A Book A Week: The Neddiad by Daniel Pinkwater

The Neddiad: How Neddie Took The Train, Went to Hollywood, and Saved Civilization by Daniel Pinkwater (Houghton Mifflin, 2007)

A shoelace tycoon with a parakeet fetish moves his family from Chicago to L.A. on a whim. On a train. His son, Neddie Wentworthstein, has some interesting adventures that begin when he misses the train in Santa Fe and meets an oddball shaman. Melvin the Shaman (as he is sometimes called) gives Neddie a small carved turtle. Neddie later discovers that the turtle is essential to the preservation of civilization. With enemies like Sandor Eucalyptus and Sholmos Bunyip, and allies like Seamus Finn (and his dad, a famous, swashbuckling movie actor), a ghost named Billie, and Yggdrasil Birnbaum, Neddie completes an Oedipean adventure that prevents rapid, sudden devolution and the return of the ice age. 

The Sonars and I read this one out loud, and with prose as fun and lyrical as the memorable names, it’s a great story to read out loud. Even with the fate of civilization threatened, Pinkwater doesn’t let the story get too intense. The wise characters keep the story real, and assure Neddie that when the time comes, not only will he know exactly the right thing to do, but he’ll be successful doing it. Our only vaguely critical comment about the story is the abruptness of the ending. We wander for dozens of chapters through whimsically detailed encounters, but the sudden turn into dreamlike resolution left us hanging in mid-wonder. Sonar X11 said it was like the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. We sat there for several moments, mouths open, wondering “Wha-aat?”

This mid-twentieth-century setting is a kinder, gentler world in which kids have freer and further reign and navigation in their worlds. Which, all by itself is a great fantasy for kids that often find their lives circumscribed by the minivan route. Plus Neddie and his friends find a mastodon. Who doesn’t love a mastodon in L.A.? 

ABAW: Janet Evanovich's First Four Plums

Or Four.

One For the Money (Harper Paperback edition, 1994)

Two For the Dough (Pocket Books edition, 1996)

Three to Get Deadly (St. Martin’s Paperback edition, 1997)

Four to Score (St. Martin’s Paperback edition, 1998)

Janet Evanovich got her chops writing romance novels. Now she’s one of the four highest paid authors in the U.S. (According to Forbes), trailing James Patterson, Danielle Steele, and Stephen King. Kapow.

I discovered her series about a New Jersey lingerie buyer turned badass bounty hunter around the time that the eighth or ninth book debuted. She’s up to eighteen now, plus novellas and spinoffs. A movie version of One for the Money starring Katherine Heigl as the inimitable Stephanie Plum premieres this week. 

A couple of weeks ago, when the germy funk descended (yet again this winter) over myself and the spawn, I binged on the first four Plums. I loved it. Evanovich calls her books birthday cake, exhorting us all to indulge from time to time. But she doesn’t owe anyone apologies for her writing or her success. Evanovich found a niche, collected a set of reliable tropes, populated it with rich characters and tapped an audience that eagerly waits for her every publication. She is commercially successful and sharp at what she does. 

No other books motivate me quite the same way as an Evanovich Plum. I find them easily rereadable. As a writer, I’m inspired by Evanovich’s gumption, perseverance, and success. As a person, Stephanie always makes me want to get up and kick butt at whatever I’m doing. The world does not keep that woman down. Even when her cars keep blowing up. 

There is a lot of slapstick silliness in the stories, especially as the series progresses. The cartoon rhetoric of the marketing gives a shallow vibe to the series. While some complain that by the eighteenth iteration those tropes have been beaten to death, I was surprised in this rereading by how much more gritty (and occasionally quite scary) the first book is. There is style and structural technique to be found under the goofy veneer, as well as some fun. 

A Book A Week: Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick

Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick. Scholastic 2011 (library copy)

You might know Selznick’s work from his previous novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret (which has recently been adapted into the film Hugo), or from one of the many children’s books he has illustrated (like Frindle or The Landry News). Like Hugo Cabret, Wonderstruck is massive-looking, but do no be put off by fears of the book’s density. The text of the novel is elaborately illustrated by Selznick’s signature artwork, giving a cinematic quality to the unfolding of the narrative.

The story alternates between Ben and Rose. Ben lives in 1977, in Minnesota. His story is told entirely in words. His mother has just died, and in his grief, he begins to wonder about the father he has never known. Rose lives in 1927, near New York City, and her story is told entirely in pictures. Despite the distance of time and space, Ben and Rose are connected, both in coincidences of their lives, and in their mutual search for missing pieces.

This is the sort of story a person (child or adult) could completely fall into. Though I read this to myself, the story would be lovely read out loud, side-by-side. And though there are one or two moments where the story feels overly contrived, there is a little bit of magic in the way that Ben and Rose find what they need.

A Book A Week: The Princess Bride by William Goldman

The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, The ‘good parts’ version, Abridged by William Goldman. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (Via Ballantine paperback) 1973.

I’ve seen The Princess Bride movie many times. It’s one of the few movies I’ve ever been willing to rewatch. I infected the Sonars with my love for the movie, and now they too will quote it for you on request. They particularly like Fezzik and Inigo’s rhyming.

But I had never read the book. This paperback has been hanging around our house for decades, and I’ve always wanted to read it, but just never got around to it. So I was put in a curious position. Usually I read a book first and it’s up to the movie to live up to the book and my imagination. In this case though, I knew and loved the movie, and it was up to the book to measure up.

I’m happy to say that the book is fun. In terms of the main plot about Westley and Buttercup, the story is very familiar, with only minor shifts to accommodate movie-plotting. But what I absolutely adore is the framing sequence about Goldman’s experience with the book as a child at his father’s side and trying to find the book for his own son only to be disappointed by the boring parts. In the movie, the framing story of the grandfather reading to the sick boy inadequately stands in for this hilarious device. The book is worth a read if only for the introduction and for Goldman’s narrative remarks throughout the story.

A Book A Week: The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka

The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Osaka. Alfred A. Knopf 2011 (library copy).

Otsuka’s second novel tells the story of a group of women, Japanese picture brides, traveling on a boat to meet the husbands that have bought them and brought them to America. We follow the women through their struggles, pain, fear, joy, disappointment, outrage, success, and failure, through their various jobs, marriages, and experiences leading up to their next great journey: to Japanese internment camps in the United States during World War II. We feel their experiences in the immediacy of the narration. Rather than feeling those experiences individually though, we feel them collectively through Osaka’s use of first person plural narration.

The story has a chant-like quality, almost prayer-like in the layered repetition of the women’s collective lives. We are the women when we read the story. We feel the reverence and sanctity of their lives. We are hurt by their tragedies. We feel the betrayal and devastation most keenly when the narrative voice shifts from the women themselves to their neighbors who watch them go to the camps. The neighbors who understand nothing, and do nothing, as the Japanese-Americans (and anyone who might resemble a Japanese-American) marches away to who knows where, leaving behind a void that is first lamented, then filled, then forgotten.

This small, spare, beautiful, important novel might be overlooked, but, perhaps without intending to, can teach us a lesson about the world we live in now. I see the same kind of marginalization and dehumanization of Muslim-Americans happening today. I hope we as Americans do not forget the ugly truth of the wrong we inflicted upon Japanese-Americans in the name of patriotism and a false sense of security. I hope that we can learn from those experiences of the past. But I am not certain.

Osaka’s deft and subtle use of language is thrilling to me, and I look forward to reading her first novel, When the Emperor was Divine.