Scottish Play Doe (please just call him Scott) has always been a little weird, what with his migraines that make him see really strange things, but everything in his life gets a lot weirder when his family moves to Goodborough (home of the GoodCo Cereal Company) and one of his hallucinations steals his backpack. And then it turns out he hasn’t been hallucinating at all: he can see things no one else can, and oh yeah, that includes cereal mascots that might actually be faeries… and they’re all on the run from GoodCo itself.

With the help of his new friends Erno and Emily (who have their own weird connection to GoodCo), plus Mick the leprechaun, Harvey the rabbit man, and a suspiciously hairy housekeeper named Biggs, Scott has to figure out what’s really going on at GoodCo… and how to save the world from one seriously sinister cereal company.

(Mild spoilers within.)
Although I never got around to Rex’s second book, Fat Vampire, Rex was on my list of authors to watch after I finished The True Meaning of Smekday a few years ago. And considering the two books, I feel safe in saying this: Adam Rex is a very entertaining writer and illustrator, but his Achilles heel is definitely pacing.

Something was distinctly off about the way the tension in Cold Cereal built, and I think it comes down to the fact that there were about three different books in this book. Basically, in this one (very long for middle grade) novel, you’ve got way too many elements at play: a creepy cereal company, some Irish/Celtic mythology, time traveling King Arthur, freemasons, and more. And that is just… a lot. Too much. They are all cool ideas, and they tie together eventually, but it also becomes kind of a jumbled, confusing mess. And, because there are just so many elements that need to be pulled together, getting all the pieces in play, moved to where they need to be, and set up for the climax, takes a lonnnnng time, and makes things feel kind of bumpy and uneven.

But on the plus side, a lot of the ideas are really enjoyable and entertaining. Sinister cereal company that uses faerie creatures as mascots? HECK YES. And the time traveling King Arthur idea was really cool. Also, while Scott and Ernesto were both basically everykids, Emily was wonderful — she’s a supergenius, smart enough that she’s figured out a lot of what’s going on before everyone else, but no one believes her, but also smart enough to understand that and deal with it. And smart enough that when her brother tries to make her feel better for being a social outcast, she doesn’t really want to hear about it. She knows people don’t like her and she doesn’t want to be condescended to about it, frankly. That was a small piece of the story, but a great touch.

Overall, the book was enjoyable. There are a lot of good gags and Rex’s tone is funny and entertaining. But when I got to the end and realized that it’s the first of a trilogy, instead of jazzed for more, my reaction was, “How is it POSSIBLE that there’s more???” So, while it has the same pacing issues as Smekday, it doesn’t deal with anything deeper than the surface story the way Smekday did. thus Cold Cereal gets three cupcakes.

(Note: I was given an advance copy of this book by my personal ARC fairy. It actually goes on sale next week, 2/7/12.)

Josephine is sure she’ll be bored when her parents move her to the tiny town of Awkward Falls, Manitoba, but that’s before she discovers her next-door neighbors: kid genius Thaddeus Hibble, his robot butler, and a zombie cat. But the deranged killer Fetid Stenchley, who killed Thaddeus’s grandfather, has escaped the insane asylum and is on his way to take out Thaddeus as well. Throw in an aging movie star, half a dozen enormous genetic monsters, and some dark secrets about the past, and Awkward Falls is turning out to be not so boring after all.

This is a first novel (though Graves has written “many picture books,” according to the author bio), and it shows. The prose is mediocre; it’s not really bad, but it’s not terribly engaging, either. It’s just…there. The plot structure is kind of a mess – there’s almost no rising action, just chapters and chapters of climax, an awkwardly-placed moment of downtime, and then brief excitement that ends abruptly without actually resolving anything.

Most egregiously, though, Josephine, the ostensible heroine, is a complete cipher of a character. The bland Everykid protagonist can be a problem in kids’ lit, but I usually see it with boys. Josephine’s a shining example of it. We’re told in quick succession that she’s quirky, but also wants to be normal, but also doesn’t want to be normal. She doesn’t appear to have any interests or hobbies, and before she makes her only significant action of the book – going over to the Hibble house and meeting Thaddeus – we’re given a long explanation of how impulsive she is, instead of, you know, being shown her doing impulsive things. Eventually she disappears into the background of the narrative in favor of the more colorful Thaddeus and Stenchley and Felix, the zombie cat. (Really, Felix is the closest thing this book has to a hero.)

But my major problem with the book was that it was…well, gruesome. Aggressively and unrelentingly so. Stenchley is a cannibal, so he spends the book doing his best to literally eat people alive – he bites Josephine so hard he draws blood. His past crimes – including strangling Thaddeus’s grandfather – are described in loving detail. So is the absolutely horrendous “treatment” he receives in the insane asylum, which involves opening up his skull (it’s kept shut with Velcro) and applying extreme heat to his brain. Thaddeus, meanwhile, has a genius for reanimating dead animals, and his work is also described in elaborate, squishy detail. His grandfather, who has been dead ten years, is reanimated halfway through the book, and the rotting zombie stumbles around, decaying in, I probably don’t have to say, extremely gory detail until he is devoured by the mutated monsters he invented.

Look, I’m not clutching my pearls and crying “Think of the children!” This book is intended for sixth graders, who can probably handle it. I just think it’s gross. Gratuitously, excessively gross, with no strength of plot or characterization to balance it out.

Overall, The Orphan of Awkward Falls is simultaneously kind of bland and extraordinarily icky, and so it gets one and a half cupcakes.

Cassandra prides herself on being ready for anything, but she’s not ready for the Symphony of Smells – a strange chest full of vials that once belonged to a magician, and that appears one day at her grandfathers’ antique shop. With her new friend Max-Ernest, Cass investigates the magician’s disappearance – and finds herself battling an ancient society, the Midnight Sun, that is seeking the key to immortality. Soon Cass and Max-Ernest join the benevolent Terces Society along with their new friend Yo-Yoji, but the plots of the Midnight Sun grow ever more diabolical, and the mysteries surrounding our heroes grow ever more complex.

There’s a lot to like about these books. They are a blatant Lemony Snicket ripoff, true, but unlike many copycats, Bosch apes the style well. They’re engaging, the mythology is fresh and interesting, and the main characters are all likable. For the most part, I really enjoy reading these books, and did they not possess a couple of troubling elements, they’d probably run a strong four cupcakes. But those elements are so problematic that they overshadow the basically decent core of the books:

1. There are supporting characters in the series, most prominent in the second book, If You’re Reading This, It’s Too Late, called the Skelton Sisters. They’re a pair of twins, Romi and Montana, who are actress-singers with a huge media empire. They are most directly a parody of the Olsen twins (which is weird enough on its own, because the target audience for this books is not old enough to remember the Olsen twins at their tweeny peak), but more generally a parody of tween girl culture and marketing, with a nod towards Hannah Montana.

Just on the face of it, that’s problematic because Bosch is mocking things targeted at tween girls, and all the tween girls who like those things, and that’s half of his audience, so I’m fairly uncomfortable with the Skelton Sisters to begin with. But the bigger problem is the issue of food. The Skeltons are members of the semi-immortal Midnight Sun and thus don’t need to eat – and don’t eat, thus making themselves so skinny that they are described as grotesques. However, they’re obsessed with food and at one point force a 12-year-old girl to eat a cupcake so that they can watch (after first trying to build up her resistance by telling her she’s a fat pig).

So, first of all, issues of eating disorders and food consumption are extremely complicated, especially for women. In a culture where girls are told they must be thin at all costs, the problem is with the culture and not the girls. So maybe, just maybe, we shouldn’t be mocking people struggling with eating disorders? Eating disorders aren’t fun or funny. People don’t have them for kicks. They are serious medical issues. And since there are plenty of fat jokes in these books too, maybe these conflicting, poisonous messages shouldn’t be fed to the 10-year-olds who are going to be reading these books? “You must be thin without trying to be thin, or you’re a bad person,” is a pretty shitty moral for a kids’ book.

But more specifically, the Skelton Sisters are a very, very obvious parody of the Olsen twins. And Mary Kate Olsen’s eating disorder is public knowledge. So Bosch isn’t just making fun of eating disorders generally, he’s publicly making fun of one particular real life human being with an eating disorder.

And I don’t care if the kids today don’t know about Mary Kate’s medical issues or if Bosch didn’t really think through what he was saying. It’s reprehensible.

2. This Book Is Not Good for You features a little girl named Simone who is stolen from her family on the Ivory Coast and brought to America, where she’s kept in a cage and forced to taste chocolate. The climax of the book takes place at a cacao plantation, where the villains force presumably stolen African or African-American children to dig through monkey feces in order to find cacao beans that have been digested by the monkeys. At one point, the Skelton Sisters grab one of the little boys and try to take him home, because they’re very good with pets. Later, Cass discovers a sculpture of that same little boy.

Now, I’m aware that all of these atrocities are committed by the villains. The book does not condone any of these actions.

It does, however, make light of them.

Simone’s abduction is impossible to separate from its historical context, where African children were taken from their families and forced to labor for Americans. And the plantation is impossible to separate from its current context, where such things actually happen. Bosch even mentions the concept of “blood chocolate” (chocolate made with slave labor), but in a flippant way that completely dismisses and trivializes the issue.

Look, some things just aren’t funny. And joking about the very real, current issue of slave labor normalizes it. It turns an atrocity (abducted children being forced to dig through feces) into a punchline (they throw it at the bad guys! ha ha, poop is funny!). The scene where Cass happens upon the chocolate sculpture, an image that perfectly literalizes the commodification and consumption of third world children, made me sick to my stomach in a way that I doubt was Bosch’s intent.

Again, I’m aware that Bosch isn’t endorsing slave labor, the blood chocolate trade, or stealing children. But the total disregard for the seriousness of the issue and the insensitivity of making characters like Simone minor plot points to add (no pun intended) color to the narrative of his white heroes is appalling.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this review, The Secret Series is, for the most part, enjoyable. The characters are likable, the prose is funny, and the story is strong. But the problematic treatment of eating disorders and child slavery bring the grade way down. The Name of This Book Is Secret gets four cupcakes, while If You’re Reading This, It’s Too Late and This Book Is Not Good for You get two cupcakes each, bringing the series average down to two and a half cupcakes. I’ll probably finish reading the series, but I’ll be doing it through the library and not spending money on the rest of the books.

Having saved the monastery of Vbngoom from certain destruction, all Lily, Katie, and Jasper want to do is head home. But the despotic government of Delaware is none too eager to let these troublesome children past the state borders, and the Ministry of Silence has eyes everywhere. With the help of the monks of Vbngoom, our heroes desperately struggle towards the New Jersey border, but there’s a spy among their party…

Aside from my recent conflicted screed on Immortal Beloved, I feel like I’ve had a lot of really short reviews lately that have just said “This book is so great! You should read it!” Unfortunately, here comes another one:

Agent Q, or the Smell of Danger! is so great! You should read it!

Seriously, that’s really all I have to say. I’ve talked about this weird little series before at length (it seems to have been firmly branded as “Pals in Peril” now, as the first two books have been re-released under that banner); it’s goofy and gleefully metatextual and kind of melancholy in places, and I really love it a lot. This particular volume is another fast-paced, silly adventure that made me laugh out loud in multiple places, and as such is a worthy addition to the series. I’m already chomping at the bit to read the next one, not just because I love these books, but because Anderson appears to be stringing together a more continuous narrative, and I want to find out what happens next.

Agent Q wasn’t perfect – Anderson has set up a love triangle, and while it’s very low-key (these kids are in middle school, after all) and the characters aren’t behaving like jerks about it, I really despise love triangles. And this book failed to tug on the heartstrings the way The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen and Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware did. But it’s still really, really fun.

Agent Q, or the Smell of Danger! (I love writing out that title) gets four and a half cupcakes. These books aren’t for everyone, but they are definitely for me, and I can’t wait for the next one.

Finbar Frame is pale, skinny, broody, and allergic to the sun – but it’s not until a vampire-novel-obsessed girl on the train mistakes him for a vampire that he decides to become one. Or at least pretend to become one. After all, girls dig vampires, right? But when his masquerade gets underway, sorting out who he really likes, who really likes him, and why – not to mention figuring out who he really is – gets a little more complicated.

Okay, this book isn’t technically fantasy, but I’m reviewing it here because it plays on the most popular trend in YA fantasy right now. (And because I haven’t read anything else remotely applicable recently and I need a blog post. Shh.)

When my friend gave me this ARC, I was more than a little leery. Now, I don’t particularly care for vampires in general, am waiting impatiently for the current vampire trend to be over, and despise Twilight with all of my soul. But at the same time, these are female fantasies written for teenage girls by women (for the most part), and when I looked at Bloodthirsty, I saw a man trying to make money off of teenage girls by making fun of that fantasy. “Hey, girls! That thing you like is dumb! Give me money.”

And yes, that is part of what’s going on in this book, but that aspect wound up not bothering me as much as I thought it would. Partially this is because it turns out Flynn Meaney is a woman – whoops, initial preconceptions! But mostly this is because the vampire parody is…rather defanged, if you’ll pardon the expression. While she tears into romance novels (which pissed me off, because guess what? I read those too, and there are excellent ones out there) she mostly just references Twilight, True Blood, and the like, rather than mocking them. So it’s mercenary, but it’s not necessarily any more mercenary than a straightforward book about vampires would be – it’s just cashing in on a trend.

I was bothered more as I read by the Nice Guy issue. Finbar repeatedly describes himself as nice and sensitive and blames the fact that he doesn’t get girls on these characteristics. Well, fine, except he doesn’t actually behave in a nice fashion. When he says “nice,” what he really means is “tries to hard and comes off creepy,” like when he has a disastrous first meeting with a girl he knows on the internet. She asks him to meet at a coffee shop. He gives her the address of an expensive French restaurant instead and brings a present, turning a casual meet-up into a formal date and blindsiding her. I don’t blame her for no longer wanting to have anything to do with him, but all he can think about is how much money he spent and how horrible she is for not appreciating it. Um, no, dude, you’re creepy.

He also spends a lot of time comparing himself to his twin brother Luke, who is handsome and athletic and popular, and blaming the fact that he’s not as popular on his skinniness and intelligence – but Luke is generous, cheerful, and selfless, while Finbar spends an awful lot of time taking potshots at his brother’s learning disability in his head. Yes. That’s very nice.

Shockingly, Finbar eventually actually kind of realizes he’s not always nice and thoughtful. He’s spent the book in pursuit of the beautiful, cool Kate, while palling around with the geeky Jenny, who obviously has an enormous crush on him. Finbar doesn’t twig to this until the end of the book, though, at which point he realizes how obvious it was – and that if he was really the thoughtful, caring person he always believed himself to be, he would have noticed. It’s actually kind of an amazing revelation, given how incredibly common Finbar’s character type is and how rarely they realize that they’re actually self-involved, whiny jerks. So kudos to Meaney for that.

So the “cashing in on a female fantasy” issue wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected, and the Nice Guy issue was actually dealt with a little. And yet the book infuriated me. Why?

Well, remember that beautiful, cool Kate? She tells Finbar she transferred to their school because she wanted better AP classes. show

On top of the appalling, misogynistic slut-shaming, there are also a handful of casual transphobic jokes for no reason, and a couple of lines make light of sexual harassment and domestic abuse. Because these things are all hilarious, you see. It all fits in with the prose of the book, which is 20% legitimately funny, 80% trying too hard. Example: at a fantasy convention, a guy is described as wearing a mask with devil horns “the color of foreskin.” I don’t know what that means, but I do know Meaney is trying way too hard to be shocking there.

There were nuggets of good in there – Finbar’s semi-realization of his own jerkiness, and a handful of good jokes. But that doesn’t overcome an obnoxious narrator and the infuriating resolution of the romance, and that’s why Bloodthirsty gets two cupcakes.

Jaime Reyes was an ordinary kid, until a piece of advanced alien tech shaped like a scarab attached itself to his spine, giving him superpowers, and the Justice League dragged him into space to fight an evil satellite. Now he’s back in El Paso, trying to put his life back together after being missing for a year – and trying to learn how to control the scarab in his back, which wants to turn him into a killing machine. Oh, and the scarab’s creators, the Reach, have arrived on Earth, and Jaime’s the only one who knows they’re here to take over. Can the new Blue Beetle stop an alien invasion, protect his family and his city, and survive a legacy that’s already killed both his predecessors?

In the interest of full disclosure, I should admit my bias here: Ted Kord, the Blue Beetle before Jaime and who Jaime spends much of the series fanboying, is not just one of my all-time favorite superheroes, but one of my all-time favorite fictional characters, full-stop. So is his best friend, Booster Gold, who makes a heroic appearance towards the end, and Guy Gardner, the Green Lantern who makes regular appearances in the book, is way up there. And Ted, Booster, and Guy all met in the pages of Justice League International, one of my very favorite comics of all time, and one which this series makes deliberate allusions to. And Supergirl, my absolute favorite superhero, makes a cameo, and I’m awfully fond of Dan Garrett, the first Blue Beetle, and…look, this comic has a lot of things I adore in it before you even get into the actual subject matter. I’m predisposed to love it.

That said, even if you’re not me, it’s pretty darn good.

(A side note: Ongoing superhero comics, particularly those by DC and Marvel, tend to presuppose a certain familiarity with up to 70-plus years of backstory. Blue Beetle is better than most in that regard, but there are certainly moments that are caught up in the history of the Blue Beetle legacy, or characters the previous Blue Beetle was friends with, or what was going on in the rest of the DC Universe at the time. If you pick up these books based on this review and are confused, feel free to email me; I can talk for hours on end about Blue Beetle. Just ask my long-suffering co-blogger, who after years of friendship with me can tell you where Ted Kord grew up (Chicago), his favorite book (The Brothers Karamazov), and what kind of underwear he wears (boxers).)

Blue Beetle is both hilarious and exciting, but the real strength of the book is the characters. This, of course, starts with Jaime, who is endlessly lovable. He’s certainly a teenage boy, awkward and impatient and goofy, but he’s such a good boy; he’s brave and smart and responsible and he doesn’t want to hurt anyone and he loves his parents and his friends and his little sister and he makes people better just by being around them. His dream is to become a dentist so that he can pay off his parents’ mortgage. And yet he never comes off like a too-perfect Gary Stu; he’s a believable, funny, kind of dorky, unbelievably sweet kid, in over his head but trying his best.

It’s very clear that this is in large part because of how he was raised. Jaime’s parents are fully realized characters in their own right, and wonderful. They expect obedience and respect from their son, but they also trust him – there’s a great scene where they lay down the ground rules for crimefighting at night (he doesn’t have to ask permission if there’s a natural disaster, but he does have to call). (Incidentally, the fact that Jaime’s family and friends all know his secret identity is extremely rare in comics, and very refreshing – rather than constantly lying to his loved ones, Jaime just trusts them, right away.) They believe in peace and the sacredness of human life, and talk to Jaime about forgiveness and turning the other cheek, but Bianca can back down a Green Lantern (one of the most powerful superheroes in the cosmos) like a naughty child, and Alberto will fearlessly face off against a mob boss who dares bring guns onto his property. The strength of Jaime’s upbringing is encapsulated in one wonderful panel: when a defeated supervillain asks why Jaime doesn’t just kill him, Jaime simply says “That’s not how my mother raised me.” Darn straight.

Milagro, Jaime’s much younger sister, is great, too – whiny and plucky and believable. One particularly sweet moment between her and Jaime led to me bursting into tears on the subway (which happened three times – between that and all the giggling, I must have looked like a lunatic). And Jaime’s best friends, Brenda and Paco, are pretty much everything I love wrapped up in a bow – Brenda is a smart, overachieving, determined and independent redhead who can flip a guy twice her size to the ground, and Paco is a big, lovably smug goofball who acts like an idiotic BMOC but is actually extremely smart and loyal. She fights aliens! He saves babies! Maybe they’re in love maybe? Shh, don’t tell them.

And the story! The series is brilliantly-plotted and paced; the second half of End Game had me on the edge of my seat. (It should be noted that the series continued after this for about ten more issues, but I haven’t read those yet.) The gradual development of the scarab is beautifully done, and the climatic battle, with all of Jaime’s allies coming together, is one of those moments that makes the reader want to stand up and cheer (the one crazy thing I actually did manage to avoid doing on the subway).

I also loved the art, which goes through quite a few artists but always has a modern, kinetic, urban feel that fits both Jaime’s character and his powers very well. It’s also refreshing that none of women are drawn in nonsensically skimpy outfits, or contorting their bodies into uncomfortable, “sexy” poses; though the teenage girls have a tendency to wear belly shirts, it comes off as oddly dated fashion more than creepy objectification.

Oh, and did I mention that the cast is almost entirely Hispanic and the setting within a Latino community is handled with taste, careful thought, and understanding? The characters never come off as stereotypes, the bilingual factor is handled well (one issue is almost entirely in Spanish, and it’s wonderful (don’t worry, there’s a translation in the back)), and – there’s that word again – it’s just refreshing to see a non-white hero leading a non-white cast in a story that’s about the character and not his race, since mainstream comics don’t often handle that well. (Jaime’s interracial relationship with his Asian – and incredibly competent and funny magical detective – girlfriend Traci is also well done and very cute.)

The only bad thing I can say about this series is that it was sadly canceled after 36 issues (the four books reviewed here cover the first 26 of those). (Don’t worry, Jaime’s still appearing in the sadly-dreadful Teen Titans and will be featured in the upcoming Generation Lost, and is a major player on the animated Batman: The Brave and the Bold, so the character, at least, isn’t going anywhere for a while.) Since I can’t fault the series for heartbreaking decisions made by the company, Blue Beetle gets the coveted five cupcakes, and a double thumbs-up from longtime Blue Beetle pal Booster Gold:

It doesn’t get much better than that, I tell you what.

When Jasper Dash, Boy Technonaut, receives a telepathic cry for help from a dear friend at the secret monastery of Vbngoom, he and his best friends Katie and Lily journey to the mountains of Delaware to offer their assistance. But Delaware is a strange and dangerous place, and they must make their way past dinosaurs, tourists, spies, mountain squid, riddles, and a creepy staring-contest team to reach Vbngoom – and there’s something even worse waiting for them at their destination.

A few years ago I read the first (and apparently only) two books in the M. T. Anderson’s Thrilling Tales series: Whales on Stilts and The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen. The first was just kind of a brisk, silly story; the second one, while equally silly, broke my heart in all the right places. The protagonist of both books is Lily Gefelty, a smart and somewhat shy but basically average tween. However, her two best friends are each the stars of their own (fictional) book series. Katie Mulligan is the lead in the Horrow Hollow series, a sort of combination of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Goosebumps and is constantly fighting werewolves and witches and demonic mold and such. Jasper Dash is the star of Jasper Dash, Boy Technonaut, a pulp science fiction series from the 1930s and 40s, and is constantly inventing (often unhelpful) gadgets and saying things like “Dash it all, chums.” Lily longs to be adventurous and exciting like her friends, but the Thrilling Tales series showcases her own heroic traits while brilliantly exploring what it means to be a beloved fictional character.

While I loved Jasper in the Thrilling Tales books, I was worried that Anderson was moving away from spotlighting Lily, but I needn’t have worried – the book is split fairly evenly between Lily’s worries about being inferior to her friends, Katie’s full throttle sass, and Jasper’s struggles to live in a modern world while upholding justice and fair play. It’s hilarious and exciting and, yes, I got a bit misty at the end. Curse you, Anderson!

Now, these books aren’t for everyone. I can tell you right off the bat that my co-blogger Becky probably wouldn’t enjoy the aggressively whimsical tone of the prose; my roommate read the first two and didn’t enjoy the silliness (although she loved Anderson’s completely different Feed and Octavian Nothing); my friend Mackenzie probably wouldn’t like all the metatextual navel-gazing. But I love silliness and meta, and I’m a big fan of the whimsical tone when it’s done well. If you enjoy the flippancy of A Series of Unfortunate Events, you’ll probably enjoy Jasper Dash.

There’s honestly not much to say about this book beyond praise. Lily and Katie are both wonderfully strong in their own ways, and Katie’s romantic tribulations were handled very touchingly and age-appropriately. Jasper is hilarious and endearing, and the friendship between the main three is rock-solid, moving, and blessedly free of any whiff of romance. The plot, despite the silliness, was engaging, and the excitement exciting, and the subtle digs at racist tourists were well done.

Obviously, Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware gets five cupcakes. More, please, Mr. Anderson?

Title: Bite Me!
Author: Dylan Meconis
Genre: Humor/Horror/Graphic Novel
Pages: 168
Summary: A ragtag group of vampires attempt to rescue their coven during the height of the French Revolution.
Thoughts: I’ve read Bite Me! in its online form before, but I always prefer having a copy to hold in my hands, so I bought a copy at MoCCA. The story is hilarious; the art, drawn over several years starts out lively and fun and becomes lively and fun and fantastic as Meconis comes into her own. Good times.

Four cupcakes

Title: Alex and the Ironic Gentleman
Author: Adrienne Kress
Genre: Humor
Pages: 308

Summary: Alex Morningside loves her sixth grade teacher, Mr. Underwood, so much that when he is kidnapped by the bloodthirsty crew of the pirate ship Ironic Gentleman, she sets off to rescue him. There are plenty of adventures on the way.

Thoughts: Basically, what Jess said when she reviewed it. An enjoyable read, and a bit reminiscent of Lewis Carroll, which I appreciated. I was glad when the whimsical narrative settled down a bit, and laid of the wacky asides and Significant Capitals, because those aren’t devices I’m especially fond of. And I’m baffled as to what time period the book takes place in, as it’s got modern bits (movies, cars, etc) but much of it reads like Ye Olde Fashioned pirate stories. (Though that’s not a very important detail to be concerned about.) The cast of the book was pretty fantastic, the little old ladies were truly menacing and creepy, the climax and resolution were great, and I will probably pick up the sequel when it’s out in paperback.

My favorite bit was the one with the Extremely Ginormous Octopus.

Four cupcakes.

Life is good for Alexandra Morningside – she loves living with her uncle in the flat above his doorknob shop, and she loves her sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Underwood, a stickler for grammar and an expert on fencing. But Mr. Underwood is the descendent of one of history’s most feared pirates and the inheritor of the Wigpowder treasure, and the dreaded pirate Captain Steele will stop at nothing to claim the treasure before Mr. Underwood can. It’s up to Alex to rescue her kidnapped teacher and find the treasure – if she can survive the increasingly more bizarre hurdles along the way.

In my last review, I indulged myself with a little rant about whimsy, wherein I stated that an author had to decide before writing a book whether or not the book was going to contain said whimsy, and if so, in what quantity. Adrienne Kress clearly asked herself those questions, and her answers were just as clearly “indubitably” and “out the wazoo.” And, delightfully, it works! Alex has a lot of the flavor of Louis Sachar’s wonderful Wayside School books, sprinkled with a fair bit of Dahl and Snicket, all of which are very whimsical ingredients indeed. However, Alex manages to retain enough originality in its narrative voice to keep it firmly in the “inspired by” category rather than the “shamelessly derivative of.”

It does, however, take some getting used to. The plot structure in particular is a bit confusing: Alex meanders through several set pieces, most of which contribute in only the most minor of ways to her ultimate goal, and are not clear allegories, which might offer another explanation for their presence. For example, one of the first things Alex does is board a train to Port Cullis (oh yes, there are puns in this book), but the train turns out to be the setting for an endless succession of madcap dinner parties that serve as an elaborate front for a minor villain’s plot to suck out people’s souls. Alex manages to shut down the operation and escape, but aside from her gaining a new companion – a delightfully prickly cat named Giggles – nothing is really added to the plot. There are several adventures like this, each almost entirely superfluous, yet after a couple of them I settled into the rhythm of the book. I can’t decide if Kress had a few random ideas (a soul-sucking villain at a dinner party on a train, a giant octopus resentful of his replacement in films by CGI monsters, a hotel manager demanding that his employees take “mental dictation”) that couldn’t be wrangled into full books on their own, so she crammed them into Alex’s story as best she could, or if she’s brilliantly flouting the idea of a streamlined plot structure for her own reasons. Either way, the various set pieces are quite enjoyable, so I’m not complaining.

Like Rebecca with the Gregor books, I’m a little at a loss to talk about this one aside from just saying “And also, this was awesome!” The various wacky characters were all really fun, and the book is full of the kind of passages you want to read aloud to everyone around you, much to their annoyance, like this one from the introduction to one of the minor villains:

Now you shouldn’t feel sorry for him because he had never had eyes and had been born that way. And if you have never had something you can’t really miss it. Once upon a time, he had had his nose, however, and he missed that terribly. Even more than he missed his ears, and definitely more than he missed his hands. Again, though, you shouldn’t feel bad for him because though this all sounds unpleasant, and it really is, he could still hear things through the holes in the sides of his head, and he could still grab things with the elegant wooden hands designed to replace the originals.

[…]

Now if you had seen this man in this way, you might have fainted from fright. And you may wonder exactly how he would go about in the daytime with everyone fainting around him. “How,” for example, “would he be able to buy a hot chocolate?” you may ask. Well, he had solved this problem by wrapping a long, black silk cloth around his head just above his mouth (which was entirely intact, by the way) and tying it neatly at the back of his head. The silk meant he could still hear through the material, and it also felt very nice against the skin. He wore a matching black silk shirt tied with strings at the front and soft, dark-red leather trousers with black boots. And when he walked down the street, instead of everyone fainting, they would whisper, “What a dashing young man that dashing young man is. I wonder why he wears a scarf around his face?”

See? Delightful!

It’s certainly a prose style you have to get used to. I have a pretty high tolerance for whimsy, and even I raised an eyebrow at all the Significant Capitals sprinkled throughout the book. There’s also a fairly high death count for a kids’ book, and I’m not sure all of those deaths are given quite the attention they deserve for the effect I think they’d have on a ten-and-a-half-year-old girl’s psyche. And it sort of defies categorization, as you can see by the tags, although that’s more of a problem for me than most reviewers. All in all, though, these are relatively minor quibbles.

Alex and the Ironic Gentleman gets the rare-but-oh-so-coveted five cupcakes. I’m still not quite sure whether it’s brilliant or simply so fun I can’t tell the difference, but either way it works. More, please!