Tag: middle grade review

A Story Imprisoned by Style in “Furthermore”

“Ferenwood had been built on color,” Tahereh Mafi writes of her protagonist, Alice’s, magical homeland in her middle grade debut. “Bursts of it, swaths of it, depths and breadths of it.” What seems a surprising new direction after her gritty, post-apocalyptic Shatter Me series actually, considering Mafi’s lush, lyrical writing in her excursion into sci-fi, makes perfect sense.

Now, in a genre and category that rewards whimsy, where a witty and knowing narrator can slip right into the action without much fuss, Mafi’s vivid metaphors and heady descriptions of feeling are never at risk of being read melodramatically. For the YA dystopian author who once wrote “every butterfly in the world has migrated to my stomach,” Furthermore, with its adventurous spirit and Wonderland worldbuilding, should be the perfect fit. So why isn’t it?

In terms of reading experience, realizing Furthermore doesn’t know where it’s going is something of a slow burn: the narration style is, at least, outwardly charming, and some of the odd narrative choices it enables––revealing characters’ motivations right away, using flowery prose to explain the depth of a characters’ feelings rather than elaborating through dialogue or description––seem like choices made in good faith.

But after a full fourth of the book passes, and the slow, sputtering engine of our adventure still hasn’t managed to get it rolling, Furthermore becomes less a boundary-breaking experiment in tone and more an empty vessel for pithy sayings and flashy fantasy concepts, where everything that could go wrong when a book plays fast and loose with magic and gleefully chucks the fourth wall, does.

When we first learn about Alice Alexis Queensmeadow, a girl born entirely without color in a world that prizes it above all else, we’re told exactly everything we need to know: her lack of color and how it affects her, her disposition, her relationship with her mother (cold), her relationship with her father (warm), and her special talent (dancing). We are told all of this outright, in a simple scene of her going about her daily life, with hardly any action, and almost all exposition.

Later on, whenever a critical piece of information comes into play, we’re given it, again, outright, at the whims of a narrator who, to Mafi’s credit, certainly reads like someone who’d opt for expediency, but, of course, in consequence, knowing everything makes nothing a surprise.

In one frustrating instance, as Alice runs from her childhood enemy-turned-traveling-companion, Oliver, Mafi not only pauses the action to spend almost a page walking us through her motives; she stops to explain Oliver’s shortsightedness, too, denying the conflict between them the chance to fester into something with true consequences.

Tension, in other words, has no hope of survival in the pages of Furthermore––either the chatty narrator spills information that should’ve been concealed, or otherwise left for inference, or hides it until a convenient moment, and upon its release, the revelation feels arbitrary; something whipped up only to magic a messy situation away.

Where worldbuilding is concerned, Furthermore belongs in a tradition of colorfully embracing the nonsensical, which children’s fantasy has been borrowing from since Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: The School for Good and Evil fits this tradition, as does Catherynne M. Valente’s Fairyland series. When things don’t, strictly speaking, make “sense”––when rules appear out of nowhere and magic is unpredictable––there are myriad opportunities for satire, inventiveness, and zany concepts that would absolutely wreck the suspension of disbelief in a straight-laced fantasy novel.

That’s what it seems like Furthermore is going for here: in the land of Furthermore, where Alice and Oliver travel to recover Alice’s missing father, there’s a village of paper, a village to the left of a signpost called Left, and travel-by-painting, but instead of coming off as whimsical, all these ideas read like bells and whistles, mere distractions from the fact that deep within Furthermore, there isn’t a uniting principle for all this chaos––only a half-baked attempt at one.

Take Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, for instance: Wonderland is a supremely nonsensical place, but that’s by design. The whole point of its nonsense is to face Alice, a person who expects the world to operate logically, with the utterly arbitrary. It’s a decision that reflects character, but can also work as an analogue for the very real experience of coming of age in our labyrinthine and often nonsensical adult world. (Yes, I never shut up about Alice, but this is why.)

In Furthermore, the uniting principle is a heedless disregard for the responsible use of magic, which has made its villages the chaotic places they are, and has also made stray travelers from Ferenwood, a place rich in magic, a delicacy ripe for consumption.

However prominent a threat this explanation provides to our characters, though, we never get the sense that it has any real bearing on the illogic of Furthermore: it serves neither as a proper analogue nor as a suitable reflection of our leads and their flaws.

As a work, Furthermore is defined by two major stylistic choices: the first in the tell-all narrator, and the second in the aforementioned worldbuilding. In a work with unity, these two choices would be inseparable from a book’s themes and characters, justifying themselves on every page, but they often fail to justify themselves in Furthermore. There are major dramatic moments that would be miles better without them, and that’s a terrible sign––no qualities so central to the creative vision of a book should make it suffer this much.

And Furthermore, dear reader, has the makings of an exuberant adventure. It should not have to suffer.

In “The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls,” Legrand Masters the Pointed Children’s Tale

Claire Legrand’s 2012 middle grade debut has a lot to offer: The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls is as charming as it is creepy, fronted by a perfectionist protagonist who likes everything just so…and bolstered by a villain who is startlingly the same. It’s the best kind of horror––one of institutional critique––and the best kind of middle grade––one that interrogates the relationships that children have with the adults in their lives, and doesn’t emerge with complete faith in authority intact.

The eponymous Cavendish Home lies at the edge of Silldie Place, the street of none other than promising, top-of-her-class Victoria Wright. Children have been disappearing from the wealthy suburb of Belleville for some time now, with explanations that would fall apart instantly if anybody cared to poke them (only no one does). This is of little concern for Victoria, who pours herself entirely into her schoolwork and forgets the chills the Home gives her as soon as she passes it by. Her peers keep shuffling out of classes, “ill” and “visiting relatives” almost entirely outside her notice, until one day, she knocks on the door of the brilliant, musically-inclined Lawrence Prewitt, her only friend, and greets his parents in his place. Bearing too-wide, plastered-on smiles, they tell her that he’s staying with his grandmother; perfectly benign, nothing to see here, thankyouverymuch.

Here, Victoria has two options, and, wielding Victoria’s desperate need for approval and vehement distaste for breaking the rules, Legrand very nearly has us convinced that she’ll shrink to the safer one. She can either keep her suspicions to herself and go on being a model student, or she can get to the bottom of it––and, very possibly, in trouble.

One thing to note about Legrand’s setup is that it isn’t nearly as spellbinding as the payoff. Every clue advances something, from the warnings of a few adults already in the know to the ominous shuffling of roaches in every shadow, but the first act does spend some pages re-trodding old ground. There are a couple false starts where you find yourself itching for things to unravel already, only for Victoria to shy away and slip back into safety, with the unsolved mystery still in the air.

In terms of suspense, Cavendish Home has the exact opposite problem as that of Sawkill Girls, Legrand’s young adult horror from 2018, which has deliciously wicked buildup and a reveal that falls short. Ultimately, we know, by virtue of its introduction and by virtue of the title, that the Home is to blame for the disappearances, and to dance around the question at the beginning wastes valuable time that we could’ve spent reading every lurid detail of what life is like in its dastardly clutches.

Once we finally get to do so, a little later than we ought, every chapter afterwards makes it worth the wait. It’s dark and twisted, indeed; a perfectly rendered cabinet of horrors: manners classes meet torture chambers and make a fittingly terrible pair. But all the more memorable is the portrait its terrors––and its evil mistress, Mrs. Cavendish––paint of Victoria.

Victoria’s friendship with Lawrence is mired in condescension. She spends an inordinate amount of time trying to tidy his faults (à la Emma Woodhouse), with the same exacting hand that Mrs. Cavendish uses to transform petulant, rebellious, or otherwise unseemly children into the empty, well-mannered shells that leave the Home––if they leave at all. Legrand cleverly angles Victoria’s greatest weaknesses against the qualities most prized by her role models. Her obedience becomes complicity, her teacher’s-pet tendencies make her a willing victim, and her Belleville-trained tastes prevent her from seeing the corruption at work until it’s almost too late.

Those same traits, brewed in A-student insecurities, are the best-examined members in Cavendish Home‘s ensemble, complete with the details that only come from lived experience, or a close study of such: the spiral Victoria’s first B sends her into, the petty feud with the only other prospective primary school valedictorian, the way she assumes Lawrence must languish without this validation––because his parents don’t brag about him, the worst fate Victoria could imagine. Legrand, having set this up, offers Mrs. Cavendish as a stirring foil for Victoria’s tyrannical tidying, just as much of Belleville’s dark side as Victoria herself. They have some truly compelling exchanges, all of which serve to nail to book’s sharp lampoon of society’s attitudes towards children into place.

As we see in the terrifying array of Cavendish Home children with spirits beaten, unable to stand up for themselves, there’s something truly insidious in a society––not to mention an institution––that tells children they have no value, and ought to sit down, shut up, and stop causing such fuss. This story isn’t just an inspired horror with a chilling monster waiting for us at the end; it’s a necessary indictment of the adult world’s worst tendencies apropos of its fledgling members, because children taught, as they are in Belleville, to keep their heads down and their grades up grow into adults who look the other way when the minds and spirits of the next generation are sanded into oblivion.

Most scathingly of all, there was space for the monster before it settled into the well-manicured lawns of Belleville. We’ve known since the first page (but it’s only spoken outright in the stormy eleventh hour) that the Cavendish Home only churns out perfect, silent children because their parents want them.

It’s the mark of a pungent social dimension in Legrand’s writing that ––despite an ebullient triumph in the book’s final act––this eerie truth lingers, and we get no guarantee that it is gone for good.

Life Science and Self-Discovery in “The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate”

Jacqueline Kelly’s historical middle grade novel follows a young protagonist who discovers her love of science, but there is little struggle or story to be found.

The 10-year old Calpurnia Tate discovers her love of biology and taxonomy in 1899, in Jacqueline Kelly’s historical middle-grade novel. I made this illustration, credits for the things I used are here.

On a rare and precious trip to the library, The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate‘s determined and curious 10-year-old heroine is in search of a tightly-guarded treasure. In between tedious needlework lessons and the looming threat of housewifery, Calpurnia, in spite of the dictates of turn-of-the-century Texas, has developed a sapling of scientific inquiry, and she hopes against hope that she can get her hands on Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of Species.

The librarian, however, objects profoundly. The doors of opportunity are shrieking closed. In a moment that will set the tone for the rest of the novel, Jacqueline Kelly has used the opening chapter to remind us where we are.

Many more incidents like this are peppered through Kelly’s middle grade novel, among the many incidents that frame and define the brief, pivotal period of Calpurnia’s childhood that The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate covers. It’s not one continuous story––more episodic and memory based, Little Women-style. This approach certainly has its benefits: for one thing, it helps prevent the book from essentializing the misogyny of Calpurnia’s time, the way historicals strictly adhering to Freytag’s pyramid have a tendency to include whatever bias it addresses as one of the characters’ personal struggles, and show it heartily defeated in the end. The obstacles that stand in between a young girl and science in 1899 are very much still in place come the last page, and not magically vanquished by the power of story.

One thing Little Women‘s vignette style has on The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate‘s, however, is a more robust set of through-lines. Things are resolved rather tidily chapter-by-chapter in both books, but vignettes need to be tied together with resilient twine: a blend of character development, recurring themes, and an ambitious grasp at meaning. Evolution‘s through-lines, namely her interest in science, her relationships with her family, and the historical moment’s hope for the future, aren’t strong enough for the novel to progress cohesively. Instead, the reading experience is disjointed: dry, even––inching into the territory of a spotty adult memoir. The book has an adventurous, hopeful spirit, but in execution, its momentum often dries up. It’s barred from demonstrating competence in pacing, because, by virtue of Kelly’s stylistic choices, it isn’t paced.

Science and the pursuit of knowledge in a somewhat hostile age is the book’s most promising hint of consistency, but Calpurnia’s interest in biology, cultivated by a close bond with her grandfather, is more a consistent thrum than a relationship with true development, and what’s more, conflict. Kelly’s depiction of scientific observation is in itself authentic: we see Calpurnia reckon with a natural world that doesn’t reveal all its secrets to the casual viewer, angst over lost specimens and missed opportunities abounding. But science, for whatever reason (including perfectly legitimate ones like the fact of the protagonist’s age), lacks a big-picture meaning in The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate. Wonder, in its purest and most powerful form, is severely lacking in the novel, and so is pronounced struggle. In an age of scant science graduates and struggling math students, it may be very worth it to see a young protagonist go up against cloudy and difficult ideas, the specter of being wrong, and more related woes, and triumph. (Or fail, but gain by it.) Calpurnia mentions in passing the difficulty of getting through Darwin’s writing, but beyond that, science is easy for her, and only external factors bar her from the field: nothing she has to confront in her own thinking. As absent is the contest, so muted is the reward.

Another shortcoming in Kelly’s narrative of science reveals itself in a sustained focus on those very external factors, so much so that the heart of The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate is intent on defining itself primarily in opposition to what it’s not. The book is more concerned with how little Calpurnia wants to be a housewife than it is with how much she wants to be a scientist. Kelly’s glimpses of the heartbreak of being excluded is powerful, indeed––it may even be the strongest element in the book. But a historical must not merely be concerned with the tragedy of its circumstances, especially when it also happens to be careless about whom it leaves out.

The Tates’ servant, a Black woman named Viola, is very much on the periphery of Kelly’s attention. There are reasons for this: why would a ten-year-old notice the hardships of her family’s maid? It hurts the novel’s case, though, when Viola’s status is presented without objection, and only the backwards ideas that target a white girl are found to have fault. The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate holds a powerful image of how it feels to be shut out, but when it only speaks of betterment for the main character, its case falls apart. There is a glaring example of another person forgotten right beside her.

On some level, as well, the book seems more interested in charming adult readers than connecting with younger ones. For a main character who loudly proclaims to have no interest in romance, Calpurnia’s narrative is rather fond of putting it her path, drawing out cutesy exchanges like this:

“You have to let your husband kiss you once you’re married. And you have to kiss him back.”

“No,” she said.

“Yes.” I nodded, as if I knew everything there was to know about husbands and wives kissing. “That’s what they do together.”

“Do you have to?”

“Oh, absolutely. It’s the law.”

“I never heard of that law,” she said dubiously.

“It’s true, it’s Texas law.”

The vignette style, ultimately, is more suited to seeing childhood through rose-tinted glasses, than it is to contending with it in real time. In this case, though, the same also goes for history.

Hello, and thank you for reading! I post new reviews & musings every Tuesday and Thursday. Let’s have a chat in the comments! What are your thoughts? Do childrens’ books need to do more to depict learning? Is this an irrelevant nitpick of mine? Tell me below.