books boys like

Our last day in London, we went up in the London Eye, a/k/a Millennium Wheel. My first exposure to this gigantic observation wheel was in the 2005 come-back episode of Doctor Who, at which point I had no idea it was anything other than your run-of-the-mill Ferris wheel.

The original Ferris wheel, built for the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, had a 264-foot diameter wheel and 36 cars, each of which could carry a whopping 60 people. Today’s wheel at Navy Pier has a paltry 150-foot diameter. It practically looks like a miniature.

In contrast, the London Eye—built for the turn of the millennium, originally intended to stand five years, but so popular it will remain indefinitely—has a 443-foot diameter. It is freaking huge. Around the wheel are 32 sealed pods, transparent except for the floor, each of which accommodates 25 passengers. It rotates so slowly and smoothly—30 minutes per rotation—that from a distance it appears not to be moving at all. It’s right next to the Thames, across from Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, but you can see for miles in all directions.

This is all to say that when I returned to the library after my vacation and found The London Eye Mystery, by Siobhan Dowd, on our cart of new books, I was wicked excited.

Aunt Gloria and Cousin Salim are visiting Ted’s family in London for a few days before moving to America. Ted and his older sister, Kat, are expected to entertain Salim. Unfortunately, their very first activity is a bust. Salim gets into a London Eye capsule, and Ted and Kat watch it make its majestic way around. But half an hour later, when the capsule opens, Salim is nowhere in sight.

How could Salim have vanished from a sealed, transparent capsule with so many witnesses? And where has he gone? The police are on the case, but Ted and Kat have a few theories of their own. Will they find Salim before it’s too late?

My usual complaint about middle grade mysteries is that their solutions are either totally obvious from the beginning (at least, to an adult reader) or are completely obscure and fly in from out of nowhere. Where those mysteries fail, The London Eye succeeds, allowing readers to gradually pick up clues throughout the book and formulate reasonable hypotheses along with the characters. Even if readers don’t guess the solution before Ted reveals it, they’ll recognize the pieces were in place all along.

Dowd accomplishes this feat by keeping very close to Ted, driving the novel at least as much by character as by plot. Ted is quirky but likeable, a high-functioning Aspie with a “brain that runs on a different operating system from other people’s.” Like many people with autism spectrum conditions, he has a great eye for detail, a tendency to take everything literally, and difficulty reading people’s emotions. He’s also obsessed with the weather, well-meaning, and a sweet contrast to his prickly (but grudgingly likeable) sister Kat. Throughout the course of the story, Ted exchanges some of his innocence for worldliness, goes out of his comfort zone for Salim’s sake, and makes new friends.

One of my favorite, albeit serious, parts of the book is when Ted’s father goes to the morgue to see if a boy pulled from the river is Salim. Ted is waiting at home. “Something terrible happened in those fifty-four minutes. No amount of making up shipping forecasts could stop me from thinking about it. Death. I realized it was real.” Ted lapses into deep thoughts about his mortality, infinity, and God. I’ll bet you a dollar Frank and Joe Hardy never have.

The London Eye Mystery, being a British mystery with an autistic main character, invites obvious comparisons with Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. In spite of the surface similarities, it’s no rip-off but a solid work in its own right, with an upper middle grade/early YA rather than YA/adult audience. Recommended for boys and girls in middle school and up.

Bestsellers aside, one of the most popular middle grade series at my library is Blue Balliett’s trilogy consisting of Chasing Vermeer, The Wright 3, and, most recently, The Calder Game. I hesitate to call it a mystery series, for the reasons J. L. Bell and friends state, though it does share some of the appeal of mysteries—i.e., mysterious things happen. They’ve also got an appealing intellectual slant, with their focus on great works of art; reading them, you feel like you’re painlessly learning something really cool. And while I’m not a huge fan myself, there’s no denying: the books are darn popular with the kids.

So, when they’ve gobbled those up and are looking for more, hand them Ghost Letters, by Stephen Alter (Bloomsbury, 2008).

Seventh grader Gil Mendelson-Finch has just been expelled from McCauley Prep and sent to live with his poet grandfather, Prescott, in the ancestral Finch home. Initially prepared to be bored out of his skull, Gil learns that Hornswoggle Bay (somewhere in New England) is anything but dull.

As a joke, Gil writes a message, puts it in the odd, blue bottle that washes up on shore, and throws it back into the ocean—only to have it return the next day with a letter from a boy named Sikander, who lived in the Indian province of Ajeebgarh in 1896! And that’s just the first in a series of strange occurrences. There’s also a putrid-smelling skeleton’s hand Gil and his new friend Nargis find in an abandoned mailbox, a ghostly postman who walks the town, and a genie who’s been sleeping in an envelope for more than a century!

Every odd event brings Gil and Nargis closer to understanding the connection between Hornswoggle Bay and Ajeebgarh—a connection nearly 200 years old and rooted in the tragedy of a lost love letter. Meanwhile, Gil receives increasingly panicked letters from Sikander, whose province will soon be attacked by the British Army—all because of a postage stamp!

If you’re looking for a linear plot, you won’t find it here. The omniscient narrator jumps between perspectives and time periods on a chapter-by-chapter basis. Still, it’s a fun ride. Alter works many mail-related tropes—dogs who chase mailmen, carrier pigeons, secret wartime codes—into the plot (though a chain letter disappointingly went nowhere). There’s also a recurring poetry motif that, while not essential to the plot, does not feel out of place either.

Readers (e.g., I) may be disappointed that there is no such place as Ajeebgarh, nor was there ever a Postage Stamp War in India, but they will catch the vibe of British Colonialism and perhaps read into real-life postage stamp wars in other parts of the world throughout history. My other disappointment was the rather Deus Ex Machina ending—but kids who have enjoyed Blue Balliett’s books, with their similarly fantastical and serendipitous conclusions, will probably not be bothered.

All in all, an entertaining read for grades 4 and up.

Yesterday I fielded a phone call from a Concerned Mother. Concerned Mothers often concern me because even though they ostensibly want reassurance, they won’t always accept it. Which leaves me wondering why they asked my opinion in the first place.

This particular Concerned Mother was calling with good news: her sixth grade son, who’d never enjoyed reading, became utterly captivated by Darren Shan’s Cirque du Freak vampire series and read all twelve. Now he wants to read Shan’s Demonata series. Mom has done her research and knows the series promises violence and gore. What she wants to know is should she be worried about her son’s new fixation on horror stories?

So I told her how when my brother was in middle school, he devoured nothing but Stephen King, Peter Straub, Robin Cook. In eighth grade, for language arts he wrote a novella called Scarlet Raid, a horror story about the return of Black Plague. And now, more than twenty years later, he is – to the best of my knowledge – a sane and law-abiding citizen whose literary taste runs toward Russell Banks and Paul Thereux.

In other words, her son – “a very nice, quiet kid” – is perfectly normal. “Just so long as he isn’t painting pentagrams on his bedroom floor,” I told her.

Fortunately, this Concerned Mother seemed very willing to accept my reassurance that horror is a popular genre with middle school boys. She even wrote down my suggestion of Anthony Horowitz’s Gatekeepers series as another possibility for her son.

The conversation prompted me to start revising our department’s list of recommended horror books. This is not a genre in which I read widely. I’m a chicken with a weak stomach for gore.

When I was twelve, I stayed at home while my parents drove my brother to college in another state for his freshman year. Already missing him, I raided his bedroom. I spent all day, alone in the house, reading his old copy of Cujo – not one of my brighter moments. That night I spent the night at a friend’s house and dreamed her cat had been bitten by evil vampire bats. I woke up clawing dream-Leo off my throat.

(I’ve read other Stephen King books since. My favorites are his non-gory paranormal books, particularly Carrie and The Green Mile – except for one chapter I always skip over.)

Anyway, I was surprised that in the past couple years I actually have read a number of scary books – scary for an eleven-year-old, anyway. Some of my favored series to suggest to middle school boys:

• Neal Shusterman’s Dark Fusion series
• Joseph Delaney’s Last Apprentice series
• Anthony Horowitz’s Gatekeepers series
• Paul Zindel’s various later books like The Doom Stone and Loch

We still carry R.L. Stine’s Fear Street series, but my impression is that these are not nearly as popular as they once were. I also suspect that their residual popularity lies in a female readership, but I really have no scientific basis for that – it’s just a hunch I’ve formed based on the shimmery book covers. Anyone know? Anyone have other suggestions of horror for boys who aren’t quite ready for Stephen King?

Reaching waaay back in time (all the way to 2007!), there the YA YA YAs initiated a discussion about social class in young adult literature. Whether/where poverty is depicted in YA lit, whether/how it's tied up with race, etc. Figures that in the month since, I've read several good books that deal with class differences.

1. Mortal Engines, by Philip Reeve.

   I'd tried reading Larklight and just couldn't get into it, so I was intensely surprised and pleased when I discovered I LOVED Mortal Engines!

   It's a steampunk adventure set on a far-future Earth where wheeled cities roam the continents devouring smaller towns. The gentry live on the top tier, slaves operate the engines in the bowels, and everyone else falls somewhere in between.

   Our story’s heroes are Tom, an apprentice historian (middle-class), Katherine, the Head Historian’s daughter (nouveau riche), and Hester, a would-be assassin (outsider/untouchable). All become embroiled in London’s sinister plot to dominate Eurasia. It’s a page-turner with three glorious sequels. Oh, and did I mention the pirates?

   To me, it read most like Kenneth Oppel’s Airborn and Skybreaker, but it will find fans among most literary fantasy/science fiction (Philip Pullman, Garth Nix, Diana Wynne Jones, etc.) lovers, junior high and up.

2. Taken, by Edward Bloor.

   In this near-future suspense, 13-year-old Charity has been kidnapped, presumably for the high ransom her parents will pay. Kidnapping children from wealthy families has become an industry in this America of intense social stratification (yes, even more intense than today). Fully expecting to be returned home safely within the typical 24 hours, Charity is forced to reevaluate everything she knows about her family when the kidnappers stray from protocol.

   In this book, race and class are definitely intertwined. In Charity’s South Florida community, the people living in gated communities seem to be mostly white, while the new servant class is largely Hispanic, African-American, or otherwise “of color.” Taken sort of hits the reader over the head with its social commentary, but it’s still one of the better written and thoughtful suspense novels for the junior high age group available. It should appeal to both boys and girls.

3. Another Kind of Cowboy, by Susan Juby.

   And now for something completely different. This contemporary YA book explores teenagers Alex and Clio’s coming of age. Alex is a reserved, closeted gay teen who lives for horses. Clio is a spoiled and naive debutante at the local equestrienne school. Alex’s lack of money causes problems in his quest to pursue the dressage method of riding, while Clio has more money than she knows what to do with. In spite of their glaring differences, they somehow become good friends.

   I really enjoyed the book’s realism and dry humor. It reaches a very satisfying conclusion, and avoids the obvious solution to Alex’s financial problems by having Clio bail him out.

This week saw the launch of a new gender-related book blog, Boys Blogging Books!

So far, reviewers include 14-year-old Kurtis and 11-year-old Michael. They kicked off with a review of Thirteen Reasons Why and an interview with the author, Jay Asher. I look forward to reading more!

Via Disco Mermaids