a stork. In general, however, the novel’s deleted scenes aren’t particularly integral to the main thrust of the story, and the film captures Baum’s original narrative quite well.
One aspect in which the two versions differ considerably is in the level of violence; the book certainly wins out in that department. In Baum’s novel, the tin woodman’s axe is not just for show. His origin story involves self-dismemberment, and in one scene he beheads an entire pack of wolves. Though in the minds of children these would likely be seen as bloodless decapitations, it is certainly odd to read a children’s book in which the heroine and her fanciful friends are sent on a mission to kill someone, in this case the wicked witch. That assassination plot is played down in the movie, but here the fatal intent on the part of both sides of that battle is much more evident. For that reason, one might want to reconsider reading the book to small children, but I suppose it isn't not any worse than the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, originally published in 1900, is the first in a series of 14 novels by Baum. He also wrote Ozian plays, short stories, and a comic strip. Since his death, several other authors have also written books set in the world of Oz. There are those who delve deeply into this fictional universe and consider it on a par with J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth. In the history of fantasy literature it likely occupies an important place as America’s Alice in Wonderland. Having read a lot of science fiction from the 19th century and earlier, however, I didn’t find this book particularly groundbreaking. Sure, it’s imaginative, but other than the film adaptation I can’t see why Baum’s book continues to fascinate readers of fantasy literature after all these years, while so many other aged books of the genre have faded into obscurity. I still feel some Kansan pride towards Baum, but I’m unlikely to read any of the sequels.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R3KNI1173ZF0DL/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm
Wholesome crimefighting fun
The fourth book in the Hardy Boys mystery series, The Missing Chums, was originally published in 1928 and significantly revised and reissued in 1962. The revised version, written by James Buechler under the series pseudonym of Franklin W. Dixon, is the story that I’m reviewing here. In this adventure, Frank and Joe Hardy are on their way to a costume party when they witness a bank robbery. After giving their statements to the police, they join their friends at the party. The next day they find out that two of their buddies, Chet and Biff, never returned home after the evening’s festivities. While using their sleuthing talents to locate their missing chums, the boys discover important clues to the identities of the bank robbers.
The first thing that stands out about The Missing Chums is the amazing amount of personal freedom that teenagers apparently enjoyed in the early 1960s. Not only do the police allow the Hardy Boys to participate in active investigations, they actually encourage them to do so. In the first chapter, the chief of police sends Frank and Joe on a mission to investigate a series of violent disturbances in the local squatters’ village for hoboes and drifters. Talk about child endangerment! Later, the police deliberately use the boys as bait to catch some crooks. Much of the action of the story takes place on motorboats, which the boys are allowed to take out without permission whenever they wish, and the Hardy parents allow them to stay out all night and chase after criminals. Of course, kids love to read about other kids who live in some dream world where they are allowed to act like adults, which is why this series is so appealing to young readers. Another reminder that the ‘60s were a much simpler and safer era is the attitude taken toward kidnapping. When it is suspected that Chet and Biff may have been abducted, it is just assumed that they are being held for ransom, rather than captured by some creepy psycho who might want to do them harm. Ah, the good old days, when all we had to worry about was ransom.
The plot of The Missing Chums is better than the previous three Hardy Boys books. The story delivers enough twists and turns to keep the reader guessing, and it was sufficiently suspenseful to keep my young son and I interested up until the very end. Judging from the series so far, the main thing that hinders the Hardy Boys cases from being truly great detective fiction is the fact that the villains are never integral members of the supporting cast (i.e. the butler did it), but rather career criminals who just happen to be plying their craft in the environs of Bayport. This convention serves to reinforce the wholesomeness of the Hardys’ world. In their hometown, a grocer, a teacher, or a pharmacist couldn’t possibly be a criminal. Only an outsider—hoboes, drifters, sailors—born and raised among a lower class of people, could stoop to committing such evil acts as theft or kidnapping (and of course, there are no murders in Bayport). Though the Hardy Boys series was probably originally meant for teenagers in Frank and Joe’s age range, the adolescents of today are unlikely to appreciate the early books because of this antiquatedly hokey view of the world. The Hardys can’t compete with the violent and fantastical excesses of today’s video games, movies, and young adult literature. Younger kids with a less jaded attitude, however, like elementary schoolers, can still find these books exciting and entertaining. My son and I have enjoyed reading them together, and as long as he’s up for it, I’ll be joining the Hardys for book five, Hunting for Hidden Gold.
On the trail of counterfeiters
Originally published in 1927, The Secret of the Old Mill is the third book in the Hardy Boys series of mystery novels by Franklin W. Dixon. Like all the early Hardy Boys books, it was revised and updated in 1962, with significant changes made to the original story. The revised version, one of the familiar blue-spined editions from Grosset & Dunlap, is the novel I’m reviewing here.
The mystery begins when brothers Frank and Joe Hardy accompany their pal Chet Morton to the science store to buy that microscope he’s always wanted. He has been saving up his money for this dream purchase, and is utterly disappointed when his legal tender is refused. One of his bills is counterfeit! When the Hardys go to the police to report the phony bill, they are informed that the cops have become aware of several other recent instances of counterfeit currency being circulated in Bayport. The boys decide to take it upon themselves to investigate the problem. Meanwhile, their dad is working on a separate case, the details of which he is not at liberty to divulge to his family. When mysterious threats start being aimed at the Hardys, warning them to drop the case, it is unclear to which case the anonymous notes are referring—the father’s or the sons’.
The plot of The Secret of the Old Mill is confusing, even for a grown-up. The Hardy Boys just seem to tread water for most of the book, not really making any headway in their pursuit of the counterfeiters. It is clear from the title of the book, the cover illustration, and developments throughout the story that the answer can only be discovered by venturing inside the old mill, but it takes forever for the boys to get there. Once they do, it is a pretty quick wrap-up to the finale. The reader never really sees much of the bad guys until the very end, so there’s nothing particularly interesting about them. They don’t have the personality of other Hardy opponents, like Snattman from the previous book. Instead, they come across like the generic wanted men who show up at the end of a Scooby-Doo episode from time to time. Of great assistance to the boys’ investigation, they obligingly spill their guts, revealing all the secrets that should have been figured out earlier in the book.
Despite the lackluster plot, The Secret of the Old Mill is amply stocked with the suspenseful scenes of captures and escapes, boat chases, and secret passages behind the bookcase that succeed in maintaining the interest of young boys. The real attraction here for the juvenile audience is not so much the mystery itself but rather the independence the boy detectives enjoy as they make their own way by car, motorcycle, or speedboat to solving adult problems without adult supervision. I enjoyed the series when I was a kid, and now I’m reading them with my young son. He and I both agreed that this third installment in the Hardy Boys series is not as good as the second book, The House on the Cliff, but it is probably better than their debut, The Tower Treasure.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R18O6LL8XLK5T/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm
An exciting improvement over the first book
I read the Hardy Boys mysteries when I was younger, and I’m now reading them with my son. We were both relatively unimpressed with The Tower Treasure, the first book in the series of boy-detective novels by author Franklin W. Dixon. To my surprise, however, my son wanted to read more, so we moved on to book two, The House on the Cliff. This mystery novel was originally published in 1927, but like many of the books in the series it was significantly revised in 1959 by Harriet Adams, an editor working on behalf of the publisher who owned the rights to the books. I’m happy to report, and I think my son would agree, that The House on the Cliff is much more entertaining and exciting than the volume that preceded it.
Smugglers have been operating in the coastal waters near the town of Bayport, and the police and Coast Guard have asked for internationally renowned detective Fenton Hardy’s help on the case. He in turn enlists his sons Frank and Joe and their buddies from high school to help him out with some of the legwork. The boys are assigned to watch the waters from a cliff that overlooks the bay. This vantage point is located on the grounds of the old Pollitt place, a spooky mansion sitting in seaside seclusion. Through the lens of their telescope, the boys spot suspicious activity taking place in the bay. Could it be the smugglers? Then suddenly, they hear strange noises coming from the Pollitt house. Fearing someone might be in danger within, they decide to enter the mansion and investigate.
There isn’t a lot of detective work here in the sense of piecing clues together to solve a puzzle, but there is a lot of cops-and-robbers-style scenes of chase, capture, and escape. The Hardy Boys follow the bad guys into secret caverns and hidden passageways. Occasionally guns are drawn and fists are thrown, but the violence is kept at a minimum for young audiences. As always, the Hardy Boys are held up as examples of right behavior and moral fortitude. The illustrations always show them wearing sweaters and ties—even when they’ve supposedly just been swimming!—while the villains wear trashy open-collared shirts and short sleeves. Still, even though the smugglers speak in sailor slang, there’s less of the classism here that was so blatant in The Tower Treasure. The criminals are depicted as men behaving badly but not incapable of moral redemption.
My son, of elementary school age, really enjoyed the colorful characters, like the helpful informant Pretzel Pete and the evil king of the smugglers Snattman. Almost every chapter in the book ends on a cliffhanger, so we were always looking forward to what would happen next. The House on the Cliff is not a particularly creative or intelligent mystery, but it’s a good family-friendly adventure novel that’s still got enough thrills for young boys to enjoy. After reading this episode, my son and I are looking forward to starting book three, The Secret of the Old Mill.
Charming but tedious
I’m sure a lot of people grew up with this story and absolutely love it, but having just encountered it for the first time, as an adult reading it to my own kids, I was underwhelmed. The title of Roald Dahl’s 1982 novel The BFG is an acronym for Big Friendly Giant. The heroine of the story, a young girl named Sophie, spies the giant on the prowl in her neighborhood one evening when she is up past her bedtime. The existence of giants is supposed to be a secret, so the BFG snatches Sophie up and takes her back to his cave, where she’s required to stay forever so she can’t tell anyone that he’s real.
Luckily he’s a gentle and friendly giant, unlike others in the book. There are nine other giants who make their secret rounds at night, but instead of blowing dreams into children’s bedrooms they snatch kids up and eat them. If your children are too old to be scared by this premise (as mine are), then they’re probably old enough to be bored by it. The rather gory allusions to bone crunching and blood bottling get rather monotonous when they are dragged out ad nauseam over the course of a too-lengthy novel. The story is simple enough that Dr. Seuss could have made it work in 48 easy pages, but Dahl stretches it out over three or four hours of reading. And this is one of his shorter books? For most of its length, the novel is just long descriptive passages about the giants and their lifestyles, with an emphasis on the threat from the child-eating carnivores. It isn’t until the last few chapters when Sophie and friend decide to do something about it, but even then the resolution feels overly protracted.
Where the novel succeeds is in Dahl’s playful use of language and touches of humor throughout. The BFG speaks in a dialect that combines barbaric crudeness with childlike cuteness. His lingo is peppered with a bevy of nonsense words like whizzpopping, crodsquinkled, and frobscottle, and Dahl incorporates clever puns into the prose, particularly when he’s describing the flavors of “human beans.” Linguistically, the story occasionally had my elementary school boys and I laughing, but narratively, we were mostly bored by the plot and kept wishing Dahl would get on with it already.
If there’s a moral to the story, Dahl doesn’t hammer it home. The BFG proves that scary people/things can be nice—Don’t judge a book by its cover, that sort of thing. Sophie shows that kids can be heroes too. Mostly, however, it’s just a fight-the-monsters tale that takes forever to get around to fighting the monsters. The story does have a certain charm to it, so I can understand why many have fond memories of the book from their youth, but Dahl’s probably got better books up his sleeve than this. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach seem like better candidates for the kid-lit canon.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/RSO5W467UQ95E/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
A rather bland debut
The Tower Treasure, originally published in 1927, is the first book in the Hardy Boys series of mysteries for juvenile readers. I read dozens of these books when I was a kid, though I don’t think I ever read The Tower Treasure back then. Purists will point out that the original story by Dixon was significantly altered in the 1959 edition. The latter version is the one that I read, and the one I’m reviewing here. I was looking for a chapter book to read with my seven-year-old son, and I thought I’d give the Hardy Boys a try. He reacted rather unenthusiastically to the book, and surprisingly, reading the Boys myself after all these years, so did I.
Frank and Joe Hardy, students at Bayport High, are sons of the renowned detective Fenton Hardy. When their friend Chet Morton’s yellow jalopy is stolen, the boys decide to try their hand at their father’s trade and solve the mystery themselves. In the course of their investigation, a more substantial robbery takes place as $40,000 worth of jewelry and securities is stolen from the Tower Mansion, the palatial residence of the aged Applegate siblings. The Hardy Boys uncover evidence that the same thief perpetrated both crimes, but Hurd Applegate, the cranky old rich man who was robbed, blames the theft on his servant Mr. Robinson, whose son is a classmate of Frank and Joe’s. The boys must solve the mystery to clear their friend’s father and collect the $1,000 reward.
As one might expect, given the time period in which the book was published, The Tower Treasure is a wholesome adventure story imbued with the conservative family values of a bygone era. Everyone in the book is white, mothers don’t work, and that sort of thing. No surprises there. What was unexpected, however, is the classism running throughout the book, with the repeated implication that poor people are evil. When Mr. Robinson loses his job and the family has to take lodgings on the wrong side of the tracks, Frank and Joe just can’t get over what a horrible a fate that is. The Hardys and the families they associate with are virtuous members of the upper middle class, and anyone beneath their station is depicted as seedy and shifty. There’s a rival detective named Oscar Smuff, for instance, who is also vying for the reward. With his shabby clothes and bad manners, he’s the representative of white trash, and thus the Hardy Boys and their friends are justified in deceiving him and making him the butt of their jokes.
These offenses are slight, however, compared to just how boring the book is. Rather than a progressive string of discoveries that builds suspense, chapter after chapter goes by with nary a clue in sight. It’s like an Encyclopedia Brown story that’s been stretched out to 180 pages. Because the plot was significantly altered in the 1959 revision, perhaps the publisher is to blame rather than the author. Or maybe because this is their first case, as often happens the origin story is just not as exciting as the subsequent adventures. Nevertheless, this book deserves some credit for starting the series that has captivated so many young readers. I have fond memories of the Hardy Boys exploring underground caverns, climbing mountains, or flying planes, but there was little excitement in this debut. As my son and I read through it, he repeatedly complained of being bored. Nevertheless, to my surprise, he picked out another Hardy Boys book at the used book store, so it looks like I will be moving on to book two, The House on the Cliff. I hope it delivers more thrills than The Tower Treasure.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” voter. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R3MI4P654OINV/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
To compute or not to compute?
Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine, published in 1958, is the third novel in the Danny Dunn series by Jay Williams and Raymond Abrashkin. Danny is an adolescent boy who lives with the scientist Professor Bullfinch, for whom Danny’s mother serves as housekeeper. In each book Danny and his sidekick Joe co-opt some invention of the Professor’s and use it to get in and out of trouble. This time the theme is computer science, as the boys get their hands on MINIAC, a computer that Bullfinch is developing for the government.
In the first chapter of this third installment, Williams and Abrashkin introduce the recurring character of Irene Miller, who has just moved into the house next door. Like Danny, she is scientifically minded and intelligent beyond her years. She and Danny make fast friends, much to the chagrin of Joe, who feels he’s losing his best friend. It was smart of the authors to introduce a female character, thus creating a role model for girls as Danny is for boys. Irene proves that anything boys can do girls can do too, and also serves as a voice of reason in response to some of Danny’s cockamamie schemes. Joe expresses his disgruntlement over Irene’s arrival with utterances like “Dames! Who needs ‘em! Nothing but trouble.” While everything works out OK in the end, of course, I hope my sons don’t take to spouting anti-feminist rhetoric in the slang terms of the ‘50s. My 8 year old found the term “dames” to be particularly hilarious.
While Professor Bullfinch is away, Danny comes up with the idea of using the computer to complete his homework and convinces his two companions to go along with his plan. The authors make it clear to young readers that the computer is not a magic box that solves all your problems for you. A computer can only do what people tell it to do. So Danny and his friends have to program the machine, loading it with information before they can extract the answers to their homework assignments. Contrary to Danny’s plans, he thus ends up doing more homework than he was doing before. When Danny’s teacher finds out that he’s using the computer, he has a debate with her about digital ethics. The computer, he insists, is just another tool, like a textbook or slide rule, and why shouldn’t he use what resources are available to him? His teacher, on the other hand, is afraid it will hinder his learning. The discussion of such issues, however elementary, are still relevant to today’s digitally saturated kids who may wonder why studying is even necessary when you can just Google everything.
These books were originally intended for junior high-age readers, but due to the antiquated technology and obvious moral lessons, these days that demographic will probably find them painfully corny. The books will, however, appeal to younger readers with an avid interest in science. I read them with my two boys, who both loved the first book, Danny Dunn and the Anti-Gravity Paint. They were split on this volume. My 6 year old lost interest halfway through, but my 8 year old was all-in until the very end. In my opinion, this is not one of Danny’s more exciting adventures, especially since computers have become so ubiquitous. Nevertheless, like all of the books in the series, it’s good, solid, entertaining fare for young readers.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
http://www.amazon.com/review/R3A50F7CFA20PQ/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
