Dust and Spores

The Sea of Monsters / Rick Riordan
New York : Disney Hyperion Books, 2008
Originally published: 2006
Percy Jackson & the Olympians, bk. 2
279 p.

Percy Jackson's seventh-grade year has been surprisingly quiet. Not a single monster has set foot on his New York prep-school campus. But when an innocent game of dodgeball among Percy and his classmates turns into a death match against an ugly gang of cannibal giants, things get... well, ugly. And the unexpected arrival of his friend Annabeth brings more bad news: the magical borders that protect Camp Half-Blook have been poisoned by a musterious enemy, and unless a cure is found, the only safe haven for demigods will be destroyed.

So, I read this a couple weeks ago, but I keep putting off the review because I honestly have nothing to say.

You all know how I feel about The Lightning Thief (below) and all I can really say is that this one was less offensive, though this is perhaps only because with 100 less pages, there were 100 less opportunities to drop the ball. The awkward, cutesy anachronisms were fewer, which is nice. And it kept me turning the pages to the end, which is a talent, but not one I put much stock in. The Da Vinci Code did the same thing, and I'm one of those judgmental jerks who hated it.

So in the end: Feh. But I'll keep reading the series anyway.

The Lightning Thief / Rick Riordan
New York : Disney Hyperion Books, 2006
Originally published: 2005
Percy Jackson & the Olympians, bk. 1
375 p.

Percy Jackson is about to be kicked out of boarding school... again. And that's the least of his troubles. Lately, mythological monsters and the gods of Mount Olympus seem to be walking straight out of the pages of Percy's Greek mythology textbook and into his life. And worse, he's angered a few of them. Zeus's master lightning bolt has been stolen, and Percy is the prime suspect.

My good friend Ryan expressed an in interest in seeing the first Percy Jackson movie this weekend, so like a good book-to-movie conversion enthusiast, I devoted part of my snow day yesterday to reading the first novel, The Lightning Thief. It's both good and bad, but... well there's really no excuse for the bad.

To begin, a summary: A boy with a mean guardian finds out he has powers for which evil dudes want him dead, so he goes to a special training facility to hone said powers where the kids are sorted into groups wherein the members have similar personalities and one group is unpleasant, ugly, and mean. There he finds out he is the Chosen One, sort of. Then he befriends a really smart girl and an awkward boy who doesn't believe in himself, and they face insurmountable odds to retrieve a powerful artifact from the embodiment of evil, and in the end they find out that a supreme bad guy that is supposed to be gone is gathering followers and planning on returning. Everybody cheers for the boy and his friends at the end.

That said, THIS IS NOT A HARRY POTTER KNOCK OFF! It was written in 1994. It's just really unfortunately similar in so many ways beyond the bounds of the typical "every story borrows from every other" rules. But honestly: pure coincidence.

Anyway, I love Greek mythology, and Riordan did a lot right and had some great ideas here. Unfortunately, it was really poorly executed. Riordan is no fancy writer. Neither was Rowling, to be fair, but she had some sense of language and narrative elegance. I don't believe that Percy is a child, mostly because Riordan is trying SO HARD to make him sound like one. And that's the main problem I have with this book: he's trying too hard.

A lot of the creatures and gods (who have shallow, caricatured personalities based on their "domains") feel thrown in, like he wanted to get as much in there to show us how creative he was. It makes the book feel episodic, which is fine, but all this "then he met Medusa", "then he met the stretching giant", "now he's in a children's casino for 4 days" didn't tie into the main thread. At the end, the book implied that the monsters were attacking him because of the evil bad dude and their quest, but I don't buy it.

The casino episode was especially bad. The trio wanders into a building where they are given free reign of a gorgeous hotel/arcade/casino for children. Some sort of spell is put on them where they eat and play games and suddenly Percy finds out a kid has been there since 1977 and thinks only 2 weeks have gone by, so he snaps out of the reverie. Then he snaps Annabeth out of it by saying the word "spiders", which she is afraid of. Then they leave without incident and 4 days have passed. No explanation, no consequences. The scene, which had no dramatic tension, served only to advance the plot 4 days. See, Riordan set an arbitrary 10-day deadline for the kids to finish the quest, and then when he realized that it doesn't take 10 days to get from New York to LA, so he did that.

But parts of the book were pretty ok. The overall plot still has a lot of potential, but he really needs to not play around so much with the gimmicky "modernized mythology" crap. Get the narrative down and the story right, and you won't have to make reference to playing Hillary Duff on a pan flute to get a cheap giggle.

I hear the next books get better, and this can make a great set of movies, so I'm on board with the franchise. I'm also glad that this is one of those books that "gets kids reading", but honestly, is it really a victory to "get kids reading" if what they're reading has the same low standards of quality as the television shows everyone claims are rotting their brains? Substandard literature is NOT a gateway drug to good literature.

Gossip Girl / Cecily von Ziegesar
New York : Poppy, 2002
Gossip Girl series, bk. 1
199 p.

Enter the scandalous world of Gossip Girl -- a world inhabited by the city's most fabulous crowd; a world of jealousy, betrayal, and naughty pictures on the sides of buses.

Dudes, I read this book and I don't even know why. Wait yes, I know exactly why. What I don't know is why I read it through to the end.

Take Gossip Girl, the TV show. Remove all the characters' personality traits until they are down to one each. Make them somehow shallower. Remove all actual knowledge of fashion and culture and just namedrop major names. Stir, shake, give Jenny Humphrey a huge rack, and you get this book.

An inspiration for the show in name and setting only, these are really not worth bothering with as an adult fan.

The Golem's Eye / Jonathan Stroud
New York : Miramax Books, 2004
562 p.
The Bartimaeus Trilogy, bk. 2

At dusk, the enemy lit their campfires one by one, in greater profusion than on any night before. The lights sparkled like fiery jewels out in the grayness of the plains, so numerous it seemed an enchanted city had sprung up from the earth. By contrast, within our walls the houses had their shutters closed, their lights blacked out.

We need to get something straight before I give you my opinion of this book. I have been reading it a few pages at a time since way back in March. I can't explain why because it's got a pretty exciting plot. I just kept forgetting about it. So my idea of the pacing is off and I forgot who some minor characters were between readings, but I'm fairly certain it all came together in my head when I was finished.

That sort of disclaimer would be more important if I were going to pan the book, but in fact, despite my approach, I quite liked it.

Like the first in the trilogy, The Golem's Eye alternates between the perspectives of three protagonists. Nathaniel is an ambitious and scheming young magician working for the British government (a position he earned after the events of the first novel). Bartimaeus is a sarcastic demon that Nathaniel summons as a slave. (That's the way magic primarily works in this world: the summoning and binding of demons of various degrees of power.) They are both from the first book. The third protagonist that makes an appearance here is Kitty, a spirited young peasant (non-magician) who is part of a resistance movement to take down the magical aristocracy that controls Britain and leaves the commoners as second-class citizens.

A bit of a side note on the magic: The demons in the series are loosely based on the hierarchy of spirits in Arabian mythology. Djinni, marids, and afrits make up the bulk of the more powerful beings. If you're at all familiar with the 1,001 Nights or something like Diana Wynne Jones' The Castle in the Sky, you'll find some familiar elements here.

Getting back to it, I liked this book a lot. The class struggle that was the focus of Kitty's plot line is well-crafted and believable, and the reader can really get behind her and her resistance movement, which involves stealing magical artifacts and using them to cause chaos. (It's not terribly effective, but their spirit is inspiring.) Nathaniel and Bartimaeus, meanwhile, are working with the government to take down a golem, a powerful magical creature made by a magician and used as a powerful weapon of destruction. This is interesting enough, but what I most like about their story is that this is one of few young adult novels that masters the portrayal of Bureaucratic Nonsense.

Magicians in Nathaniel's world are power-hungry, conniving egomaniacs who will do anything to gain credit for things that will promote them and divorce themselves from blame for things that will hurt them. It's startlingly unjust and real, and Stroud uses it to his advantage when characterizing Nathaniel. See, he is an utterly hateable character. He's greasy and rude and self-serving without a noble or heroic bone in his body. But Stroud puts the reader on his side by making everyone around him even more unpleasant. You think: "Sure he's a jerk, but at least he's young and there's still hope for him. He's the lesser of a thousand evils, a little pathetic, and his demon puts him in his place with his unending sarcasm so.... Go Nathaniel!"

The story, on top of being rather funny, keeps it real. There's no silly naval-gazing or improbable character shifts like one might expect from a character like Nathaniel in a book for the young. It's a straight-up good story. I look forward to taking 5 years to read the third.

Eighth Grade Bites / Heather Brewer
New York : Speak, 2008
The Chronicles of Vladimir Tod, bk. 1
182 p.

A tree branch slapped John Craig across the face, scraping his skin, but he kept on running and ignored the stabbing of pine needles on his bare feet. He could hear the man's footsteps behind him, echoing his own.

Right, so I got this book that weekend I was locked out of my apartment and read it in one day. It's that kind of book: fun, simple, and entertaining... all I want in a book about a teenage vampire, really.

Basically Vlad is a vampire halfling. "Me dad's a muggle; mum's a witch!" Wait, I mean his dad was a vampire and his mom wasn't. So basically he eats blood and undercooked meat, but ages like a person. His parents died in a mysterious fire when he was young, so he's raised by his human aunt. He attends a normal junior high where he deals with typical losery teen boy problems.

There's nothing terribly innovative about the basic backdrop of the story, but the direction Brewer takes it keeps it interesting. Vlad's English teacher disappears and is replaced by an off-center man who seems to know something about Vlad. The boy himself discovers old family secrets and gets involved with other vampires he never knew existed. It's a compelling, if throwaway story told with a good amount of intrigue and light humor and the requisite teen angst. I really did enjoy it.

This novel is especially appealing because it stands in contrast with the overwrought, neo-gothic romantic vampire stuff that's been flooding the market lately. (Thanks, Twilight!) This one is fun. It's boyish. Nobody falls in love, nobody cries, nobody SPARKLES. It has more in common with Christopher Moore's vampires than Stephenie Meyers' or Charlaine Harris'. I look forward to reading the next ones.