Y'All Drive Me Crazy With Your Adult Over-Caution

Island of the Aunts by Eva Ibbotson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I see a lot of objections in the reviews of this book to the "kidnapping" device of the story.  Adults are having a big problem with the concept of kidnapping - but not the fantasy.  I think we often stint on giving credit to children's intelligence.  You only have to look at the cover of this book (with the giant eye of the Kraken and the mermaid) to see this is a book of fantasy.  The first sentence tells you what you already know, that kidnapping children is not a good idea.  Nor, I might add, is luring them away. 
The author has to find a way to get three children from their mundane or painful lives to another place.  One of them has to be a mistake.  No sane child who is old enough to read this would make the assumption that being kidnapped is a fun thing to have happen.  The children in the book know what kidnapping is really about - it's about being tied up and awful things happening.  They have been taught properly.  But this is a book of fantasy where things don't happen as expected in real life. 
I think we need to let go of our adult sensibilities (we read murder mysteries, don't we, and we don't complain about people getting killed or tortured in them for our pleasure or it leading to readers who will go out and murder in real life) and enter this fantasy world that Ibbotson creates where there are nice people and not-nice people who do wicked things for what they think are good reasons and have silly opinions on "aristos" or men or whatever. 
Ibbotson's work is great fun to read.  There's lots of imagination and gentle humor and they are slightly sillier than, say, Diana Wynne Jones's books. Another fantasy writer who would appall adults and raise the hairs on the necks of kids is John Bellairs. 



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It's a Long, Long Way from May to ...

The Professor's Daughter by Joann Sfar

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I was utterly charmed by the story, the illustrations, and the printing.  The cavorting with mummies reminded me of the Adèle Blanc-Sec books, but this story is slightly less gruesome than those.  True, there are poisonings and shootings, but this is a love story between Imhotep IV and the daughter of the professor who planned to put him on display.  While capturing the surreal, the exquisite drawings evoke the past with the regularity of their size and the monochrome treatment of the early part of the stories that gradually increases in color as the mummy's life becomes more ... fraught.


The plot itself begins almost halfway into the story.  We don't know how the mummy came to be found or was discovered to be alive - only that the professor's daughter has dressed him in her father's clothes and taken him out for what can only be described as a date.  Imhotep IV lives up to his proper English clothing for only a short time and then a taste of tea inebriates him and what started as a harmless outing turns into high adventure and courtroom drama!  This short book leaves you crying for prequels! 



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Oy! It's Raining Mrs. Danvers!

First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This was hard to follow. I think the Nursery Crimes stories are more linear. Well, you get into time travel and everything goes arse over bristols, dunnit? There are so many minor plots going on, just like one of them tv shows with all the interweaving plots that are supposed to be making us smarter. I guess I just haven't been watching them.
Thursday's troubles are legion in this book: a teenage son who resolutely behaves like a teenage son and not the chronoguard genius he grew up to be that she met in other stories; she's mentoring both of her fictional selves at Jurisfiction, book reading is declining fast and the fictional world only has crackpot ideas for reviving it; apparently history is going to fold up on itself and time as we know it will end because they've neglected to invent time travel and have been merely accomplishing it on the strength of it having been invented at some point; and, Where's Jenny? Also, everyone's trying to kill her as usual.
It's just so nice to see a 50+ female character with a family and a nice job laying carpet (ha!) so active!
Am still listening to the audiobook, which is okay, but doesn't have the characterization to it that, say, Nigel Planer brings to things.

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