This book was a hoot. Weird and silly, with plenty of gross out humor and a healthy dash of just the right kind of scary, plus wonderfully fun illustrThis book was a hoot. Weird and silly, with plenty of gross out humor and a healthy dash of just the right kind of scary, plus wonderfully fun illustrations, this is a perfect book for kids of a certain age. (Not my kids, not yet, as the eldest is only five, but in another five or six years I predict this will be a huge hit with them.) Lots of great setups and payoffs and some surprisingly poignant themes of fear and bravery (obviously) and the bond between a father and son—which really got me at the end. Lots of fun, but with a bit of substance too....more
Really enjoyable historical adventure for kids, featuring a plucky, wide eyed boy protagonist and his resourceful, indomitably hopeful butler. Highly Really enjoyable historical adventure for kids, featuring a plucky, wide eyed boy protagonist and his resourceful, indomitably hopeful butler. Highly episodic, which makes for good chapter by chapter bedtime reading, with clever plot surprises, fun characters, and a nicely realized historical setting.
Also nicely captures something of the spirit of the Gold Rush beyond mere naked greed (although there are plenty of characters motivated entirely by that); a kind of kids’ version of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis—shedding the old world to make oneself anew in a wild place.
Picked this up at Sutter’s Fort in Sacramento, which is mentioned in the book. Worth visiting if you’re ever in northern California....more
Very nicely realized medieval story for children, with lots of good historical details (the setting is mid-14th century England, during the reign of EVery nicely realized medieval story for children, with lots of good historical details (the setting is mid-14th century England, during the reign of Edward III, who shows up at the end), a little suspense, and a message about skill, education, art, and disability....more
I remember reading one of the Cooper Kids books in elementary school and enjoying it, so I got this one, the first in the series, to read with my wifeI remember reading one of the Cooper Kids books in elementary school and enjoying it, so I got this one, the first in the series, to read with my wife at night. Hoo, boy.
What an off-putting, poorly written mess. The protagonist for the first half of the book isn’t even Jay and Lila, the titular Cooper kids, but their father. Dr Cooper is impatient, short with his subordinates, dismissive under the guise of being confident in his faith, and generally unlikeable. He also uses a strangely large amount of dynamite for an archaeologist working around millennia-old artifacts.
The Door in the Dragon’s Throat is set in Nepur, a middle eastern Ruritania that Peretti is careful to point out is not majority Muslim, but rather in the grip of “superstitions” that Dr Cooper is only too happy to pooh-pooh the moment he meets the locals tasked with assisting him. Even Indiana Jones knows not to dismiss local lore as a factor in archeological work.
The Door (always capitalized) is an ancient bronze (or bronze-like? it’s unclear) gate of monumental dimensions embedded deep in a cave in the desert. Dr Cooper and his kids are hired by the corrupt sheik-like President of Nepur to excavate the site and open the doors, which are rumored to protect a vast hoard of wealth. But naturally there seems to be more to the Door than mere treasure. Dr Cooper’s assistant, Gozan, cowers and shrieks in fear at every shake and tremble of the earth as they approach the door, to the increasing irritation of Dr Cooper. And the Coopers are haunted by a wizened desert shaman who turns out to be the last of a line of pagan guardians of the key to the Door, who converts to Christianity the moment the Cooper kids tell him to.
If even I start thinking of Edward Said while reading your novel, you’re doing something wrong.
The Door turns out to be the entrance to the pit from Revelation, and behind it an army of demons await their release. (So why do they keep scaring people away from the Door? one wonders.) Only the talismanic power of Jesus’s name, invoked Peretti-style, can stop the Door from opening and releasing the demonic horde.
This book is better written than anything by Dan Brown, a bar so low it’s practically subterranean. The characters are poorly developed, the locals are all oriental stereotypes, and Dr Cooper is really insufferable as what seems intended to be a spokesman for a muscular Christian faith. The kids are practically nonentities for most of the book, though they did become fun to follow once they became involved in the plot. The climactic action is insane and over-the-top but I have to admit it was fun.
More bothersome to me was the book’s theological weirdness. As a kid, I knew people in my church who were wary of Peretti’s fiction because of his fixation on demons and, shall we say, questionable angelology. I can see why now. CS Lewis, in a preface to Screwtape, wrote that there are two mistakes one can make about demons: one is to deny their existence, the other is to obsess over them, their nature, activity, and power. This novel definitely succumbs to the latter temptations.
Super cheesy with a few fun ideas or moments mixed into the dreck. This reads like a low-rent, low church evangelical Exorcist crossed with Indiana Jones. I’d be interested to see this turned into a much toned-down and sobered kids’ TV show or something. As it is, my wife and I barely made it through.
Not recommended.
PS—Dr Cooper also carries .357 Magnum revolver with him, which is a hilarious and weird detail....more
**spoiler alert** This is a weird book, but apparently one that many, many people remember fondly from elementary school. I never read it as a kid but**spoiler alert** This is a weird book, but apparently one that many, many people remember fondly from elementary school. I never read it as a kid but somehow learned through the aether or by osmosis that it was a classic. So when I ran across a copy at our used book store I picked it up. I read a chapter a night to my wife—a middle school English teacher—before bed, and we've enjoyed a lot of good books this way.
You can glean the plot—or rather, the setup—from other reviews. Suffice it to say that sixteen apparent strangers are invited to participate as “heirs” in a game laid out in the will of the purportedly deceased paper tycoon Sam Westing. The winner of the game has to find out who killed Westing; the reward is millions of dollars.
The Westing Game is apparently some kind of tribute to Agatha Christie. Since my wife and I just saw Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express last night, the two should bear comparisons.
Like those in Orient Express, the strangers in The Westing Game all turn out to be connected to the dead man. Unsurprising, maybe, since it's heavily hinted that Westing had them specially chosen for their new apartment building—except for one who, we are told in chapter one, was a mistake. But the characters don't seem to know they're all connected, not at first, even the ones who turn out to be blood relatives of Westing. The “strangers” in Orient Express intentionally conceal their relationships; the strangers in this book don't—they're just minding their own business until they're invited to the reading of Westing’s will, and they come across as dummies as a result.
In trying to make heads or tails of this book, I've read that the author was making it up as she went along. That, if true, explains everything.
The plot as such seems slapdash, like the kind of mystery I wrote as a kid, with a series of mysterious or inexplicable episodes eventually given a hasty and plot-hole ridden reinterpretation that accounts for at least some of the mystery by the detective at the end. Shades of Lost, perhaps. There are a series of bombings and thefts that turn out to have nothing to do with the plot; they're just a lot of loose threads or dead ends—“red herrings,” if you believe Raskin was intending that, which I can't. Important information is introduced haphazardly, leaving you wondering at what point some characters actually turned their brains on.
Grace Windsor Wexler seems to be posing as an actual niece of Westing to legitimize her claim to part of the fortune, and gradually turns out to have been an actual niece of Westing, who—forgot? Never mentioned or had anything to do with Westing until he was dead? It's unclear. There's a complicated runaround involving her maiden name later, too. Judge Ford turns out to have been the daughter of Westing’s cleaning woman and to have lived in Westing’s house and to have played chess with the old man as a girl—and turns out to have been paired with a disguised Westing for the game. And yet we don't learn about her past until halfway through and she never once suspects her partner—or at least not until the end, when you get that modicum of order imposed on the chaos, and just before Westing-in-disguise drops dead (or does he???). Nothing ever really comes of the mistaken identity of one of the apartment owners, either—it gets handwaved near the end. And one wonders how the apartment was rented to the wrong person in the first place, when the realtor was also Westing in disguise.
A lot of people love Turtle Wexler, another one of those precious, precocious little girl geniuses that populate so much children's lit. I found her annoying. She also only emerges as the true protagonist in the last quarter of the book, by which time I actually cared more about other characters and was disappointed to see them fall off in importance. The disabled Chris Theodorakis, often dismissed by the others because of his disability but one of the only consistently smart and observant characters in the plot, not only gradually falls away but also has his disability miraculously healed by new medicine researched by another character, a medical intern who has maybe ten pages of real presence in the story. Again, it smacks of story elements introduced with no plan.
The book was also poorly written. I've never seen more comma splices in a professionally edited—and award winning—book. Sure, that's a rule you can break with a purpose in mind (e.g. parallel thoughts), but it seems slapdash here, along with everything else.
A promising setup and some fun wit fizzled. Maybe The Westing Game will grow on me, but I doubt it. It was too disjointed, too confusing, too haphazardly “plotted” to be rewarding upon meditation. It might be good enough to hoodwink and entertain fifth graders, but it doesn't pay off for an adult, and a book that's not worth reading both as a kid and an adult isn't worth it.
A genuinely powerful moral and emotional dilemma in the last seventeen pages is undermined by the first hundred. It did not help my impression of The A genuinely powerful moral and emotional dilemma in the last seventeen pages is undermined by the first hundred. It did not help my impression of The Light in the Forest that I read at the same time, and completely by coincidence, the similar News of the World, by Paulette Jiles. Both are about young white children taken captive by Indians, adopted into the tribe, and eventually ransomed and taken back to their families. One is set in the Ohio Territory and Pennsylvania in the aftermath of the French and Indian War, and other is set in Reconstruction Texas. In both, difficulties ensue.
But where Jiles makes the story about the return itself, and shows the child (a girl, Johanna) growing and bonding with at least one person along the way, Richter's protagonist, a boy named True Son, remains aloof and haughty, if not outright antagonistic, toward everyone around him. The nearest he comes to bonding is his toleration of the younger brother he has never met, Gordie. Jiles refuses to romanticize either frontier life or Indian culture, and realistically depicts the psychological wounds Johanna carries out of captivity. Richter's True Son has similar problems, but he hates everything about white culture, and Richter gives us no reason to believe he is wrong; he lays on the "noble savage" tropes with a trowel and peoples his novel with all kinds of unlikable characters: True Son's hypochondriac mother, his genial but materialistic father, and his murderously anti-Indian uncle. (The uncle is one of the historical "Paxton Boys," who turned vigilante when they became fed up with Pennsylvania's Quaker leadership, which had tried to deal honestly with the Indians and had succeeded up to that point. This is a historical facet that plays almost no role in the plot—beyond giving the uncle a reason to hate Indians—and comes to nothing.) Jiles makes it clear that, despite Johanna's assimilation among her abductors, the circumstances of her capture were brutal, with murder, rape, mutilation, and scalping . (Compare the specific example of the German Sisters, an incident from the same time and place as Jiles's story.) True Son protests the Indians' innocence of any crimes, whether stealing or murdering children, and then steals his father's rifle and partially scalps his uncle the first chance he gets. His dilemma only arises after he returns to his tribe and, on a raid, sees that a fellow warrior has taken a child's scalp (easier to kill and scalp her than carry her along, the warrior says), though how True Son could have been abducted and lived with the Indians for a decade without seeing something like this before is... questionable.
I keep referring to the dilemma at the end. Apparently Richter means this to be an awakening for True Son, but until this point, again, Richter gives us no reason to believe that the whites aren't as stupid and evil as True Son thinks they are, and that Indian life isn't as peaceful and harmonious as True Son says it is.
The climax is powerful, because True Son is confronted with a reality he'd rather not face, and a choice with no positive outcome for himself, and it is resolved with melancholy poignancy by his adoptive Indian father. But with the hundred pages of tedium leading up to this point, it feels unearned. The final moments also fall back into the romanticism that burdens the rest of the book.
Not recommended. Read Jiles's News of the World instead, which is just as poignant, more realistic, and better written than The Light in the Forest....more
Read to Sarah over a couple of weeks. Fun historical adventure set in a believable but kid-friendly version of Elizabethan London (one would not realiRead to Sarah over a couple of weeks. Fun historical adventure set in a believable but kid-friendly version of Elizabethan London (one would not realize after reading this book that Southwark was full of prostitutes, but that's okay). Draws nice attention to speech and dialect and the day-to-day life of a troupe of "players" in a working theater. Some nice cameos by historical figures, including the Queen in her decrepitude and Shakespeare himself, about whom the author maintains a nice but not too self-aware sense of mystery. The ending felt a little slapdash, to be honest, but the novel as a whole was enjoyable and the characters finely drawn. Looking forward to reading the sequels....more
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