When I reserved this, I asked the librarian if she had read it or then liked it. Her response was tepid. I offered that I had often not liked Avi in the past and wondered how much different (and better) this might be than his previous to win the Newbery (although his Nothing But the Truth is an Honor book). She supposed that if I hadn't liked him in the past, I wouldn't like this one: she hadn't either.
I started hopeful: it's set in England in 1377, points more in its favor than contemporary America (Truth) or even a ship (Charlotte Doyle) and I know I've read others by him obviously unmemorable. It's less clumsy than, say, Witch Child in illuminating for a 21st-century young reader certain points of daily life before electricity and running water without sounding like a lecture, and that's fine. But last summer while at Charenton I began a library book APB had just finished and recommended, called The Physician, also set in England in the middle ages, whose boy protagonist begins by being apprenticed to a juggler--well, a physician who attracts his patients with a juggling performance. That's as far as I got in The Physician, but it's enough to make me, already dubious about Avi, see this book's premise as derivative. Plus I read Lord Valentine's Castle, I'm sorry to say, I think on the recommendation of a man I was probably sleeping with at the time, I'm sorry to say, and where it wasn't tedious it was about juggling.
Eh. Newbery hasn't had a dud (that I've read) since...since...1962's Bronze Bow, though Elizabeth George Speare could certainly write herself a good Witch of Blackbird Pond (although what the ALA was thinking to award the medal to nonfiction light on the writing, like Lincoln: A Photobiography, I don't know. A good book, just not Newberyish). And this isn't a dud yet, on page 60. I doubt its target audience has read (or begun) The Physician or Lord Valentine's Castle so if I condemn it I'll do so on its own faults. Or merits. Whichever.
Edited to say: dud. An innocuous story, which is not what a Newbery ought to be. A bildungsroman (a term I probably apply far too broadly), as was Miguel, but with nothing for a reader to take away.
Someone or other who shouldn't have wrote some faux sequels for Jane Austen, The Third Sister about Margaret Dashwood and one for Georgianna Darcy whose name I forget. (Others have been okay, or, if not particularly Austeny, like Eliza's Daughter, at least an adequate story.) My problem with those two is that throughout the entire book you know Margaret and Georgianna are in love with Wrong-Seeming Men yet that they must marry by the end of the books. So you wait for the Wrong-Seeming Man to redeem himself, as Darcy did, or for the Right Man to show up. On both occasions, someone about whose personality and stake we know nothing swoops in at the end to claim his prize. Totally unsatisfying, even more than you ought to expect when you read faux Austen.
Same thing with Avi. Several potential plotlines to develop and he finishes one, an important one, with little but dialog exchanged to gauge the credibility the action.
You know, it could be his whole Sting-Prince-Cher-Madonna thing that I just don't cotton to.
Hookay, it happened again. Whenever I read Witch Child and The Watcher, one after the other, I noticed that both authors used the device of a coin broken in halves as mementos for people who're separating. Yesterday in ...And Now, Miguel, Miguel has a lucky stone with a hole through it. I am just starting Coraline and the protagonist is given a stone with a hole through it as a charm for luck or safety.
Edited to add: pleasantly ghoulish. I immediately thereafter started Sandman (again), where someone is being read Through the Looking Glass. I didn't need to read that that to know that Lewis Carroll must haunt Gaiman's dreams.
My plan, this week, is to grow moss. Which means to prove that I have neither self-respect nor willpower nor discipline when I don't have a chaperon. I intend to eat meals the size of my head, frequently; to read a bunch of books, probably more of the children's than the adult's variety; and to set anti-landspeed records for inertia. Yesterday the obvious excuse not to work outside was the rain; today it's the wind. Also today it's that I got really fucking frustrated at Microsoft Word today, having manually to format shit that would be automated were my software to behave correctly, and then keeping my tongue when after that, the authors wanted to change this and that which meant I redid a lot of that formatting. Tomorrow, though, I might have to get up. Because there's just one small problem in my plot to devolve into an invertebrate, and that is that there is not a lick of chocolate in the entire house.