This came up again while reading The Charlatan’s Boy by Jonathan Rogers.

Here is the publisher’s description:

As far back as he can remember, the orphan Grady has tramped from village to village in the company of a huckster named Floyd. With his adolescent accomplice, Floyd perpetrates a variety of hoaxes and flimflams on the good citizens of the Corenwald frontier, such as the Ugliest Boy in the World act.

It’s a hard way to make a living, made harder by the memory of fatter times when audiences thronged to see young Grady perform as “The Wild Man of the Feechiefen Swamp.” But what can they do? Nobody believes in feechies anymore.

When Floyd stages an elaborate plot to revive Corenwalders’ belief in the mythical swamp-dwellers known as the feechiefolk, he overshoots the mark. Floyd’s Great Feechie Scare becomes widespread panic. Eager audiences become angry mobs, and in the ensuing chaos, the Charlatan’s Boy discovers the truth that has evaded him all his life—and will change his path forever.

My first mistake was not really thinking of this as a young adult book. I guess I vaguely knew that but when I picked up the book I didn’t have that clearly in my mind and it affected my reaction.

But then knowing that it is YA what expectations should I have?

I love the setting and the personality and voice of the main character, Grady, but found the story dragged and held little suspense. But this might be due to “adult” expectations so your mileage may vary.

The premise of the story is far from unique: orphan boy seeks his real heritage; wants to connect with people and “home” in a way he has been unable to do since being given up by his real parents.

But the setting for this is more creative. The story takes place in Corenwald a sort of pre-industrial revolution old world type place with wagons and cow rustlers (which I believe is also the setting of his previous The Wilderking Trilogy). And of course the central plot revolves around the Feechie – a mythical swamp people that Grady and his mentor/guardian Floyd use as a money making ruse.

Rogers does a good job of introducing the characters and pulling the reader into the story. The dialog and character interaction evoke the author’s beloved South and give the story a unique tone and feel. He does a good job of situating the characters in this place in a way that is natural and feels authentic – it is smooth read.

But after the set-up the story just spins its wheels. Floyd and Grady travel around preparing the Feechie scare and I kept wondering when something significant was going to happen. Instead there were almost anecdotal chapters with Grady and Floyd in different towns. These chapters felt like filler rather than consequential action.

By the time the story picked up the pace again it was over – with a promise of more to come in 2011.

Now it could be that the author kept the story simple because it is for young people. But in the age of Harry Potter and other long and complex fantasy series is this really necessary? Or it could be taste. Maybe some like a story that is simple and ambles along without rushing.

For me the interesting setting, characters, and initial story line were not enough to overcome the lack of tension or pace. In the middle of the book I wasn’t sure what the point was exactly.  And not to be condescending, but I saw the ending coming from very early on.

And while I should know better than to be taken in by back cover blurbs, Andrew Peterson set me up to be disappointed. The fellow author claimed the story was “C.S. Lewis and Mark Twain rolled into one.”

Let’s just say the book didn’t quite approach that level for me. I can appreciate a literary novel that is more about language and the art of prose than it is about plot and action but Rogers often skillful use of Southern idiom and style just wasn’t enough to overcome the lack of more traditional “genre” ingredients. Besides, since when is YA fantasy fiction supposed to be approached like a literary novel? Will ten-year-olds appreciate the prose?

(For the record, it could be my innate Midwestern-ness prevents my enjoyment of the Southern nature and style of this story.)

In the end, I found The Charlatan’s Boy to be a cute and quirky story but one that held little suspense and failed to hold my interest for more than a few chapters.

- Read the first chapter

I received this book for free from WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group for this review.

So when The Magicians by Lev Grossman was released it seemed a must read.  Here is the publishers blurb:

Quentin Coldwater is brilliant but miserable. A senior in high school, he’s still secretly preoccupied with a series of fantasy novels he read as a child, set in a magical land called Fillory. Imagine his surprise when he finds himself unexpectedly admitted to a very secret, very exclusive college of magic in upstate New York, where he receives a thorough and rigorous education in the craft of modern sorcery.

He also discovers all the other things people learn in college: friendship, love, sex, booze, and boredom. Something is missing, though. Magic doesn’t bring Quentin the happiness and adventure he dreamed it would. After graduation he and his friends make a stunning discovery: Fillory is real. But the land of Quentin’s fantasies turns out to be much darker and more dangerous than he could have imagined. His childhood dream becomes a nightmare with a shocking truth at its heart.

I read the book in August but haven’t had a chance to put my thoughts down.  What follows is an attempt to rectify that.

What Lev Grossman attempts to do in The Magicians is both bring this shared love of childhood fantasy adventures into a more adult-like world but also ask the question: “What if something like Narnia really existed?”  These two concepts make up the bulk of the book but they do not always work together.

The first section is – as many critics have noted – basically Harry Potter goes to college.  But despite its derivative nature – or perhaps because Grossman embraces it – this storyline is imaginative and entertaining for the most part.  This is where the basic hook works.  It is interesting to see a “magic is real” type storyline in a different setting and with a different tone and style.

And when things begin to slow down Grossman introduces a creative and well done challenge; a sort of senior project for magicians that involves a trip to the South Pole as geese and using magic to return home.  I also like the meeting in the cellar where each graduate was given a sort of built in emergency defense system as matriculation gift

This first part, however, really does feel like just an introduction.  It very much has the feel of the first book in a series.  Characters are introduced and the settings explored but a lot seems left to discover in further adventures.

The second half of the book is more involved but I am not sure it quite comes together either.  Quentin and his fellow magical graduates come to find out that Filory – the magical world explored in a popular series  from their childhood called Fillory and Further – is not a fictional world but a real place.  And as it turns out, a very dangerous place.

The group faces the challenge together and the result is mostly tragic.  There follows two interludes of sorts.  One where Quentin recovers injuries sustained in the events in Fillory and then his attempt to put his magical life behind him.

All these different pieces and parts – some interesting and entertaining others less so – give the book a sort of stop-start feeling.  It takes a while to get going; gains speed; rushes to a conclusion and then sort of peters out.

As this rundown has probably made clear, I have mixed feelings about The Magicians.  I enjoyed reading it.  It is a creative take, and interesting twist, on a popular genre and, IMO, an aspect of how so many come to be voracious readers as young people through adulthood.

But on the other hand, there is a sense that an opportunity was missed; that possibilities were left on the table; an experiment that didn’t quite work.  In his review in the NYT, Michael Agger notes that maybe this is the nature of the beast:

The Narnia books and the Harry Potter series captivate the young by putting young people in a world where adults are a distant, unsteady presence. “The Magicians” is a jarring attempt to go where those novels do not: into drugs, disappointment, anomie, the place and time when magic leaks out of your life. Perhaps a fantasy novel meant for adults can’t help being a strange mess of effects. It’s similar to inviting everyone to a rave for your 40th-birthday party. Sounds like fun, but aren’t we a little old for this?

There is some merit to this I think.  Perhaps the result is interesting and entertaining but doesn’t quite come together in a neat package like we want it to.

The Complete Review, however, made a different argument which I found compelling.  The book should have been more definitively the start of a multi-book series:

The fact that The Magicians fits so openly in this line of fantasy tales turns out to be one of its more appealing elements. Grossman acknowledges his debts openly, and has some fun with them, and so that works out quite well. What works less well are his other ambitions: surprisingly, he doesn’t take a page from Rowling and Lewis and opt for the multi-volume epic (though a sequel is apparently in the works …), and instead stuffs all his material into far too little space. The resulting odd pacing, and the consequences of it, undermine the whole terribly: spread patiently over four or five volumes, this could have been a lot of fun. Crammed into one — think all of Harry Potter and Narnia packed together into four hundred pages — it has its moments but adds up to a surprisingly thin tale.

The more I thought about this the more I came to be persuaded.  The introduction and the hook of the story really are the strongest part.  Building on this to create a better paced, more coherent, first book in a series would have made for a stronger work.  There was even a natural cliffhanger with Quentin’s convalescence and meeting Jane Chatwin.  That was the perfect spot for a “To be continued …”

But alas, it was not to be.  It will be interesting, however, to see how the Grossman takes the story forward in the sequel.

Criticisms aside, I would think anyone who read fantasy when they were younger – or who reads it today – would get a kick of out The Magicians.  Even if it is in some ways a failed experiment it is still an interesting one.

Image via Wikipedia

I will admit that I got suckered into buying the The Tales of Beedle the Bard by J. K. Rowling.  I wasn’t all that tempted to buy it at first.  But then I saw it at the grocery store of all places and heavily discounted.  I then rationalized that I should have it with the rest of the series and who knows it might be interesting, right?

Wrong. Maybe the book is interesting to young Harry Potter enthusiasts, but this adult found the book to be boring and completely devoid of the personality of the series as a whole.

If you don’t know exactly what the book is, let us turn to Wikipedia.  First, its origins in the series:

The Tales of Beedle the Bard first appeared as a fictional book, used as a plot device, in J. K. Rowling’s 2007 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final novel of the Harry Potter series. The book is bequeathed to Hermione Granger by Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. It is described as a popular collection of Wizarding children’s fairy tales, so that while Ron Weasley is familiar with the stories, Harry Potter and Hermione Granger had not previously heard them due to their non-magical upbringing.

Then how it became a book of its own:

The Tales of Beedle the Bard is a book of children’s stories by British author J. K. Rowling. It purports to be the storybook of the same name mentioned in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the last book of the Harry Potter series.

The book was originally produced in a limited edition of only seven copies, each handwritten and illustrated by J. K. Rowling. One of them was offered for auction in late 2007 and was expected to sell for £50,000 ($103,000); ultimately it was bought for £1.95 million ($3.98 million) by Amazon.com, making the selling price the highest achieved at auction for a modern literary manuscript. The money earned at the auction of the book was donated to The Children’s Voice charity campaign.

All well and good I suppose.  Friends thanks and money for charity raised.  But the book itself – the stories and commentary – just are not very interesting.  They seem the kind of thing that might have been useful as an appendix rather than a stand alone book.

The stories themselves are only interesting so far as they are a sort of fairy tale gloss on the wizarding world of HP; sort of The Brothers Grimm for Hogwarts.  I am a big fan of fairy tales and myths but I found the Tales of the Beedle Bard rather flat.  They just don’t have the charge that the best of these type of stories do.  They seem rather like run of the mill children’s stories weekly connected to witches and wizards.  Like Hallmark cards turned into fairy tales.

And the commentary by Rowling and Dumbledore added nothing of interest.  Rowling added her own sort of political commentary in the footnotes and Dumbledore’s notes are bland and uninteresting.  One comes away with the feeling that someone as smart and talented as Dumbledore could not have written down such unimmaginative notes.

The whole thing strikes me as a marketing ploy to raise money for charity.  I suppose that is better than a lame stunt to simply make money, but it still feels like a waste.

Again, maybe young children feel differently but the disconnect between the series and this book is vast.  I hope Rowling sticks to her word and leaves Harry Potter alone.  If this book is any indication, any further work will only harm her reputation.