Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

Posted on March 8, 2024 by pagesofjulia

My biggest question about this book is, is this the beginning of a series? Because it was so short and maybe a little bit rushed but also left us absolutely on the edge of a sequel, and I’m interested in finding out more.

Upright Women Wanted is under 200 pages, set in an alternative American Southwest under a totalitarian regime with strict control of information and vigilante troops of bandit-sheriffs running small towns. Esther has just run away from home to escape a forced marriage to the former fiancé of her best friend, following that best friend’s execution (by Esther’s father) for possession of resistance literature. The dead best friend was also her secret partner. Esther stows away in a Librarian’s book wagon, hoping the Librarians can straighten her out, in more ways than one, but they will instead open a wider and far more dangerous world than she’d previously imagined. And it might just be a good thing.

Some of the character development and romance goes by a bit more quickly than might have been most satisfying. If queer librarian resisters, spies, and assassins on horseback sound exciting, you should check this one out. That said, there might not be much more than you just saw in the preview. But again, it’s a short little novel, and pretty action packed, and I’m prepared to be excited about book two. Is there a book two??

Rating: 7 synth-pouches of wine.

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The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley by Sean Lusk

Posted on November 10, 2023 by pagesofjulia

An exceptional boy in a loving, if odd, family, surrounded by automatons, must adventure into historical Constantinople to save his father in this debut novel of love and whimsy.

Sean Lusk’s debut novel, The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley, is a strange, spellbinding, imaginative work of magical realism set in 1700s London and Constantinople, exploring Pinocchio-esque questions about what is real, and the many forms of love. It contains no shortage of tragedy, but always retains a charming sense of wonder.

In London in 1754, Abel Cloudesley anxiously paces outside the birthing chamber where his beloved wife, Alice, labors. Zachary Cloudesley’s life begins with his mother’s death; Abel will be a loving father, but at first the experience is clouded by grief.

Abel is a clockmaker, but clocks are only the beginning of his artistry: he creates clockwork creatures, automatons that move and communicate like the real-life animals and humans they mimic. In Abel’s workshop, Zachary suffers a life-changing injury, resulting in the treasured son being sent away to be raised in the safety of his eccentric great-aunt Frances’s home in the country. Zachary’s no-nonsense nurse, Mrs. Morley, and the staunchly feminist Frances round out an unusual family for a very unusual boy. Zachary is a genius, precocious in everything, a great reader and nature lover. He also knows things–the past, the future–that he should not be able to know. When Abel is sent away to distant Constantinople on an odd and dangerous mission, seven-year-old Zachary says, “You should not go, Papa. You know that, don’t you?” Abel knows, but sail he does.

Years later, a teenaged Zachary will set out to rescue his father–believed to be long dead–from imprisonment in the Ottoman court. Zachary is still a deeply intelligent young man, but his studies have been conducted from the English countryside, and these travels will be eye-opening. Readers will delight in following the devoted son as he learns about a broader world, encounters romance, and seeks family. Through these pages are woven the clockwork wonders that have gotten Abel into this mess, and may yet get him out.

The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley is enchanting. Abel and Zachary are sensitive, compelling characters; Mrs. Morley and Aunt Franny are stalwart and impressive female heroes in two very different styles; Mrs. Morley’s daughter (raised alongside Zachary nearly as a sister) offers her own development and young romance; and Abel’s gifted employee Tom, an indispensable friend to the family, is not quite what he appears.

Lusk’s engrossing novel wraps a coming-of-age narrative in a historical setting, with lovable characters and dreamlike twists. Don’t miss Lusk’s memorable, sweet, original debut.

This review originally ran in the October 12, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 peacock feathers.

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Maximum Shelf: A Short Walk Through a Wide World by Douglas Westerbeke

Posted on November 3, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Maximum Shelf is the weekly Shelf Awareness feature focusing on an upcoming title we love and believe will be a great handselling opportunity for booksellers everywhere. The features are written by our editors and reviewers and the publisher has helped support the issue.

This review was published by Shelf Awareness on October 12, 2023.

Douglas Westerbeke’s debut novel, A Short Walk Through a Wide World, is a wild romping adventure, a poignant tale of relationships and interconnectedness, and a compelling journey of self-discovery. The worldwide (and possibly beyond) travels of Aubry Tourvel have something for every reader, with a momentum that’s impossible to turn away from.

“The paper is clean and white–she hasn’t drawn her first line–so when the drop of blood falls and makes its little red mark on the page, she freezes. Her pencil hovers in her hand. Her heart, like it always does, gives her chest an extra kick.” With these opening lines, readers meet Aubry mid-scene, in a marketplace in Siam. Her illness has returned. First the blood, “And then the pain strikes–a terrible, venomous pain–a weeping pain, like a nail through a rotten tooth.” The first pages are adrenaline-fueled, as Aubry runs for her life.

Aubry recounts her past in fragments to people she meets along the way. In early chapters, she narrates the beginning of this singular illness, this mysterious curse that appeared when she was nine years old in 1885, where her family lived in Belle Époque Paris. She ran, and “Every step made her breath flow easier, made the pain slip a little farther away. She knew this would be her strategy from now on. She would outrun it.” Precocious Aubry quickly intuits the inexplicable rules of her condition: she can never revisit the same place twice, can never retrace her steps, can stay in one place only two to three days, four at the most, before she must move on. And so begins a life of constant travel. From a privileged, spoiled childhood, Aubry becomes resourceful, wary, self-sufficient, standoffish, and eventually a kind–but always watchful–wanderer.

Aubry fashions a spear and becomes adept with it. She travels mainly on foot and by boat, doing odd jobs, fishing and hunting. Her relationships, while often meaningful, last only days. One of her most significant love affairs lasts a whole week, aboard a moving train, until the train breaks down and she must leave her lover behind. A few acquaintances try to travel with Aubry, but it becomes increasingly clear that she is special, able to withstand more than the average human. On foot, she crosses the Himalayas, and the Calanshio Sand Sea in the Libyan desert. She finds libraries filled with wordless books containing only pictorial storytelling–to overcome language barriers–and discovers that these libraries, perhaps a little magic, are for her alone.

The workings of Aubry’s unique, global-scale library are never clear, even to her. There, she finds everything she needs: sustenance, warmth, information. “It comforts her that for every path she’s taken during her many revolutions around the world–for every individual footstep, it seems–there’s a story. Something once happened, a past that is not hers.” This is what library-lovers everywhere have long known, but it is also a device that allows for one of the more magical elements of Aubry’s strange travels. “‘It seems,’ said [one brief acquaintance], ‘that the world you travel through is not the same world we travel through.’ My God, thinks Aubry. My God.”

It is a lonely life. People she meets tend to “romanticize her illness. They imagine an eternal holiday, which is ludicrous, of course. Does anyone really want an eternal holiday? A holiday is a temporary break from the routine, a chance to shake off the dust of habit, to experiment with new foods and customs, but then to return, perhaps borrowing from the outside, perhaps rejecting it–but either way, a return.”

Westerbeke’s imagination is prodigious, and the details with which he fleshes out this absorbing tale are equally abundant. A Short Walk Through a Wide World abounds in the tastes, smells, textures, and sensations of a woman who lives almost from moment to moment. Her haphazard travels, rarely planned, are always in response to a sharp pain or a nosebleed, or worse. She stays just a half-step ahead of the illness which she’s come to personify. “It clung to her back, fingers and toes screwed into her bones, gasping and grinning at all the places she went, a happy demon mounted forever on her shoulders.” She speaks to it, and it responds.

Aubry’s travels arrange themselves into a moving story, often sad, but also filled with joy and fun. Aubry has a special weakness for children, and delights in engaging with them wherever she goes, from a ferry in Siam to a tribe in the Congo. This expansive tale offers new ways of looking at the world–wise, questioning, as rich in emotional depth as it is in detail. The characters she meets are numerous and diverse: New Zealanders rescue her in Siam; an Ottoman fisherman encourages her to gain a meaningful skill; an Indian prince befriends her; a Tibetan nomad invites her to hunt a mysterious beast; a Mexican journalist tracks her down in Alaska. A Short Walk Through a Wide World is utterly engrossing, a world–worlds–to get lost in. In these riveting, swashbuckling adventures, tender meditations on relationships, and philosophical musings about travel and home, every reader will find something to love.

Rating: 9 horned cucumbers.

Come back Monday for my interview with Westerbeke.

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Maximum Shelf: Outlawed by Anna North

Posted on September 28, 2020 by pagesofjulia

Maximum Shelf is the weekly Shelf Awareness feature focusing on an upcoming title we love and believe will be a great handselling opportunity for booksellers everywhere. The features are written by our editors and reviewers and the publisher has helped support the issue.

This review was published by Shelf Awareness on September 16, 2020.

Outlawed by Anna North (America Pacifica; The Life and Death of Sophie Stark) is a wild, ripping western with a firm feminist bent, set in an alternative North America.

“In the year of our Lord 1894, I became an outlaw.” Some decades ago, the Great Flu decimated the national population, the United States government collapsed and, in its place, the people established Independent Towns west of the Mississippi. Ada has grown up in the Independent Town of Fairchild, where she has lived a good enough life. Her mother is a skilled midwife; Ada excels in her own training in the profession and helps care for her beloved three younger sisters. She marries at 17, as girls do when they become able to reproduce, and so begins the serious and sacred work of trying to become pregnant. But when six months pass, then more, Ada begins to worry. To be barren in Fairchild is a crime punishable by death.

At the end of a year, her husband’s family rejects her, and Ada’s mother sends her to the Sisters of the Holy Child, hoping to keep her safe. In the nunnery’s library Ada continues to read and study, seeking the truth about infertility; her mother had taught her, against popular belief, that barrenness was a medical condition and not witchcraft, but the details are not well understood. It is not a wish to have children herself, but Ada’s hunger for knowledge that drives her from Holy Child and further west, to join up with the infamous Hole in the Wall Gang. This band of outlaws is led by the Kid, “nearly seven feet tall, the sheriff said, and as strong as three ordinary men put together. His eye was so keen he could shoot a man dead from a mile away, and his heart was so cold he’d steal the wedding ring from a widow or the silver spoon from a baby’s mouth.” But like everything else Ada has been taught, these stories aren’t quite accurate. The Kid is charismatic, beloved and possibly dangerous in entirely different ways than the rumors insist, and the outlaws are not what they are thought to be. It is only in the West that it occurs to Ada that “perhaps barren wives were not hanged for witches everywhere.”

Outlawed is a delightful tale of adventure, rebellion, the importance of knowledge and the value of family–however family is made or defined. With the Hole in the Wall Gang, Ada finds unexpected freedoms and fluid gender roles, and is forced to consider what she has to offer her new friends and the world. “I don’t think I’m much of a threat,” she tells the Mother Superior when she leaves Holy Child, but her story is just beginning.

In her new life of crime, Ada learns to care for horses, to shoot and to be a member of a community she’s chosen and loves. As the gang plans and attempts robberies, North’s narrative is often lighthearted, with style, humor and a sense of fun, but her protagonist never forgets the high stakes. Ada meets men and women who are not what they seem, including an actor who’s studied male dress, movements and mannerisms because “the male roles were the most prestigious.” She becomes aware of not only gender but also race as a point of prejudice and contention in North’s version of the Wild West. She learns new skills to supplement her midwife training; she treats gunshot wounds and mental illness and comes to be called Doctor. She learns to carry herself differently. But she never stops worrying about the sisters she’s left behind in Fairchild, who are vulnerable to punishment simply for their relationship to Ada, “a barren woman, a discarded wife, an outlaw wanted for cursing women’s wombs even though I had helped coax dozens of babies into the world.” Ada does not take naturally to the business of holding up stagecoaches or robbing banks, but her devotion to her new group of friends forces her to take risks. Eventually she must choose to invest in their future, or strike out on her own again.

Part of the genius of Outlawed is that its feminist themes juxtapose neatly with the traditionally male-dominated western genre. In Ada’s first-person narration, the critical significance of reproduction and fertility seems simply a background element, central to the workings of North’s fictional world, which is in itself curious and thought-provoking. Ada’s voice is perfectly authentic and easily believable: her developing rebellion is organic, born of her love for her family and friends. She is a maverick, and the best kind of heroine: adventurous, innovative, self-doubting but brave, with intense loyalty and a magnetic, compelling curiosity.

Outlawed boasts a lively, quick-paced plot, a well-constructed alternate-historical setting and an indomitable heroine. While North clearly has something to say about gender in society and the politics of reproduction, this novel is absolutely a work of energetic literary entertainment first. For all readers in all times.

Rating: 7 drops.

Come back Friday for my interview with North.

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The Plover by Brian Doyle (audio)

Posted on June 12, 2019 by pagesofjulia

And no thinking on this trip, either, he said to the gull floating over the stern. No recriminations and ruminations. No logs and journals and literary pretensions neither. Thinking can only, like the boat, proceed forward.

Thank goodness for Brian Doyle. I had been in a bit of a blue funk and looked for something cheerful to pick me up; a Brian Doyle novel was just the thing, I thought, and I was right.

Based on Martin Marten and Mink River, I foolishly thought the plover in this story would be an actual plover – a bird. Ha! No, the Plover is a boat. (And to be fair, the protagonist of Mink River turned out to be a crow.) Classically, for Doyle, we open with epigraphs: from Robert Louis Stevenson, George Harrison, and Annie Dillard. (Perfect.) Then we plunge right in and meet our protagonist, an eccentric fellow (aren’t they all) named Declan O’Donnell. An Irishman (read here with an accent) who hails from the Oregon coast and a fractured family, he’s invested himself totally in a small trawler he calls the Plover for perfect reasons. He’s “edited” her by, among other things, fitting a small mast and sails; and he heads off from Oregon, intending “west and then west.”

Declan is explicitly trying to escape humankind and all their “emotional complications… expectations and illusions… analysis and explications.” But of course, he is immediately joined (page 1) by a gull, to whom he holds forth at length: we already suspect he enjoys having the company. And the comedy of the book is in all the passengers he takes on: the narrative tells us that the census reaches over one thousand, if we count barnacles, but it also at one point reaches seven human beings. Declan is in fact a more social creature than he aspires to be, and that’s the central storyline here: Macmillan’s blurb calls it “the story of a cold man melting,” and I think that’s not too far off, although I might amend to call it the melting of a man who tried to be cold. Declan has had some trauma in his life, and his reaction is to try and shut himself off. He fails, and that’s one of the joys of this book.

There are so many joys, although also much trauma. Declan’s best friend, Piko, is one of Doyle’s exuberant characters – “he had legally changed his name for a while to an adjective, he played the flügelhorn in a jazz band that deliberately played only such events as weddings between Lutherans and Presbyterians and baptisms of babies named for animals, and he had once flensed a whale by himself, over the course of three weeks, on the beach, living in a tiny blue tent about the high tide line. He was one of those guys who seemed electrified by everyone and everything, the kind of guy who totally lit up when he saw a sparrow-hawk helicoptering over a corn shock, the kind of guy who liked every kid he ever met and every kid liked him… But he had been wounded by a storm, this guy, his little daughter hit by a bus driver when she was five years old waiting for the kindergarten bus, and his light was dimmed.” Pippa, the daughter, cannot move except for a possibly meaningless fluttering of her hands; she cannot speak except to make possibly meaningless squeaks and coos that sound like bird sounds. But she has a rich inner life. (Spoiler: Piko and Pippa will become passengers and crew on the Plover.) Both Piko and Pippa are very Doylesque characters: peculiar, delightful, brimming, wounded. There are more of these in the book – a Doyle novel is made of such characters. Again: just what I needed.

So Declan explores the world, becoming increasingly reluctant to set foot on land. He cares for his boat and weathers storms. He picks up passengers and rails against their very presence, but still they come on. He and his growing crew-family have a conflict with another ship and its ill-intending captain, but everything comes out well in the end. As the small, green, red-sailed Plover swells in population, tensions rise, but so does the incidence of miracles. Doyle is unafraid to take his whimsical characters to the brink of death and then snatch them, in unlikely fashion, back. Once you’ve made peace with this inclination (and I have), it’s great fun.

Declan is a devoted reader of the Irish author and orator Edmund Burke, who is much quoted here, along with a reference or two to Robert Louis Stevenson (upon whom Doyle would base a later book). Through these outside voices, through Declan’s own and the wise voices of his friends and comrades (including one very quirky minister for fisheries and marine resources and foreign affairs), The Plover is a novel of philosophy as well as the story of one plucky little boat and its captain.

David Drummond’s reading feels perfect to me. I love the many different voices, accents, rhythms he plays. Pippa’s exuberance, Declan’s grumpy Irish lilt, the minister’s volubility and interesting speech patterns, and so much more. (Somebody should write a paper on the minister’s word coinages.) A good narrator makes all the difference, and I’m so glad we got a good one here.

Doyle’s usual strengths are all present. Characters and story are brimming and bubbling with good cheer even in the face of significant and imaginative tragedy. Sentences are often long, convoluted, and performative of their content. Details are numerous and precise and bizarre. Nothing has changed; this man is a near-perfect novelist, for this reader. I’m still so sad he’s gone.

Rating: 8 crucial silences between notes.

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The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World: A Novel of Robert Louis Stevenson by Brian Doyle

Posted on April 26, 2017 by pagesofjulia

With enthusiasm and verve, in the style his fans love, Brian Doyle re-creates a novel Robert Louis Stevenson intended to write.

john-carson

In a novel with layers of authors, Brian Doyle (The Mighty Currawongs; Martin Marten) honors the art of storytelling. The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World is firmly based in fact: Robert Louis Stevenson boarded for some months at the home of Mrs. Carson in San Francisco while waiting to marry his love, Fanny. He conceived of a novel based on the tales of his landlady’s husband, but never wrote it. Doyle imagines what stories Mr. Carson might have told, and the style in which Stevenson might have written them. Doyle calls upon other published accounts of Carson’s and Stevenson’s acquaintances, including Mark Twain and scientist Alfred Russel Wallace.

In Doyle’s imagination, Stevenson sits by the fire with Mr. Carson as the latter recounts his voyages around the world as a seaman and his experience as a Union solider in the Civil War. This talented storyteller takes Stevenson (and Doyle’s reader) through the jungles of Borneo, over the rocky hills of Irish islands, from coast to coast of Canada in winter, to Australia’s Sydney Harbor and to the battlefield at Gettysburg. Mrs. Carson turns out to be as fine a narrator as her husband, and both have a knack for ending on a cliffhanger just as dinner is ready. As he recounts the Carsons’ feats, Stevenson also explores the sights, smells and steep hills of 1880 San Francisco, and touches on his romance with Fanny Osbourne, herself a worthy, headstrong character.

Doyle’s characteristic prose style is effusive, wry, highly descriptive and always passionate about his subjects. Throughout this story of stories runs a thread of commentary on the value and nuances of the storytelling art. Stevenson constantly refers to his ambition and makes notes for future works: “Hyde would be a lovely name for a character,” he muses, and imagines a novel in which a “sudden shocking kidnapping would set the prose to sprinting.” In several passages, Doyle-as-Stevenson extols the power of storytelling, the universal need for tales of adventure, the urgency of getting them out–he even worries what the “disconsolate reviewers” might say. Readers hungry for more stories-upon-stories will delight in Doyle’s “Afterword” and “Thanks & Notes,” which are filled with recommendations for further reading (what he calls “homework”).

Stevenson’s rollicking zest for adventure blends happily and seamlessly with Doyle’s unrestrained love of words and life. Adventures offers daring exploits, romance and emotional highs and lows, but perhaps most of all, a celebration of stories. Doyle’s signature style expresses this joyousness perfectly.

This review originally ran in the March 2, 2017 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 stories, of course.

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Ithaca: A Novel of Homer’s Odyssey by Patrick Dillon

Posted on July 27, 2016 by pagesofjulia

This retelling of the Odyssey gives Telemachus more voice than ever before.

ithaca

Homer’s Odyssey recounts Odysseus’s 10-year journey home from the Trojan War, to where his wife and son await him. His adventures along the way take center stage. Ithaca, Patrick Dillon’s retelling, resets that center to the son. With substantially more insight into Telemachus than readers have had before, this version also offers a more fallible Odysseus, with all the drama and yearning of the original.

Dillon remains true to Homer’s setting, but the novel is told in Telemachus’s voice, and the weighty absence of a father he never met defines his existence. At 16, he worries over his role and responsibilities, and his inability to protect his mother: he has no one to teach him how to fight. These interior workings bring Odysseus’s iconic son to light as a nuanced and fully formed character. When the wise warrior Nestor assigns his daughter to be Telemachus’s traveling companion, the story gets an appealing twist: Polycaste is headstrong and capable, and her friendship has much to offer Telemachus. The gods are less present this time around; Telemachus is openly dubious. Veterans of the Trojan War roam Greece as bandits and vagabonds.

Though only slight details are changed, Ithaca is a vibrant and fresh revival; Telemachus’s struggles are illuminated through the use of his own voice. The well-loved classic is present: Penelope is beautiful, determined, fading; the suitors are shocking; Menelaus and Helen fight bitterly; the aging Nestor tries to guide Telemachus true. Dillon’s achievement is in characterization while retaining the heart and passion of Homer.

This review originally ran in the July 8, 2016 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Rating: 8 arrows.

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Luigi’s Freedom Ride by Alan Murray

Posted on March 26, 2015 by pagesofjulia

A novel of love and bicycles, both funny and poignant, beginning in Mussolini’s Italy and traveling around the world.

luigi

Alan Murray (The Wealth of Choices; Showdown at Gucci Gulch) tries his hand at fiction with Luigi’s Freedom Ride, and achieves a rare blend of humor, solemnity and grace in this sweeping tale. Luigi Ferraro was born in 1921, in a small Tuscan village where he learned metalworking and a love of bicycles from his Uncle Cesare. Under Mussolini, Luigi is conscripted into the Italian army with his two best friends and trains in the cycling corps; he escapes and joins a group of partisans resisting fascism, and experiences both love and loss. The heartbroken young man then sets out on an international tour via bicycle and train, visiting Jerusalem and Sri Lanka and circumnavigating Australia, that “furthest place” he’d been seeking. Finally, Luigi dismounts in Sydney, where unexpected good fortune awaits him. With friends, family, love and pain spread around the globe, will he ever make it back to Tuscany?

Murray’s quirky tone is absolutely charming, managing to express both the brutality and ugliness of war as well as the sweetly naive foibles of a young man learning about the wider world. Luigi is deeply endearing: he is well-intentioned but inexperienced, confounded by the English dialects of the Scots, Australians and Americans he meets, loyal and quick to love. Employing the bicycle as a symbol of freedom, fun, adventure and forward movement, Luigi’s Freedom Ride is a novel about hope, self-determination and fresh starts, both heartfelt and surprisingly optimistic.

This review originally ran in the February 24, 2015 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 8 clicks.

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Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (audio)

Posted on January 30, 2015 by pagesofjulia

treasureAfter reading Under the Wide and Starry Sky, I was driven to reread Treasure Island. I suspect that I only ever read the Great Illustrated Classics version, in fact: and I loved that series for several years, but I worry now about what I missed. (I reread certain of those classics in full later on, but not all. What misconceptions am I still harboring?) Husband and I first attempted this audio version, read by David Buck, on our U-haul drive cross-country this fall. But the Scottish accent, and the story-within-a-story format, proved too difficult for the big loud truck and our navigation of unfamiliar roads. Fair warning: this is not a criticism of the book (or the audiobook), but it is not the most distraction-friendly listen I’ve encountered.

The story itself is, of course, riveting, once you get into it. It is narrated from a distance of some years by the voice of Jim, who is a young boy (perhaps 12 or so?) in the time of his tale. At his father’s seaside inn, Jim assists in hosting a mysterious sailor we call Billy Bones; Billy is apparently frightened of certain other seafaring men, particularly a one-legged man who wishes him ill. When Billy dies – of fright, after a visit from a band of related ruffians – Jim finds a map within the possessions of the deceased. Local community members Dr. Livesey and Squire Trelawney conspire with young Jim to buy and staff a ship to go looking for buried treasure they believe is indicated on the pirate map.

Here Stevenson securely establishes several tropes of pirate fiction. The cook they install on board their ship is peg-legged Long John Silver, who sings “yo ho ho and a bottle of rum,” talks in the pirate-talk (“aye, matey”), and carries a parrot on one shoulder. The treasure map, marked with an X, takes them to a deserted island, where the shipmates plan a mutiny: Squire Trelawney has haplessly engaged a bunch of pirates for his crew, and they will be captained not by the captain he’s hired, but by Silver himself. By luck, Jim finds out about their scheme in time to warn Trelawney and the doctor, and the three of them take cover – with their honest captain and a few other loyals – on the island, but Silver and his men are bent on treasure and murder. Also by luck, Jim meets a man who identifies himself as Ben Gunn: he was marooned on the same island years ago, by the very same pirates. And he knows where the treasure is.

Originally published as a story for young boys, Treasure Island keeps the pace up and the action quick, after the first few chapters of set-up at Jim’s father’s inn. (Those early chapters do run the risk of wearying the short attention span of young boys and my Husband, though.) The ship’s journey is fraught with danger, but once on Treasure Island the action really ramps up: there are battles, injuries and fatalities, double- and triple- and quadruple-crossings, treasure! and intrigue. I’ll stop with the plotline there. Jim is the unlikely but triumphant hero of this story (again betraying its original audience); by virtue but mostly by luck, he contributes every major piece of action or intelligence throughout. What fun!

Pacing and action are the clear strengths of this adventure tale, which is as it should be. David Buck’s narration is fine – he does voices and accents where appropriate – but I think this version probably missed some opportunity for theatrics that this wildly theatrical story offered. It’s still a great yarn, and sets up a number of recognizable pirate jokes we know and love today. It would still suit young boys well (although look out for a slightly slow start).

Rating: 7 pieces of 8.

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The Dark Tower by Stephen King

Posted on December 3, 2014 by pagesofjulia

Just to review the Dark Tower series:

The Gunslinger (I)

The Drawing of the Three (II)

The Waste Lands (III)

Wizard and Glass (IV)

The Wind Through the Keyhole (written last but fitting between books IV and V)

Wolves of the Calla (V)

Song of Susannah (VI)

And here we are with book VII, The Dark Tower.

dark towerHow to even begin? Everything that was wonderful about the first six (or seven) books of this series was at least as wonderful in this, the final installment. I love our characters – and you’ll recall that I love them best when they’re all together, which they are for the most part in this book (meaning, when they split up, they reunite in a fairly speedy manner). (The thing I am perhaps happiest about in this book is that the ka-tet reunites to work as a unit once more. That was what I found most frustrating about Susannah’s Song in particular.) I love the excitement – the many challenges, with the almost assurance that they’ll make it through, right? Because ka-tet? But then again, this is the last book… I love the suspense, and I very much love Stephen King’s prodigious, just about unbelievable imagination – where does he get this stuff? I love that even the minor characters (hello, Irene Tassenbaum) or most short-lived of locations are fully explicated, fully detailed, perfectly real – you can imagine King expanding any one of those vignettes, no matter how minor, into a full-length novel of its own, because that’s how well thought-out they are.

I feel that I need to skip the plot synopsis entirely on this one. It wraps up the series, so you know it’s denouement – nearly 850 pages of denouement, so quite a bit of action & adventure of the BEST kind prior to that wrap-up, but still. I can’t tell you what happens. If you’re that interested, I challenge you to read the whole book after reading the whole series. You won’t regret it.

There is heartbreak. But in brief response to King’s Author’s Note, in which he predicts some reader unhappiness: no, I respect this ending. I am not angry. I’m miserable that it’s over, of course. But there is a beautiful resonance to the way it all ended. Almost makes me want to …go back and start it all over again.

I am deeply amused by the extent to which King plays a role in this one. He had appeared before (I call it self-referential, he calls it metafiction; which of course it is, but I share his negative feelings about that term), but was a major player in this book, to my endless entertainment. Arrogant? Maybe a little, but I’ve bought fully into the idea that Stephen King is a master, so why not play with it? And, regarding my misery that this series is over, the fact that ALL King’s books are interconnected or woven around the Dark Tower, just means that there is more (tenuously related) to read on the subject.

The references are not limited to Stephen King as person or Stephen King’s other books, either; see Harry Potter as well as the Lord of the Rings as well as Homer as well as… pop culture, life, what you will. One of the most fun things about this series is that sense of metaconnection. It’s written into the plot – “there are other worlds than these” – and so it only makes sense.

I love the plot lines for their detail, intricacy, realism, imagination, and enormous world-building power; I love the characters; and I love the masterful way King structures every level of his stories, from dialog all the way out to a 7-(or-8)-book series arc. I am mad for this stuff.

Rating: for the sake of your father, 10 turtles, may it do ya!

This is the first book in the series to have gotten a 10; but call it a 10 for the series as a whole, to boot. Thank you, SK. Keep writing, and watch out for minivans so you can keep writing for a long while yet. Thankee sai.

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