Little Brother by Allan Baillie

Title: Little Brother

Author: Allan Baillie

Publisher: Puffin Australia           

Publish date: 1985

ISBN: 978 0 14 330174

YA texts appear to fall into a dichotomous pattern, in my limited sampling. Either they blow me away with lively characters and sparkling and age-appropriate text, or they’re condescending, lacklustre and confused. This book falls into the latter category.

Story: Cambodian kid makes solitary and heroic journey through war-ravaged country to make it to the Thai border and is whisked away to a (more or less) happy ending. I was going to say there’s nothing wrong with the premise, but I did find the white-saviour thump at the end more than annoying, despite some feeble attempts from the author at covering up the evidence. It reads like an account of an unconnected person being told a story and imagining themselves in that position, and turns out that’s exactly what it is. Had the language been better, or slipped into inappropriate vocabulary less often, it might have been more palatable. But it wasn’t. And now it’s a text recommended at schools.

Can’t say I’m inspired to spend any more time on it. Not recommended, one moose hoof up out of five. I can’t think of a reason to give it two.

Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin

Title: Native Tongue

Author: Suzette Haden Elgin

Publisher: Daw Books Inc. , Donald A. Wollheim, publisher

Publish date: 1984          

ISBN: (Appears to have no ISBN, says ‘Daw Collector’s Book No 589’.)

Book extract

‘Then consider this, please: to make something appear, is called magic, is it not? Well… when you look at another person, what do you see? Two arms, two legs, an assortment of parts. Am I right? Now, there is a continuous surface of body, a space that begins with the inside flesh of the fingers and continues over the palm of the hand and up the inner side of the arm to the end of the elbow. Everyone has that surface, in fact, everyone has two of them.

I will name that the “athad” of the person. Imagine the athad, please. See it clearly in your mind – perceive, here are my own two athads, the left one and the right one. And here are both of your athads, very nice ones.

Where there was no athad before, there will always be one now, because you will perceive the athad of every person you look at, as you perceive their nose and their hair. And I have made the athad appear. From now on. It exists.

Magic, you perceive, is not something mysterious, not something for witches and sorcerers… magic is something quite ordinary and simple. It is simply language.’

___________________________________________________________________

I picked this up with great eagerness, as the blurb purported it to be a book about a special language for women, created to articulate female preoccupations. Very interested in gender traits as expressed linguistically, I am.

Alas, there is almost nothing about the language in the book. #Disappointment. In fact, until about two thirds of the way through, the women barely speak. Mostly they don’t make an appearance either. HOWEVER, I nevertheless gleaned some thought-provoking insights regarding linguistic gender traits, though perhaps not what the author was intending to convey. Curious?

So, premise outline. The year is about 250 years into the future, women’s rights have disappeared (some paper has ‘proved’ that females are inferior) and are slaves. Humans are colonizing space and need endless interpreters to deal with the humanoid aliens they’re making their fortune from. The population has fallen into two categories, the ‘Linguists’ (the intelligencia) and the rest. The hoi polloi don’t like the linguists. The linguists live in a state of semi-Amish conditions of austerity and constant work, ostensibly to refute notions of them amassing great wealth at the taxpayer’s expense, but as the ruse is not working, I don’t know why they bother. For supposedly fantastic communicators and manipulators, they have a shit PR department.

As a work of fiction, this is definitely not the best. It starts, literally, in the middle of a council meeting. Yes, that’s as bad as it sounds. Backstory is explained endlessly through dialogue. Characters are ridiculous caricatures, with pretty much all men being bad and all women being good (including the one who goes around murdering people). One other reviewer put it that ‘I get this picture of someone sitting at the typewriter bashing it and yelling “all men are bastards” over and over again’, and tbh I kinda see the drift. Add to this the aching lack of any female input in the first two thirds, a plot structure assembled with all the finesse of a lean-to shelter, and the numerous impossibilities and illogicalities, you end up with something quite deeply unsatisfying.

That’s not to say that the book doesn’t have great exchanges, piercing insights, huge passion. It’s hard to see it go to waste.

However, here are some interesting aspects.

• ·         The male Linguists are described as strangely passive-aggressive in interactions with the non-linguist (males), in a manner that exactly mirrors the attitude of the linguist females when confronted with the linguist males. The book appears to be unaware of this.
• ·         Thomas the linguist can point out irrationalities of the bias by non-linguists against linguists, but is apparently completely blind to bias against females and similar nonsensical arguments. The book doesn’t seem to highlight this, as far as I can see.  I did consider whether his family name Chornyak might be a hint that there is some metatextual acknowledgement. The name would signify ‘blinky’, ‘hard of seeing’, or ‘four-eyes’ in its Slavic connotation, so maybe he’s meant not to see the obvious. However I don’t think Elgin did Slavic languages, plus if it’s just an Easter egg for the Slavic linguists it’s non-functional as a dramatic device.
• ·         Females, as aforementioned, rarely speak. When present, they conspicuously listen, or talk in sign language.
• ·         The book is scathing about the proliferation of the Aristotelian notion that the woman is the receptacle and completely subservient/passive. However, the premise of the world-building casts all the Aliens into exactly the same receptive, passive position. Apparently, no Alien ever tries to speak a Terran language. They merely sit behind their screens, osmosing into the brains of the juvenile Linguists. Again, the internal logic of the book seems unaware of this transference of ideology.

Which begs the question, are these all examples of being unable to move beyond the boundaries of what is given as a communication medium, which is precisely what the book is actually arguing? It seems to be acting out its own precepts, unwittingly. How insanely meta can you get?

There is also the curious aspect that the style of diction Elgin uses is distinctly… male. It beats about the bush, is pompous, doesn’t bother to describe the characters in any personal sense. The characters stand about like sticks of wood, spouting whatever they’re saying. Elgin accomplishes one of the most remarkable feats of ‘telling’ I’ve ever seen: watch this passage describing body language.

 ‘Any problems?’
‘No, but I have a question.’
They looked at one another, body-parling. WHY THE HELL DO WE HAVE TO PUT UP WITH THIS INSUFFERABLE BITCH?’ And one of them said, ‘Well, what is it?’
 

Yes, dear reader, she did it. The author has actually ‘told’ and not shown body language. ALL CAPS does it, apparently.

Now, bear in mind that the urgent, stated premise of the book is that

1) Women have not enough voice
2)      Men have too much of the running of the world, and do it badly
3)      Men don’t notice the subtle things women can

Is it not curious that this book enacts precisely all of those things on its own pages? The writing doesn’t notice the subtle things, or at least it doesn’t describe them. It uses the heavy language of pomp and convolution to garner authority. It doesn’t give its women voices.

These actions are not self-aware. Which makes them piss-poor as an attempt at fiction, but extraordinarily successful as a demonstration in vivo of exactly what it is trying to prove.

Isn’t that intriguing? Now, to the scoring. Honestly, if you’re not too interested in the effect it has, I can’t score it above a two out of five hoofs up. The main downside is the plot and illogicalities, but there are some good exchanges. Your choice.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Title: Fahrenheit 451

Author: Ray Bradbury

Publisher: Harper Voyager          

Publish date: 1953

ISBN: 978 0 00 830369 3

Book Quote: 

‘Now let’s take up the minorities in our civilisation, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don’t step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation-Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico.’

…

‘But remember that the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority. Oh, God, the terrible tyranny of the majority.’

____________________________________________

How can I put it politely? No, I can’t. This ‘novel’ is a hysterical torrent of man-flu sploshed onto a climate of cold-war misogynistic terror. However, I’m glad to have read it, as it has many interesting points. I’m taking antacids now, but it’s a price I’m prepared to pay.

The Good

·         Within the mish-mash of words, there are some nice passages. The stream-of-consciousness, poetic chunks that rely on iteration and resonance, are pleasurable. Say, the passage where Montag is trying to remember a phrase from Matthew (they toil not, neither do they spin) on the underground, when everyone is humming away to a toothpaste ad. Or quite a few passages describing scenery or setting. It’s interesting that in so misogynistic a work, the best sections are those in traditionally ‘feminine’ styles. But more of that anon.

The Bad

Where to start? At the beginning?

- By page 2 we’re choked on the fumes of so many adjectives and bombastic adverbs our heads are spinning and we can scarcely hold onto the book. They’re absolutely out of control.

- To have an experimental writing style is acceptable. To toss anything into the pot all in a novella, without a thought to the overall flow, is not. From adjective overload, to impressionism, to film-script, to monologue, to stream-of-consciousness, and then straight into diatribe shoved into the mouths of puppets. If the style differentiation had some reasoning, it would be acceptable. It hasn’t. That’s just how the words hit the page.

·         - Characterisation is nil. It’s on the level of Pilgrim’s Progress, and indeed the hysteria, self-aggrandising, and self-pity ties the two works together convincingly. OK, you can write an allegory, but don’t pretend it’s a novel in any traditional sense.

 -Plot goes no further than the initial idea of a prosecutor having a change of heart and becoming a transgressor. Which is fine. But then the author obviously doesn’t know how to end it all, so blows stuff up and leaves it all down to a plucky band of Harvard bums to re-build the word. Honestly, a blank page would have been better. As it is, it’s infantile.

The Ugly

The misogyny. Untrammelled. If the women aren’t idle sponging ignorant leeches like Millie and her cronies, they’re equally dismissive constructs like Clarisse or the woman who immolates herself with her books. Both type’s only function is to spur or spurn males. There is not even the hint of a notion that something other than procreation or inspiration may come from a female. When Montag thinks of the book burned, the phrase is that ‘behind each of them is a man’. Nothing to do with women. The unnaturalness of the female spongers is accentuated by their unwillingness or dislike of offspring. The wholesomeness of Clarisse is accentuated by her off-screen family, and her interest in love. There is no other dimension.

OK, so what are we complaining about, when we’ve just said that the entire work is an allegory? None of the other (male) characters are clothed in realistic flesh at all, including the main protagonist. Captain Beatty is a laughable travesty of improbability, and as for Faber, let’s not even go there.

The difference is the lack of agency. Males are allowed agency, females are not. It’s not a thought-out thing, it’s taken for granted. The inspirational agency one could say Clarisse and the self-torching woman have is not independent. It needs a male vehicle to achieve anything. The spongers need male vehicles to keep them in their inactive state. The inactive state itself is highlighted in the anecdote of the memorable grandfather and the hands: the recollection of all the things the hands had made, and now would not, as opposed to Millie’s hands, which are still and create nothing. So we can say that in this novella, the female directly inherits the Aristotelian notions of being an empty vessel for the agency of the male to work on. OK (deep breath), let’s work with that. Not the first and not the last to expound this notion. Where does that lead?

To the interesting part. Their inactivity and lack of agency is both forced onto them, and is made into their culpability. Apart from Clarisse and Millie, none of them have a given name. They are all named after their husbands. There is no option for them to do otherwise than they are doing, yet it is violently held against them. The other males in the general background are presumably all also zombies (when they’re not working, which is seems women don’t), but this is never mentioned. When it’s the zombie population at large, it lacks a sex. When it’s the individual, it’s female.  It’s quite clear that the resentment for the zombification has found a channel: the female form.

But what is even more interesting, is that this is not merely an expression of misogyny. The misogyny is simply the most prominent part of a fundamental flaw in the logic of the notions that purport to underpin the work’s sociological theory. 

The theory is, that the dumbing down (leading to zombification) came from excessive pandering to minorities. The book was published in 1953, and we still hear this notion everywhere. No-one was allowed to be offended, so freedom of speech was silenced. In other words, the minorities should have allowed themselves to be offended. Or should have been made to be open to offence. 

Yet, when it’s the (male, obviously) residual intellectuals, who are now in the minority, they are to rise up. They are inspirational. The women in the book are not a physical but a practical minority, due to their lack of agency. Nope, that minority is still bad. As per before. They need to stay down. There is not one instance of a female remembering one of the ‘books’ in the chain of resistance. It is always ‘a man’, and the term is not being used as a synecdoche for humankind. It is literally male. When the intellectual hobos walk off into the distance, fantasising about how they’re going to build a new world ‘generation after generation’, there are neither females present at the time, nor any thought given to anything feminine whatsoever. It’s an entirely male creative process. The males both force the fire onto the females/minorities, and hold them responsible for the resulting imbalance. And violently fear the state of being a ‘minority’ themselves, and instantly take on the mantle of the oppressed-in-need-of-adulation-and-support at the first opportunity.

There is no recognition in the book of the volta performed in the ideology. The Captain’s ‘minorities’ speech is taken at face value, and there is no tie-back to him being the later-described tyranny of the majority, and therefore out of whack. The reason for the zombification is still squarely on the shoulders of the minorities. The minorities of back then, who are not white intellectual males. The minority now is the right one to rise up.  

Rarely have I read a clearer example of the connection between misogyny and minority oppression, as coupled with fear and abnegation of culpability. In today’s world, where we are waking up to the statistics of how male violence against females is directly linked to attacks on minorities in mob violence and mass shootings, surely this is an important template of thought to bear in mind. Perhaps for all the wrong reasons, but nevertheless.

Scoring: for pleasure, one moose-hoof up out of five, but read it nevertheless if you haven’t. It’s an appalling piece, to be visited as one would visit a holocaust museum. 

And can someone explain to me the author's obsession with Marcus Aurelius?

Holes by Louis Sachar

Title:  Holes

Author: Louis Sachar

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Publish date: 2000

ISBN: 9 781408 865231

Another one for the admirable-YA-books pile. I have some recollection of seeing the movie of this, but the text was a considerably more memorable and pleasurable.

Hapless kid from hapless family gets sent to a boot-camp when wrongly convicted of petty theft. Forms friendships, and perhaps ironically ‘builds character’ because this is the (presumably fallacious) opinion of the detention center staff. In process of caring for others, rectifies an ancestral wrong, all ends well.

It’s a lovely, satisfying read. The touch is light, and often lyrical, despite portraying characters who use shoulder-shrugs more than words. The pieces are put together in as obvious a manner as possible, and even if you’re a kid with no thought to literary craft or linguistic techniques, you can’t help but connect the themes and the images that the author puts your way. Even if you don’t register them as such.

Sachar claims this is about friendship, and the importance of reading. For me the strongest motif that really ties all the strands together is the discovery of self – in this case, the reconciliation to the ancestors who emigrated from their home countries to the new continent all those years ago. The psyche of the States is continually in a state of yearning for a past it feels has eluded it. A massive nation of people whose very existence is owed to leaving their origins behind, coupled with the main theme of adolescence, a search for the self, creates a thumping rhythm of hammering away at the strands of ‘mystery’ in the novel. 

The recurring motifs of the song, the carrying, the 'training’ and changing physical form, the peaches, the onions, the pig, the lizards, the rattlesnakes, and of course, the holes. Holes in every physical and metaphorical sense. These are clear, unambiguous sign-posts for a friendly, sympathetic read.

Why not give it a five moose-hoof up? No reason at all. 

Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel

Title:  Wolf Hall

Author: Hilary Mantel

ISBN: 987 0 00 729241 7

Published: Fourth Estate, HarperCollins

Date: 2009

And

Title: Bring Up The Bodies

Author: Hilary Mantel

ISBN 978 0 8050 9003 1 52800

Originally Published by: Fourth Estate, 2012

Book quote (from Bring Up The Bodies):

‘If you intend to kill me in public, and mount a show, be quick. Or I may die of grief alone in this room.’

He shakes his head. ‘You’ll live.’ He once thought it himself, that he might die of grief: for his wife, his daughters, his sisters, his father and master the cardinal. But the pulse, obdurate, keeps its rhythm. You think you cannot keep breathing, but your ribcage has other ideas, rising and falling, emitting sighs. You must thrive in spite of yourself; and so that you may do it, God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.

I had read Wolf Hall a number of years previously, and on reading the second in the series, Bring Up The Bodies, wished to refresh my memory. So I looked in my book blog. Where was Wolf Hall? Not there. Hmm. Odd.

I checked the back-up files. Ah, there’s a file, not in the ‘posted reviews’ folder but out in the cold. Five pages of increasingly incoherent notes, exclamations and jotted observations. And then I remembered. Wolf Hall was so complex, so daunting, I hadn’t been able to bring myself to utter an opinion or post a review.

So here’s the start of that review, on Wolf Hall. A few years later.

This novel flouts – no, openly beats and throws out of doors with curses – so many of the rules that as writers we’re told to stick by it almost makes me seasick with the turmoil. In the scheme of things, the reader is at the very bottom of order of importance. There is absolutely no pandering to the needs of anyone so inconsequential.

Follow the current trend of segmenting reading chunks into small portions, so the book can be put down conveniently? You must be joking, you’ll have hold onto the tome for all you’re worth and be grateful if it’s not bucking you off physically. Shorten sentences? (What?) Clarify your pronouns? Indeed, specify your pronouns? (That’s for wimps.) Quite often, there’s simply no indication at all of who ‘he’ is – you’ll just have to read on, guess (or give up), and perhaps at the next reading you’ll know. (Work for it, dammit.) Any concessions to a lack of intimate knowledge of Tudor life? (Get off my book if you don’t know what’s going on, it’s not for you.) Well, how about timeline and tense, is it clear who we’re talking about and what period of their life it is? Of course not. Well, not immediately, you have to read on, in faith, and then think about the bits that went last, piece it together to realise that although you had just been reading a piece of writing in the past tense on 1527 events, you’re now reading a body of narrative in the present tense about earlier events, which itself contains another chunk in the past tense that probably refers to about 1492 or so, even though the chapter heading states it’s 1521-1529. I even found a few typos. It’s absolutely merciless. The reader is tossed into the brine with not the slightest regard as to whether they will sink or swim. If they sink - well, tough. They should have learned to swim ere they were tossed.

Carrying this mountain of novel-writing faux-pas, it won the 2009 Booker Prize.

Deserved? You bet. In fact, for me, it’s one of the most encouraging prize-awards I’ve seen in a long time. Why? Several reasons.

The trend is, long novels don’t win the booker. (Why that is so one scarcely dares to speculate… it couldn’t possibly be that the judges can’t be bothered, could it?) This is certainly in keeping with the influence that the internet has had on literature: tearing prose into smaller and smaller chunks, leaning towards sound-bites, word-bites and all sorts of informational snacking.  Flash fiction didn’t even exist when I last looked – now it’s everywhere. Wolf Hall weighs in at 650 pages and every word is a gem – that in itself is an achievement but the fact that it’s been acknowledged as such is truly surprising. And heartening. (I for one appreciate a decent meal, not a snack).

In general, you have to take your reader by the hand, and cosset them. Consider who you’re writing for. Usually one would try to make whatever section of society this is as broad as decently possible. Who is the target audience for Wolf Hall? Specialists in Tudor history with a background in politics, psychology and social development, it seems, and ones who have plenty of time on their hands at that. And yet it’s a bestseller.

Now I have to admit, I can’t quite understand this. I really don’t see how such a proportion of people can read and understand this book. There are numerous passages where there’s simply no way of knowing what is going on or who is doing what unless you know very intimate details of the period. Like, which Bishop was in residence at what house during which years. Who worked for whom. Most of it is Goggle-able (and I had to resort to this frequently during the course of reading) but I wonder whether the average reader would bother to do this. Now, if I were the author, I would be perfectly pleased that people are at least buying the book, but I would have a sneaking suspicion that perhaps it’s being left unread on the shelf, or skimmed through, in quite a few instances.

This very same ‘drawback’ to the book is of course also its greatest forte and innovation. It utilises the technique of creating imaginative room within the text in the sphere of historical knowledge. The best pieces of writing are where the reader is left to fill in the blanks, to join in the creative process, participate in determining the story and its implications. Hamlet’s mysterious lure, for example, is largely down to the ambiguities within it: it could be called a play about gaps in silences in many ways. Many writers give the reader ‘breathing space’ in this way, to draw various possible implications from ambiguous writing. I’ve never before seen assumed historical knowledge used like this before. It gives the novel an almost four-dimensional quality. The narrative (1^st dimension) dialogue between reader and novelist (2^nd), pre-emptive knowledge the reader possesses historically (3^rd) and implications of how history is created questions into the nature or perceived reality (4^th).

Which leads to the often-discussed issue of the makeover Mantel has given to Thomas Cromwell in this book. I’m nearly a thousand words into the review and haven’t given a synopsis yet, and should leave it that way to be in keeping with the style of the book. But here we are. Synopsis: Following the life of Thomas Cromwell (Henry VIII’th eventual Chancellor of the Exchequer) up till the execution of his contemporary, Thomas More, in 1535. Well that was easy, wasn’t it?

That’s as far as I wrote… coherently. There followed here various excepts from the book, illustrating portrayal of the rise of meritocracy, the validity of the dissolution of the monasteries, the role of food as a binding agent to relationships and its visceral nature in becoming part of the body, the differences between reality and concealment, and concealment of reality even if there is nothing to conceal, the giddying uncertainties of an age of unthinkable change of thought, mercantilism, and other topics. I was evidently overwhelmed.

Bring Up The Bodies is not quite so abstruse. The same concerns pervade the novel. The time is a little later on, up to the execution of Anne Boleyn. I didn’t realize until nearly the end (where it crops up) that the title refers to habeas corpus, the legal term. Suddenly it is a most fitting title.

The obsession with bodies is everywhere. It sticks to you like a sludge as you go through the book. Bodies that are active, ingesting, failing, dissolving, pervading everywhere. The body of the King, that metonym for the country, is literally the central theme of the work, along with the other bodies that central one interacts with. Henry isn’t described so much in terms of a character, but a force. He is a central verb, verbing away at all the other greater and lesser embodied verbs that surround him and form the body politic, and the body of the land. Within this central dynamic fit all the other concerns. Loyalty, treachery, truth, innocence, skill, fear, sex, appetite, will and power.

The tenses and the POV have calmed down. You don’t feel as if you’re about to be thrown off at any moment. The narrative is condensed, the timeline is short, the focus intense. Without doubt, an easier read. The language continues an embarrassment of riches.

And now I hear that the third in the trilogy (I didn’t know it was going to be a trilogy) is due out in March 2020. Guess where I’ll be heading!

Five out of five moose hoofs up for both, but don’t blame me if you need to take a Travelcalm along the way. All worthwhile.

The Titan's Curse by Rick Riordan

Title: The Titan’s Curse

Author: Rick Riordan

Publisher: Hyperion Books New York     

Publish date: 2007

ISBN: 978-142310148-2

You can tell I like this series, as it’s the third one I’ve read in a row. They go down like sherbet fizz: very quickly.

Another fun tale. Percy learns the importance of deference and self-sacrifice through the medium of a rescue-mission for a goddess and uncertainty of whom trust – including his own impulses.

This author is extremely good at judging how to mix-and-match characters that offset each other. Also at the rate at which to introduce those characters. You never have someone turn up on Page 10 and are never seen again, while someone whom you haven’t heard hide nor hair of pops up mid-book and takes over the narrative. There is of course the character of Nico, who appears at first and then only comes back as a book-end, but that’s his function in this novel: to backstoried, without being a part of it directly.

The author has a forte in characterisation, and in balancing differing moods throughout the narrative. This is a large portion of the reason that the narrative runs along at such a brisk pace. The reader is never bogged down in the same slurry of mood for long, nor do they have to wallow in endless examination of one mood of one character. Light, deft brushstrokes with a very generous amount of good-natured humour. Never goes amiss. Not to say that the narratives lack emotional input. It’s simply not laboured.

By this third in the series, the ease with which the backstory so fat is acknowledged is accomplished with greater ease. It feels a bit more self-confident. Not apologetic, just light.

In sum, another great romp, with admirable skill. What’s to detract? Five out of five moose-hoofs up.

Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan

Title: Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters

Author: Rick Riordan

Publisher: Hyperion Books New York     

Publish date: 2006

ISBN: 13: 978 142310334-9

The follow-up to the first in the series, Percy Jackson and the Lightening Thief. Another rip-roarer but somehow it feels like an ‘inbetweener’… which I suspect it is. Nice portrayal of self-acceptance leading to acceptance of other in the relationship between the MC and the new character of Tyson. In fact the character of Tyson is altogether a good move, as it is sufficiently different to all the others to create a multi-faceted foil quite effectively. I won’t bother with a synopsis: something will inevitably be a spoiler and anyway it only takes a few hours to read through this book, you might as well find out fresh for yourself.

As is, perhaps, inevitable in a series, there is some back-explaining and story that gets a little annoying, but it’s not too intrusive overall. Good thick, solid brushstrokes and blistering pace, as per the previous book. It might be an inbetweener, but hey, it does its job and guess what, I’ve already reserved the next in the series at the library, so that must say something. Got it out for the daughter but she’s ignored it – going to get the next one out for myself. Stuff the kids.

4 out of 5 moose hoofs up, with the one deduction only because it has that awkward feel to it.