Book-It 'o14! Book #3
The Fifty Books Challenge, year five! ( 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013) This was a secondhand find.
Title: The Land of Stories: The Wishing Spell by Chris Colfer
Details: Copyright 2012, Little Brown & Company
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): " Alex and Conner Bailey's world is about to change. When the twins' grandmother gives them a treasured fairy-tale book, they have no idea they're about to enter a land beyond all imagining: the Land of Stories, where fairy tales are real."
Why I Wanted to Read It: I stumbled across this book and mistook the familiar red Scholastic logo and the painterly quality of the cover for one of the "classics" from the '80s and '90s. The authors' names are so famous and the stories so beloved as to be a joke; the only kicker as an adult is that there were so many of them. Picking this up, I wondered if I'd ever gotten to read it and realized it was actually a recently published book (in fairness, this copy is fairly beat up and could pass for a well-preserved twenty to twenty-five year old book). I liked the premise and on a cloud of leftover Millennial nostalgia, I didn't notice that it had a famous author that's famous for other things.
Let's get this out of the way: I utterly despise children's books written by not-famous-for-writing-children's-books "authors". I hated them even when I was the target audience (that is to say a child, not a parent of a young child whose a fan of said celebrity's work). I fully co-sign Maurice Sendak's loathing of this "genre" since it not only sells short children's literature (anyone can do it!), it's so brutally unnecessary.
Still, I was between books and ripe for something to read and willing to allow that plenty of authors have other jobs as well. Also, this was a substantial chapter book rather than a picture book, so perhaps this didn't fall into the category of awfulness I and the late Mr Sendak so despise.
Also, Colfer is gay and works for LGBTQ causes; I thought there might be a possibility we could get a welcome "twist" on a fairytale or several.
How I Liked It: While not as bad as books that fall under the "written-by-a-celebrity-famous-for-something-other-than-writing-children's-books" category, the book is still fairly sloppy and in need of an editor.
It's not impossible to imagine Colfer suggesting the idea and handlers assuming his book would be as terrible as most written by actors (and hired the subsequent team of writers/polishers/editors) only to find out that Colfer actually has some talent and certainly vision, and to move in the other direction and basically to leave him to his own devices.
The book has qualities that suggest to the "for-young-adults-Scholastic" classic model I initially mistook it for being: a dysfunctional home, offbeat siblings, a rip in their quotidian that allows for fantasy. Unfortunately, sloppy and sometimes just lazy writing middles those qualities down into a bland, barely-readable mishmash of cliches and bad metaphors.
The sad part is the genuine talent that appears to be at the heart of Colfer's work. His classroom scenes in particular suggest Betty MacDonald's (of Mrs Pigglewiggle fame) zaniness, and while his re-imagining of fairytales is not particularly as creative as it could be, the ways he has them intersect is undeniably appealing.
This shouldn't be a published work. This is a very rushed first draft, hopefully with notes jotted extensively in the margins, about to be processed several times by editors and by the author himself.
This is apparently the first of a series and while it could be optimistically suggested that it will only go up from here (Colfer's work could acquire a team of editors to work with him and produce a polished result), I'm not sure that it's worth sticking around to find out when there are so many others doing it so much better.
Notable: If you were wondering, no, there were no "twists" of the sort you might have expected (or hoped for).
One thing that caught me a little off-guard was the comment from the goofy troublemaker brother to his teacher's pet goody-goody sister (imagine how much more interesting the story could've been had the roles been reversed). I realize that complaining about children's dialog being unrealistically adult is about as rote a complaint as historical accuracy in bodice-rippers, but
“The twins waited for nightfall to trael across the river to the palace. They carefully placed the log into the river and then entered the water themselves. It was unbearably cold. Conner made a high-pitched gasping sound as soon as he was waist deep.
Whoo! It's so cold, I think we may be twin sisters now," he said through rattling teeth.rdquo; (pg 300)
The twins are supposed to be in sixth grade in presumably the modern era (the book is recommended to grades four through sixth). If at twelve they know about genital shrinkage in cold temperatures, would they really refer to it as a boy becoming a girl? Isn't that kind of "old-fashioned" (and more than a little offensive/inaccurate)?
It's interesting to imagine someone explaining shrinking genitals to a kid since presumably they'd ask ("How is the cold going to make him a girl?"), but the attached gendering is something pretty unnecessary and prone to problems.
Title: The Land of Stories: The Wishing Spell by Chris Colfer
Details: Copyright 2012, Little Brown & Company
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): " Alex and Conner Bailey's world is about to change. When the twins' grandmother gives them a treasured fairy-tale book, they have no idea they're about to enter a land beyond all imagining: the Land of Stories, where fairy tales are real."
Why I Wanted to Read It: I stumbled across this book and mistook the familiar red Scholastic logo and the painterly quality of the cover for one of the "classics" from the '80s and '90s. The authors' names are so famous and the stories so beloved as to be a joke; the only kicker as an adult is that there were so many of them. Picking this up, I wondered if I'd ever gotten to read it and realized it was actually a recently published book (in fairness, this copy is fairly beat up and could pass for a well-preserved twenty to twenty-five year old book). I liked the premise and on a cloud of leftover Millennial nostalgia, I didn't notice that it had a famous author that's famous for other things.
Let's get this out of the way: I utterly despise children's books written by not-famous-for-writing-children's-books "authors". I hated them even when I was the target audience (that is to say a child, not a parent of a young child whose a fan of said celebrity's work). I fully co-sign Maurice Sendak's loathing of this "genre" since it not only sells short children's literature (anyone can do it!), it's so brutally unnecessary.
Still, I was between books and ripe for something to read and willing to allow that plenty of authors have other jobs as well. Also, this was a substantial chapter book rather than a picture book, so perhaps this didn't fall into the category of awfulness I and the late Mr Sendak so despise.
Also, Colfer is gay and works for LGBTQ causes; I thought there might be a possibility we could get a welcome "twist" on a fairytale or several.
How I Liked It: While not as bad as books that fall under the "written-by-a-celebrity-famous-for-something-other-than-writing-children's-books" category, the book is still fairly sloppy and in need of an editor.
It's not impossible to imagine Colfer suggesting the idea and handlers assuming his book would be as terrible as most written by actors (and hired the subsequent team of writers/polishers/editors) only to find out that Colfer actually has some talent and certainly vision, and to move in the other direction and basically to leave him to his own devices.
The book has qualities that suggest to the "for-young-adults-Scholastic" classic model I initially mistook it for being: a dysfunctional home, offbeat siblings, a rip in their quotidian that allows for fantasy. Unfortunately, sloppy and sometimes just lazy writing middles those qualities down into a bland, barely-readable mishmash of cliches and bad metaphors.
The sad part is the genuine talent that appears to be at the heart of Colfer's work. His classroom scenes in particular suggest Betty MacDonald's (of Mrs Pigglewiggle fame) zaniness, and while his re-imagining of fairytales is not particularly as creative as it could be, the ways he has them intersect is undeniably appealing.
This shouldn't be a published work. This is a very rushed first draft, hopefully with notes jotted extensively in the margins, about to be processed several times by editors and by the author himself.
This is apparently the first of a series and while it could be optimistically suggested that it will only go up from here (Colfer's work could acquire a team of editors to work with him and produce a polished result), I'm not sure that it's worth sticking around to find out when there are so many others doing it so much better.
Notable: If you were wondering, no, there were no "twists" of the sort you might have expected (or hoped for).
One thing that caught me a little off-guard was the comment from the goofy troublemaker brother to his teacher's pet goody-goody sister (imagine how much more interesting the story could've been had the roles been reversed). I realize that complaining about children's dialog being unrealistically adult is about as rote a complaint as historical accuracy in bodice-rippers, but
“The twins waited for nightfall to trael across the river to the palace. They carefully placed the log into the river and then entered the water themselves. It was unbearably cold. Conner made a high-pitched gasping sound as soon as he was waist deep.
Whoo! It's so cold, I think we may be twin sisters now," he said through rattling teeth.rdquo; (pg 300)
The twins are supposed to be in sixth grade in presumably the modern era (the book is recommended to grades four through sixth). If at twelve they know about genital shrinkage in cold temperatures, would they really refer to it as a boy becoming a girl? Isn't that kind of "old-fashioned" (and more than a little offensive/inaccurate)?
It's interesting to imagine someone explaining shrinking genitals to a kid since presumably they'd ask ("How is the cold going to make him a girl?"), but the attached gendering is something pretty unnecessary and prone to problems.