Sometimes stories are wonderful. Sometimes they are good. And sometimes you end up with something of a mixed review. This and the following are mixed reviews.
Cornelia Funke has been called “the German J.K. Rowling.” The Thief Lord, one of her bestselling novels, follows the story of Bo and Prosper, two brothers who run away from their scheming aunt to Venice. There, they meet up with the Thief Lord (an Italian version of Dickens’ Artful Dodger) who invites them to join his gang of thieves. Their aunt pursues them to Venice, a hired detective starts to follow them, a mysterious old man asks the Thief Lord to steal a strange object, and all this takes place against the exotic backdrop of Venice’s famous maze of canals and cathedrals.
Sounds exciting, no? Well, I hate to say it, but something must have gotten lost in the translation, because for the first half of the book, I could scarcely make myself read anymore, I just found it so boring. The characters did not seem realistic. Even though we have a gang of kid thieves sneaking around Venice, the plot dragged and it felt like nothing was happening. It wasn’t until the second half of the book that things started to pick up and the story gained some traction. Then, the mysterious stolen object turns out to be something quite magical. In the end, the story turned out better than I thought it would, but was still rather less than I had hoped it would be.
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo
The Newberry Award-winning Tale of Despereaux tells the story of a mouse who falls in love with a (human) princess and saves her from the hands (or rather, claws) of an evil, dungeon-dwelling rat. DiCamillo, (author of Newberry Award-winning Because of Winn Dixie), tells this fairytale with a quaint, “dear-reader” style narrative. Three of us recently read (or listened to) this story and compared notes on our reactions to it. We found our reviews were decidedly mixed.
The dominant reaction was that the book had its lovely moments, but it left us all somewhat disappointed. I found DiCamillo’s commands to go look the difficult words up in a dictionary and “dear-reader” comments at the end of each chapter rather patronizing. We all found the portrayal of the servant girl, Miggory Sow, who is badly beaten by every adult around her, quite disturbing. The rats in the story are also pretty nasty – they love to run about through the filth in the dungeon and torture prisoners there. One of our favorite characters got killed off abruptly for no apparent reason and I found the ending didn’t quite live up to the build-up it had been given.
On the positive side, the writing is quite well done. The characters are brilliantly written and very funny (on the audio book, the voices are marvelous), and you can’t help butlove Despereaux, the mouse who was “born with his eyes open.” There were also some wonderful messages in the book about love and forgiveness. Still, I couldn’t help thinking, throughout the abuse of Miggory, the “dear reader”-ing, and DiCamillo’s musings about courtly love, perfidy (that's one of the words she tells you to look up), and non-conformity: “Is this book really meant for kids?”
The dominant reaction was that the book had its lovely moments, but it left us all somewhat disappointed. I found DiCamillo’s commands to go look the difficult words up in a dictionary and “dear-reader” comments at the end of each chapter rather patronizing. We all found the portrayal of the servant girl, Miggory Sow, who is badly beaten by every adult around her, quite disturbing. The rats in the story are also pretty nasty – they love to run about through the filth in the dungeon and torture prisoners there. One of our favorite characters got killed off abruptly for no apparent reason and I found the ending didn’t quite live up to the build-up it had been given.
On the positive side, the writing is quite well done. The characters are brilliantly written and very funny (on the audio book, the voices are marvelous), and you can’t help butlove Despereaux, the mouse who was “born with his eyes open.” There were also some wonderful messages in the book about love and forgiveness. Still, I couldn’t help thinking, throughout the abuse of Miggory, the “dear reader”-ing, and DiCamillo’s musings about courtly love, perfidy (that's one of the words she tells you to look up), and non-conformity: “Is this book really meant for kids?”
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