Nearly caught up!
Starting off with some young people's literature, I picked up The Secret Order of the Gumm Street Girls by Elise Primavera because the inside flap read well, describing quirkily amusing characters and an odd little adventure involving The Wizard of Oz.
How disappointing, then, to get into the book and find it remarkably unremarkable. What showed promise in the opening chapters quickly degrades into one of those, "The author threw in a bunch of supposedly fun ideas and hoped to create a story out of them." The Oz connection is strangely corrupted, only marginally leading anywhere, since the girls end up in some un-imaginative alternative-to-Oz lands called "Spoz" and "Spudz" that lack any of the wit and charm of the Oz stories to which the author is ostensibly paying homage. The witches (with names like Cha Cha and Bling Bling -- seriously) are concerned with fashion, makeup, and cell phones (yack) and all-in-all, the book is just a mess. I was shocked to discover that it was a (reasonably) established author (which explained why a big, reputable publisher such as Harper Collins was putting this piece of garbage out there), but it made more sense when I realized that this was her first novel, having been known for picture books. Shock and dismay returned, however, when I heard that she was working on a sequel. Avoid this book, as I had to force myself to finish it just for the sake of finishing it.
More positively, I read The Boy in the Dress, by David Walliams, one half of the duo responsible for Little Britain. Walliams (of "I am a LAY-dee!" fame) even includes an author photo of himself as a young boy, complete with wig and gown, with his sister, proving that he, also, was a boy in a dress from time to time. This breezy little humourous tale took an afternoon to read and, despite the occasional comment for the adult reader, keeps the tale simple and clear. Dennis enjoys fashion secretly, the most beautiful girl in school finds out, and becomes his confidante and accomplice in discovering that he enjoys, on occasion, putting on a dress. Naturally, social disaster occurs. One of the enjoyable elements, I find, is that Walliams bucks the obvious explanation. Dennis just enjoys dressing up now and then. That's all it is. Deal with it. Ha!
Finally, for this entry, a friend of mine recommended Andrew Davidson's The Gargoyle (a Canadian author, no less). An engrossing story of a burn victim's personal struggle to define himself with the assistance of a (possibly) schizophrenic artist, The Gargoyle kept me turning the pages, wondering how all of the stories within the story would be resolved and connected. The title refers to: (a) sculptures made obsessively by the talented young artist; (b) the disfigured protagonist; (c) the true character of the once-beautiful protagonist before his disfiguring accident; and (d) probably even more, to be noted on a second reading some day. While the "once he was made ugly, his inside had an opportunity to become more beautiful" theme isn't a surprising one, the journey of the two characters over the course of several or several hundred years (depending on what you make of it all) was certainly worth the read. Thanks for the suggestion, Rob!
That's it for now. The next time I update, I should be completely up-to-date, and just in time for Labour Day!
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