A Nice Spot of Ink to Cure What Ails You

The Ink Drinker

by Eric Sanvoisen
Illustrated by Martin Matje
Random House Books for Young Readers, 2002

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, the blog has been inactive since summertime. While we all truly love this blog, it is a labor of love that sometimes has to take the backseat to other calls of duty, be they work, school, fighting the zombie invasion, etc. That being said, I just couldn’t let October slip by without a post or two. If there was ever a time for some spooky reading, it has to be October. Here is my first selection to kick off some reading before Halloween!

One thing that I often struggled with when I was working as a Children’s Librarian was getting the reluctant reader to embrace reading. How do you motivate a child that says to you they simply don’t like reading?

After many creative strategies, I think suggesting this book could be another welcome tactic. The Ink Drinker by Eric Sanvoisen is an early chapter book suitable for 8-10 year olds. The tale, originally published in France, is mildly horrible, more bizarre than scary, so it is palatable to a wide audience from those who love vampire tales to those who love silly stories and/or strangeness.

The book begins with a simple and cruel irony. A boy who despises books with a book loving father finds himself stuck in his father’s book shop for the summer. The pain, the sorrow, the agony of being forced to work in a bookstore all summer is more than our protagonist can stand. To pass the time he hides in the shop, daydreams, and people watches. One day he notices a very odd customer. The customer, a pale stranger, practically floating (is he floating?) delicately carries a straw and slips it between the pages of books and slurps. The boy’s horrified gasp causes the stranger to flee. Upon inspection of the volume the stranger held the boy notices that all the pages have been wiped (drank?) clean of any ink, except just a letter or two. Shocked, yet painfully curious, the boy rushes after the stranger into the cemetery where he discovers Draculink, the ink drinking vampire. As the book unfolds the boy finds himself on a journey to explain the mysterious nature of ink drinking. When his father catches him drinking ink the reader realizes just how first-hand the boy’s journey has become.

The quick narrative, the accompanying illustrations, and the elegant strangeness of this tale prove to be strong temptations that would hook any reader. In addition to being a great standalone book, I was happy to learn this title is the first in a full Ink Drinker series. Hopefully this quirky vampire tale can get you in the Halloween spirit. Stay tuned for more upcoming posts!

Social Ghost

The Space Between Trees
by Katie Williams
Chronicle Books
2010

The Space Between Trees by Katie Williams follows the story of a quiet, quirky loner. Evie, a girl raised by her divorced mother, is sixteen with a paper route and every bit the lonely outcast. Awkward in school, not fitting in, she hovers on the periphery observing and fantasizing desired interactions. Her crush, college guy Jonah, seems to be her only source of social hope.

The day that Evie does her paper route near the woods is the same day that Jonah does his job, which is collecting animal carcasses in the woods for animal control. One delivery day Evie is in the wrong place at the wrong time when Jonah discovers a human body in the woods. In a cruel twist, the murdered girl ends up to be Evie’s childhood friend, Elizabeth. It’s a lonely world when not your only friend, but your only former friend, is pulled lifeless from the woods. At the funeral, when Evie lies about the depth of her friendship with Elizabeth, she sets the stage for a very complex dynamic between her, Elizabeth’s father and Elizabeth’s best friend, Hadley. In a strange courtship, Hadley and Evie join forces to discover who the killer is. In a blend of lies, teenage escapades, and frazzled emotions Evie sinks deeper into an increasingly dangerous situation. The story slowly builds to a violent climax, causing Evie to realize what she was after all along.

As it happens, I had very high hopes for this book. The jacket reads like a thrilling murder mystery with an unlikely cast of characters. The book design is a stunning piece of die-cut craftsmanship, very elegant and haunting. The title was intriguing to me, the lonely clearing among massive, strong beings. This space between trees is the growing void of loneliness, isolation, and rejection inside a there-but-never-seen young girl. Evie’s stories, her thoughts, and her hopes stand separately from her bodily action and inaction. Evie is the ghost in the machine, the silent partner to a life unfolding everyway but that which she hoped. A phantasm, alienated from her peers and even those she thinks are friends, in life and in death. Basically, I had to read this book.

As Evie set the tone for her involvement in a devolving situation, so I set myself up for major literary disappointment. The bones of this story have huge potential to take the narrative to a greater place. Unfortunately, I think the story fell short. The author was often telling us how Evie felt instead of writing it so we would experience those feelings with her. As an example, the moment, post climax in the story, where Evie confronts Hadley in the hospital room, should have been an epic scene. Instead, flat observations and a dull dialogue reign in one of the key ending phases of the book. As a reader, I felt cheated. Stories that move us are those that allow us to get swept into and become one with the emotional thread in the story. This book is written in the first-person perspective, so when Evie feels something, anything, I want to feel it through her, organic and natural as she feels it herself. Instead, this story left me with the sense of an out of body experience, like those dreams when you are silently watching yourself from above and outside. I felt very disconnected to this book.

Not seeing the forest for the trees?

Another gripe is the tidy package readers receive at the end of the story. The equivalent of a fairy tale happily ever after, this book takes the easy way out explaining what happens to everyone. The prince married the young maid, they had a dozen babies, had a sprawling mansion by the sea while Evie gains perspective and every major plot point is hastily resolved, the end. I don’t want to create any story spoilers, but I will simply say the last few chapters were a big let down.

While the general theme of this book was on the right track, a coming of age tale, a suspenseful conflict, ultimately, I think this story is forgettable. As far as YA fiction goes, it has many of the key components that make compelling stories but I don’t think these elements were incorporated or utilized to the best effort. I’ve read good reviews for this book and other Katie Williams short stories, but for me The Space Between Trees needed a little more time to grow. Please feel free to read yourself and post opposing viewpoints. I may have been absent in my reading, causing me to miss the essential essence of this story.

Gossip Girl in the Shell, part I

Skinned -and- Crashed
by Robin Wasserman
New York: Simon Pulse, 2008 and 2009

Skinned and Crashed are the first two parts of an intriguing new teen-cyberpunk trilogy by Robin Wasserman, which follows the postmodern cyberpunk identity crisis of a young girl whose life is rapidly destroyed by the technology that saved her in the aftermath of a car crash.

Lia Kahn is the rich, white, blond-haired, blue-eyed ubermadchen daughter of an upper upper class family. Lia goes to the most exclusive school, surrounded by the most exclusive friends, and access to the most exclusive technology available in a story set in a distopian future world still recovering from the horror of nuclear fallout. Lia has everything genetic engineering can provide: perfect looks, perfect mind, perfect life. She and her friends define culture, and walk in luxury.

Like this, but with better wi-fi.

Then the worst happens; Lia's body is destroyed in a freak car crash, forcing her parents to have her mind downloaded into an advanced prosthetic body made to resemble a human being as closely as possible. The story begins with Lia waking up, and follows her through the horror of losing everything she has ever had, and ever been.

In Skinned, Lia and her family are forced to confront the reality of her new situation. Has Lia truly been saved, or is she merely a facsimile of a girl who is now dead? Like all the best stories, the book provides no real answers. In Lia's world, Faith is a quaint concept held only by the delusional, and Lia herself has been raised to believe only in power and will. In fact, she and her family are terrifyingly fascist, and her father has raised her on Nazi slogans; literally, his motto is "work will set you free" - the words written over the gates of Auschwitz.

"Arbeit Macht Frei" = "Work Will Set You Free"

After the accident, Lia's connection with family and friends breaks down in a series of revelations which drive Lia away from her life and into the company of a group of fellow "skinners", other teens who've been downloaded (voluntarily or not) and exist outside of human society.

Some of the themes dealt with in this book are staples of modern cyberpunk and culture. Lia's friends' revulsion is tied to the "not-quite" effect, known as the uncanny valley, in which people are repulsed when confronted by something that very closely resembles a human face, but isn't quite there. This effect is the reason some recent CGI movies and video games haven't fared as well as expected; people just freak out when they see something close (but just not) human.

Feel that chill? That's the Uncanny Valley

As the people around Lia attack or abandon her, Lia herself is forced to deal with the loss of what she has always believed to be "herself". No longer able to "feel" as she once did, Lia experiences a series of emotional responses which are sneakily reminiscent of the Kubler-Ross five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and (ultimately) acceptance. In the process, Lia comes to realize that she no longer belongs in the life she once led. By the end of Skinned, she has literally been stripped bare, and discards the identity of the girl whose life she has failed to replicate.

Children in the Aftermath

The Pack
by Tom Pow

New Milford, CT: Roaring Brook Press, 2006, ©2004

Tom Pow's The Pack is like a children's primer for Cormac McCarthy. It is a story of desperation and identity, set in a bleak, post apocalyptic setting which is just recognizable enough to be truly disturbing even to veteran fans of the genre. This book occupies a nebulous place between childrens' and young adult literature; though it is ostensibly about children, its themes are somewhat more mature than typical juvenile fiction. Pow's writing style does not coddle his readers, whatever their age, and the subject matter is starker still.

The story in The Pack centers around three feral, orphan children living with wild dogs on the edge of what's left of civilization. The children are named after the storefronts they were found in front of, Bradley, Victor and Floris (the 't' was broken), while the dogs are meaningfully named Hunger, Fearless and Shelter. The pack survives under the tutelage of an old woman, whose stories teach them to retain the last shreds of their humanity. When Floris is kidnapped by a local warlord, the rest are forced into a quest to save her, for their own sakes as well as hers.

There are two reasons that this book is best for advanced readers: one, the story is written in a tone of unflinching brutality, devoid of comfort or ease; two, the literary eloquence of the book, while beautiful, can also be abstract in the extreme, and requires a well-developed sense of reading comprehension. The brutality comes in several forms; one of the crucial turns in the plot centers around a pair of dog fights, described in graphic detail, and several times during the story, characters defend some atrocious behavior by claiming it was necessary to survive.

As for literary abstraction, the main character, Bradley, explicitly follows the form of the Hero's Journey. Though the term itself is never directly invoked, the constant references to stories and dreams (not to mention the narrative style) make it clear that this is the form the pack's movements take. Also, the question of identity is brought into play, as is the barrier between human and animal, boy and girl, civilization and collapse. Finally, there is a level of social commentary which I won't describe in detail, because it is integral to the "big reveal" at the end of the book. Suffice it to say, the Invisible City and its surrounding Zones bear a shocking resemblance to the world as it already is, placed in a smaller sandbox and given a different context.

To what extent the childrens' world is actually "post apocalyptic", in the traditional sense, is never made perfectly clear beyond vague allusions to the "Dead Times". By the end of The Pack, the nature of the world these children live in is less defined than it was at the beginning, and that mystery is part of its charm. In the words of the old woman, repeated as a refrain throughout the book, the world is made of dust and ashes, but stories cannot crumble, burn or be broken.

Classic Halloween

The Halloween Tree
by Ray Bradbury
Random House, 1972

As we approach the last week of October, I'm sure those Halloween preparations are in full swing. Putting finishing touches on scary and silly costumes, buying candy, choosing pumpkins and putting spooky decor around the home are just part of the tradition as we get ready for All Hallows Eve. I would like to personally suggest another activity that should be added to the holiday to-do list: find yourself a copy of The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury.

Ever since I discovered this book in junior hight I have read it each year around Halloween and each time I am never able to put it down. The magic and adventure in this book never cease to electrify my imagination. The book is about eight friends who set out on Halloween night to find some adventure. The ninth friend in the group, Pipkin, promises to meet up with the rest of the boys later on at a sinister looking house in the woods. But when the boys think they see him, the chase begins. From here on out the eight boys are led into the darkest depths of history as a mysterious character, named Moundshroud, guides them through the past to find their friend. The whole while, Moundshroud uses supernatural and mystical tactics to teach the children the meanings behind the celebration of Halloween. After spectacular lessons about history, other cultures, and celebrations are learned in ancient Egypt, the time of the Druids, and Mexico, to name a few, the boys endure the greatest personal journey of the evening as they are asked how far they would truly go to help their friend.

Fans of Bradbury know that his stories, particularly those about children, are typically accompanied by change, growing up, and the ache of loss. The Halloween Tree is no exception to this. Despite this being a children's chapter book, Bradbury still eloquently describes the realities of death's cold touch, and he does so as honestly and simply as a child might describe the misty and haunting twilight that comes after an autumn sunset. The book's lyrical nature and the youthful vibe from the characters make this book not only a moving story to listen to, but also a sheer delight to read for children and adults of all ages. Happy reading and Happy Halloween.

Beautiful Nonsense Saves the Night

What the Dickens
by Gregory Maguire
Cambridge, Mass. : Candlewick Press, 2007

What-the-Dickens, as the subtitle suggests, is the story of a rogue tooth fairy. It is also the story of three children, Dinah, Zeke and Rebecca Ruth, trapped in their house with their elder cousin Gage; outside, a terrible storm rages, and their parents have gone missing.

To keep them in good spirits, Gage tells them a story about the skibbereen - what human beings would know as "tooth fairies", and a renegade fairy named What-the-Dickens. What-the-Dickens is born in an empty tuna can, unaware of who or what he is, or much of anything, really. The story catches young Dinah's imagination, and gets them all through the night.

This is not a particularly spooky book, but it is a beautiful and imaginative one. The childrens' fear of the storm and their parents' absence gives Gage's story a sense of urgency: Dinah's immersion in the tale reminded me pleasantly of "Neverending Story", or any number of times when I was a child, reading my way through rough weather. The story of What-the-Dickens is only half the tale, though. This book was also about the power of storytelling itself, and the potency of belief in magic and prayer. Best of all, though deeply philosophical and thought-provoking, the book places itself easily in the grasp of its intended ten-year-old audience.

Gregory Maguire is known for his reworked modern fables, notably his series of books starting with Wicked. His choice of the tooth fairy in this book is interesting, because the origin of this creature is already terribly obscure: to tell the tale of the skibbereen (ironically also the name of an Irish township) really does require making it up as you go along, which Maguire does with all the craft of a master storyteller. In fact, I suspect Gage is Maguire, folded into the story even as the character folds himself into the narrative of What-the-Dickens. Late in the book, Gage has a moment of discovery about himself, his love of stories and of telling them, which struck me as a deeply autobiographical moment. All in all, a valuable read for any child with a love of stories told to keep back the dark.

Enter if You Dare

56 Water Street

by Melissa Strangway

iUniverse Inc., ©2007

56 Water Street is a startling and mysterious book. Designed for young mystery readers and ghost hunters, the book follows the events surrounding a spooky abandoned house and two ten year old friends, Derek and Ravine.

Nobody in town talks about the rambling, weather worn house at 56 Water Street. This is truly bizarre, because strange stuff is happening. The book opens with Derek and Ravine noticing the lights flickering on and off in the long abandoned house. Feeling frightened and concerned, the children rush home to tell their parents only to shockingly discover their parents say there is no house at that address. Eventually, the children find out they are the only ones who notice the house and the strange happenings inside. To the rest of the world, 56 Water Street is a vacant lot with a sordid past.

Derek and Ravine need to find out why they are the only ones able to see the house at 56 Water Street. What does it mean that they can see it and others can’t? They slowly take more chances to investigate and actually enter the house, learning that time stands still for them when they enter the premises. Even more bizarre then the house itself, there is a supernatural force compelling them to become involved with the house. This force enters their dreams and thoughts and compels them to return to the house again and again. It is as if somebody or something is trying to get their attention and trying to give them a message from the other side.

With the help of a fortune teller, who is actually a self proclaimed spirtit medium, Derek and Ravine come to acknowledge that they too have a special gift. Similar to Cole in the Sixth Sense, Derek and Ravine have a sensitivity to dead people who are trapped on earth. It is this sensitivity that allows them to see and enter 56 Water Street and to realize that the resident ghost on the premises needs their help before she can finally rest in peace. Accepting the spooky task the universe has laid at their feet, the children venture once again into the house to help the ghost solve the sorrowful mystery that is keeping her spirit form bound to the house. What follows is a spine-tingling and eerie adventure with an uplifting and hopeful ending.

This book is a sound example of a middle grade mystery. The protagonists are relatable and you are able to become attached to them, particularly Ravine. Her façade of strength and courage is obviously only a thin layer attempting to cover over a very tortured soul. Since she has suffered from her own recent tragedy, it makes sense why she is perhaps more in tune to other spiritual realms. Ravine’s tragedy and the ghost’s dilemma in 56 Water Street create a very melancholy undertone in addition to all the chills and surprises of the mystery in the book. The pain in this book is palpable and it strongly evokes the emotional sensibilities of the reader. I would recommend this book for those who are looking for a tingling paranormal mystery.

Ew, Yuck, Repeat

Peeps
by Scott Westerfeld
Razorbill, ©2005

Peeps is Scott Westerfeld's attempt to create a vampire book that is "new and interesting, while still being full of bitey goodness". Short answer: he succeeds. In all of his novels, Westerfeld weaves the culture into his storytelling, and this is no less true of Peeps.

Cal Thompson has spent the last year of his life hunting down every girl he's kissed for the last year, ever since he was infected with a disease that turns ninety-nine percent of those who catch it into crazed, cannibalistic recluses who fear the sun and everything they ever loved. Cal himself is one of the "lucky" ones, made stronger and faster by the disease, but at the cost of becoming a carrier - infecting everyone he comes into intimate contact with the disease.

To make his life even more difficult, the parasite causes carriers to become more intensely attractive and easily attracted to others in order to spread itself more effectively. Even worse, Cal is tasked with finding his progenitor, the girl who gave him the disease in the first place, before she can spread the disease to others. Unfortunately, there are things more terrible than vampires in the depths of the City, and his search seems to be taking him directly into their path.

By grounding his story in scientific realism and evolutionary theory, Westerfeld makes his story much richer than your average modern vampire fare. Rather than relying strictly on tired emotional stereotypes and vague, worn-out mythologies, he infuses the genre with warm, freshly oxygenated blood. Try not to groan too hard...

Westerfeld presents a unique twist on the vampire mythos, deeply grounded in our own reality, with its parasites and diseases infinitely more terrifying than anything the author could have made up himself. What's really great about this book is that Westerfeld recognizes this fact, and uses it to make his own story more interesting and icky. Told through the voice of Cal, every other chapter is actually a brief description of the life cycle of some horrible real-life invisible parasitic monster or other. The result? Believable, scary, dynamic vampires and a story grounded in thoroughly modern sensibilities: plus a readership left with a healthy terror of ants, rats, cats and tropical rivers. (ewww!)

Another great aspect of Scott Westerfeld's writing is his fluency with modern language; he has a knack for lending a sinister twist to the everyday vocabulary of the under-thirty set. Cal Thompson, the narrator, is a typical (if geeky) nineteen-year-old boy surrounded by other college-age characters, all living on their own in a real life city; you never doubt this, because all of Westerfeld's characters and places sound exactly like what they're supposed to be. Without crossing into gratuitous descriptiveness, the novel also doesn't flinch from real-world sexuality and emotional complexity. Written with wry humor and a mild obsession for the bizarre and terrible, Cal's pains, fears and attractions are accessible and real.