The Mysterious Benedict Society, by Trenton Lee Stewart

This is the kind of book that I would have read six times a week when I was younger. I have always been big into puzzles and riddles and whatnot, and the main character in this book (and series, apparently) has a keen eye for solving them, too. In fact, he's perhaps a little better at it than I am — or perhaps he's just a better guesser. Which is a good skill to have.

And especially in this story, as the main character, Reynie Muldoon, finds himself drafted into the titular society, whose aim is to bring together gifted and brave young souls to save the world. Silly world, always getting in trouble! This time, the world is facing some vague Emergency (isn't it always?) and the Mr. Benedict after whom the society is named has figured out that there are unsettling messages being transmitted into adult brains by children (because adults won't notice children talking to them, ha!). The exact point of the messages is unknown, but Benedict decides to send in his best and brightest on an undercover mission to the institute from which the messages are coming.

It's pretty exciting, is what I'm saying. Lots of danger and intrigue and lateral thinking. Reynie is the puzzle-solver of the group, while a kid called Sticky (because facts stick to him) has practically an eidetic memory, the Great Kate Weather Machine is a brute force to be reckoned with, and Constance Contraire is just stubborn, which isn't quite as useful.

At first, I wasn't quite getting into the story because it's all rather fantastic — I expected any minute to find out that everything was just some giant ploy to gain something or other. But no, this is a children's book and therefore quite attached to its ridiculousness. So just go with it. Once I did, I found myself enjoying it a heck of a lot more, because even the predictable bits of the story are infused with a self-aware humor that cuts a lot of the annoyance I had with The Sea of Trolls.

I will definitely be picking up the next book in this series, and then the one after that.

Recommendation: For kid geniuses, wannabe kid geniuses, and kid geniuses at heart.

Rating: 9/10
(A to Z Challenge)

The Sea of Trolls, by Nancy Farmer

Sooooooooooo. This book. I wanted to like it a lot — there's Norse mythology and bards and Beowulf and a titch of magic and adventures and Adventures and seafaring and it's all fairly exciting. I think I just read this at the wrong time.

See, the book I finished right before this was The Amulet of Samarkand, and part of my fangirl gushing over that book was the way that everything was so opposite of what I expected from a fantasy novel and so dark and intriguing. This book? Exactly what you'd expect of a fantasy novel, not dark, not really terribly intriguing. It's a sort of action book, primarily, and I just wasn't mentally prepared for that.

The story is of a kid called Jack, who becomes apprentice to a bard, which in this world is not just a teller of tales but also a bit of a magician, using the tale-telling business to tap into the... I don't remember... crap... Google says Yggdrasil (pronounced eeg-druh-sill), which is right, but there was another name for it. We see how much attention I paid while listening to this book. Sigh. Anyway, the stories have some magic to them that can have varying effects on the listeners. But that's not really the story. The story is that at some point, the bard to whom Jack is apprenticed is attacked and in the ensuing chaos Jack and his sister get kidnapped and taken aboard a slave trading vessel and eventually gets to a Viking village and then he slights the queen but good and then has to go on an epic quest to fix the slight and then spoiler alert he succeeds and goes home.

So there's a lot of stuff happening here, and it's all quite predictable because you can tell it's meant to be a riff on old Norse mythology and whatnot and according to the internet the print book mentions this explicitly at the end, and also mentions that what I felt was a really horrible sort of throw-away joke at the end was actually kind of the point of the book and wow that is neither in the audiobook nor implied by the text itself.

Taken as a sort of epic poem, the book is pretty good, though it drags in parts. I quite enjoyed the Norse setting that I haven't seen too much of elsewhere, and I enjoyed the humor that Farmer puts into her writing. I had some problems with the aforementioned joke, which almost ruined the book for me (I'm not sure if I would have felt different knowing about it in advance), and with the main female character whose role in the story was apparently to be kind of lame and then blossom into a lamer person. Ugh. There are apparently sequels to this book, even though the book itself can stand alone, but I won't be reading them.

Recommendation: For those interested in a bit of Norse mythology and lore and who like an Adventure.

Rating: 6/10
(A to Z Challenge)

The Amulet of Samarkand, by Jonathan Stroud

Dude. Why had I never heard of this series until my former supervisor mentioned it to me? Where has Bartimaeus been all my life???

I know what the problem is, actually — this book came out in 2003, which is pretty well smack-dab in the middle of Harry Potter Mania, and therefore I couldn't possibly have heard of it, what with all of the HP fans living in my house at the time. (No joke, the ratio of people in my family to copies owned between us of one HP book from the series is less than one.)

The Amulet of Samarkand is also about magic, you see, except that it is not at all the same as the magic in the HP world. In this world, magicians are almost wholly a terrible people, swooping into big cities and subjugating those without magic powers and assuming a rather Slytherin air toward pretty much everything. But the irony here is that even though the magicians claim to have all of this magic power, what it really is is that they have the power to summon up demons (daemons? I don't know, I listened to this book) that have the actual magical ability, and then the magicians just enslave them for however long they like to do their bidding. That's a lovely thing, isn't it?

So, the conceit is dark and awful and also awesome (in the strict sense of the word, because seriously, wow), and then Stroud goes and upends my fantasy-reading sensibilities by making everything that happens quite un-fantastic. There is no deus ex here; if it looks like things are going to go badly for the protagonist, they will. If it looks like they're going to go reasonably well, they will. So many times while listening to this book I thought, "Oh, now the author will reveal some great and/or terrible secret that retcons everything," because that is my training, but no, all of the crazy twists and turns I invented were totally ignored, because Stroud is a better writer than I.

Oh, what's the story, you say? Well, basically Our Protagonist, Nathaniel, is a magician's apprentice who aspires to greater heights but effs the eff up when he decides to summon a hilarious demon called Bartimaeus to go steal something for him. The stealing goes awry, and then it turns out that what was stolen is WAY more important than imagined, and then of course the stealee is not pleased.

It's a pretty standard plot. But Stroud's writing and Bartimaeus's awesomeness and the consequences that could actually happen to an actual person are the most important bits. Oh, and the audiobook narrator is fantastic. Highly recommended.

Recommendation: Read this if you like fantasy but want a little more realism with your magic.

Rating: 10/10
(A to Z Challenge)

V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore

...Interesting. That's how I would describe this book. I love the movie version, which I've watched at least once a year (on Guy Fawkes Night, natch) for the past several years, and this year someone reminded me that it was, you know, a graphic novel first, and maybe I should read it? Yes, maybe I should. So I requested it from the library, and it took forever to arrive, and then I renewed it a couple of times, and then finally I says to myself, "Self, you've gotta just read this thing. Go." So I did. It took a while, largely because I started a job in the middle of it and I'm still working out how to read print books (I listen to audiobooks at work) on my new schedule. But I read it and it was interesting.

The story is this: There's a dude, and he's called V, and he dresses like Guy Fawkes, and he blows some stuff up, and you're like, cool. He is blowing stuff up because he lives in a fascist state run by basically Big Brother, with help from a computer, so we've got some good dystopian tropes in there. At some point, he saves a girl called Evey from some police-type people who are going to do terrible things to her, and she sort of becomes his apprentice. Also, the fascist state does not like V and is hunting him down, and slowly learning his backstory (which is kind of nuts) in the process.

The book is actually quite different from the movie — and this necessarily is how I have to approach this review — with more creepiness in V's backstory and seedier government officials, and actually much less blowing stuff up, which is disappointing but understandable for the medium. I quite liked all of the extra things I learned about Larkhill, where V was imprisoned, because it made V make more sense, but much of the stuff I learned about the government officials (they're corrupt! promiscuous! ne'er-do-wells!) was rather tedious. More creepy smiling masked people, please!

All in all, I did like the novel, but it won't top my yearly dose of explodey things any time soon.

Recommendation: Definitely read it if you've seen the movie, or if you generally like dystopia and intrigue in pictorial form.

Rating: 8/10
(A to Z Challenge)

Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, by Mary Roach

Hello again, Mary Roach. You are ever so delightful.

In this book, Roach does indeed tackle the afterlife, starting with a bit of religion and then really focusing on spirits and mediums (media?) for the rest of the book. It's not nearly as titillating as Bonk, but I do know a heck of a lot more about spirit phenomena than I did before!

My favorite part: in the religion section, Roach writes about reincarnation and spends some time with a reincarnation researcher in... India, I think... who finds cases where children are claiming to be remembering past lives and then going to where they live and where they think they used to live to try to fact-check the situation. I had never thought about people doing that — it makes perfect sense, but is almost too easy, yes?

Recommendation: Good for a car trip and for the spooks-enthusiast, but not the most thrilling book you'll read all year.

Rating: 7/10
(A to Z Challenge, What's in a Name Challenge)

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain

The moral of this story: Don't be friends with Tom Sawyer. Just, really. Don't. I haven't even read his book, and maybe I won't. What a crazy person.

I'm not sure how I managed to avoid reading... any Mark Twain at all during my school years. It was never assigned, and I was too busy reading various other things, I guess. And after listening to it now, I can tell you I would never have made it through this book even if it were assigned — straight to SparkNotes I would have gone.

This is largely because of the dialect business, which is hard enough to understand as spoken to you via a lovely audiobook narrator, and which, upon opening up my paperback copy of the book, is a little overwhelming in print. It is also because of the distinct lack of plot, which I am getting more accepting of in my old age but would have bored me to tears in high school.

So I cannot really tell you what this book is about, if you haven't already had the pleasure of reading it yourself, except that there's a kid and he fakes his death and goes off down the Mississippi with a runaway slave. And while he's doing it, some seriously nutty stuff happens.

But I can tell you that I quite appreciated the book, which I felt portrayed Huckleberry Finn as a very realistic kid, even if his circumstances were not realistic at all. He faced tough decisions that he reasoned his way through as best he could, and went against some of his greatest instincts in doing so. I can definitely get behind that.

And of course, there's been that whole thing recently about the use of the word "nigger," which is in fact quite prolific throughout the book. I personally think its use is quite valid, and that "slave" would not have quite the same effect of placing this book solidly in the time period and mindset that Twain is writing about. It's obviously not a word I'd like to bring back into fashion, but you can't deny its existence any more than you can deny the fact that Jim was running away from slavery in the first place.

Recommendation: Totally worth a read if you haven't managed it yet; best if read with a sense of Twain's sarcasm.

Rating: 7/10
(A to Z Challenge, TBR Challenge)

The Willoughbys, by Lois Lowry

Lois Lowry is one of those authors that does whatever she wants, isn't she? The Giver and its first companion book, Gathering Blue, are the only other books of hers that I've read, but I did quite like them (the former moreso than the latter), and so when I was looking for audiobooks and found this one, I thought I'd give it a shot.

Goooooooood call. It's definitely not The Giver, but it is equally spectacular. Firstly, the audiobook narrator is just splendid, and he amused me throughout the book with just the particular way he would say things. Secondly, the writing is just full of that deadpan humor that I like so much, where the characters are saying wildly amusing things without realizing it. Thirdly, there is basically no plot to this book so the noise of my new workplace didn't cause me too much stress in listening.

The book, as you might guess, is about the Willoughby family, who take "dysfunctional" to a whole new level. Not only do the parents and children absolutely not care about each other, they in fact both decide to get rid of the other — the children by sending their parents on an incredibly dangerous vacation sure to orphan them, the parents by going on said vacation, hiring a nanny for the kids, and then putting their house up for sale. There is also a B plot about a baby left on the Willoughbys' doorstep and subsequently left by the Willoughbys on someone else's doorstep that ends in an extended bit about a candy bar. It makes sense... sort of...

What really makes this book wonderful is that it is a self-described and completely shameless play on every children's book ever. Lowry name-drops several books, including The Bobbsey Twins series (for one book where they find a baby on their doorstep) and James and the Giant Peach (for general orphan fun times), and helpfully includes them in a bibliography at the end of the book. There is also a glossary which is nearly as amusing as the book. I may need to obtain this book in print just for those.

Recommendation: For anyone who has ever read a children's book and found it a little trite.

Rating: 9/10
(A to Z Challenge)