★★★☆☆ Minimal surreal magic school story

Midnight for Charlie Bone

Jenny Nimmo

Charlie Bone has one friend, who has a dog. Charlie lives with his mother and two grandmothers, one who is kind (Maisie) and one, Grandma Bone, who is severe. Charlie discovers unexpectedly that he has a gift -- he is "endowed", as Grandma Bone says. When he looks at a photograph, he can hear the conversation that took place when it was taken. Grandma Bone tells him that, because he is endowed, he must go to a special private school, Bloor's Academy. Charlie accordingly goes to Bloor's Academy, meets other endowed children, and has adventures.

Although this sounds like Harry Potter or Percy Jackson, the feeling is completely different. Jenny Nimmo's style is spare to the point of minimalism. Nothing is described in more than the barest outline. I don't have a mental image of any of the characters. The story is told in the third person from Charlie's point of view. His inner dialog is minimal. I don't have a feeling for who he is or how he feels. The same holds more strongly for the remaining characters. I have no sense of an underlying structure or logic to Charlie's city or school. The result was a surreal ambience.

My best stab at explaining is that if René Magritte wrote a children's book, this might be how it would feel.

It did not honestly interest me all that much. Although I like the weird and surreal, this was too spare for me. I doubt I'll read any more Charlie Bone books.

Midnight for Charlie Bone on Amazon

Goodreads review

Comments

★★★★☆ Worst possible time to become a physician

Eleanore of Avignon Elizabeth DeLozier Elizabeth DeLozier 's Eleanore of Avignon is a story of the Black Death in Avignon, Provence, France. Even aside from the plague, there was a lot going on in Provence in 1348. It was that strange period in the history of the Roman Catholic Church when it was not literally Roman -- the popes lived in Avignon , not to be confused with the later even stranger period when there were simultaneously two guys claiming to be the pope. Clement VI was pope. His physician Guy de Chauliac (Guigo) would later became famous for an influential book on surgery, Chirurgia Magna . To make life even more exciting, the pregnant Queen Johanna of Naples arrived in Avignon while the plague was raging to be tried for the murder of one of her husbands. All of this really happened. In 1347 our hero, Eleanore Blanchet (an entirely fictional character), an herbalist and midwife living with her twin sister and father, runs into Guigo and manages to persuade

★★★★☆ If Virginia Hall was fictional, she would not be believable

A Woman of No Importance Sonia Purnell Fiction writers operate under certain constraints. Their characters and plots have to be believable. Pile the implausible too high, and critics and readers will complain. ( Mea culpa .) Reality is not thus constrained. Thus, Virginia Hall, an American spy, a tall striking redhead who speaks French with an American accent, and has a wooden leg that she calls Cuthbert, who organizes Resistance forces in occupied France during the Second World War, and who assembles and leads a force of about 1000 Maquis (rural guerillas) that defeat the Germans and drive them out of Le Puy before the Allied invasion reaches it. (Cuthbert seems so gratuitous. I would shout to the heavens about a fictional spy with a wooden leg. But Virginia was real, and she really had a wooden leg, and she really called it Cuthbert.) And this is only one of Hall's exploits. Before that she was the Limping Lady of Lyon and the Abwehr and Gestapo were obsessed with her, but never

★★★☆☆ Peggy Carter sans Steve Rogers

Agent Carter Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely, Marvel Near the end of Captain America: The First Avenger Steve Rogers dives his airplane into the sea in order to prevent it from reaching (and destroying) New York City. In a final radio conversation with Agent Peggy Carter, he makes a date to take her dancing next Saturday. Both of them know he will not make that date. Agent Carter shows Peggy Carter's career after Steve's fall and after the end of the Second World War. The year is 1946, and she is an agent with the Strategic Scientific Reserve, a fictional secret organization that was the precursor to S.H.I.E.L.D. It is, I suspect, more or less based on the OSS , which was more or less the precursor to the CIA. Although she is one of SSR's most experienced and effective operatives, having had experience in the SOE (a real English spy operation in World War II) before coming to the American side, Peggy is relegated to fetching coffee and answering phones by her bosses

★★★★☆ Fantasy of a corrupt golden age

The Familiar Leigh Bardugo The publisher describes Leigh Bardugo 's The Familiar as a "historical fantasy set during the Spanish Golden Age". That description is accurate, but gives a misleading idea of the book. The Spanish Golden Age or Siglo de Oro is a name given to the period from 1492 - 1659, during which Spanish art, culture, and political power flourished. It was also the height of persecution of anyone suspected of heresy or Jewish ancestry. "Golden" is not the adjective that will come to mind as you read. The main point-of-view character is Luzia Cotado, a scullion in the household of Valentina and Marius Ordoño. Luzia is the orphan child or parents who were secretly Jewish. From her Jewish ancestors she inherits the ability to make "milagritos". ("Milagrito" is a diminutive of "milagro" -- miracle, thus "milagrito" is "little miracle". There is a lot of Spanish in The Familiar . You don't nee

★★★☆☆ Informative but annoyingly tendentious

Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues Jonathan Kennedy There is a book that everyone who is interested in biology and history should read: William H. McNeill 's Plagues and Peoples , published in 1976. I suppose that is long enough ago that we are allowed to call it a classic. Plagues and Peoples is an example of what I call a "I have a new hammer -- look at all these nails!" book. McNeill 's new hammer was consideration of the effects of infectious disease on history. He argued that infectious disease was an important force in history, persuasively in my opinion. Jonathan Kennedy 's Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues intends to update McNeill . Kennedy points out quite correctly that the advances in technology since 1976 enable us to see more deeply and clearly into the past of infectious disease than McNeill possibly could and thus to replace much of McNeill 's speculation with clearer and more solid answers. H

★★★★☆ A broken mindship and lost children

In the Shadow of the Ship Aliette de Bodard Aliette de Bodard 's In the Shadow of the Ship is a novella set in her Xuya Universe . Like many Xuya stories, this one takes place aboard a mindship. This particular mindship is called Nightjar and was damaged escaping from the collapsing Empire. (Exactly which Empire this was I am not sure -- there is more than one in the Xuya Universe .) At any rate, Nightjar is not a healthy place. She escaped carrying some of her family. They still live aboard and afford her the loyalty she expects, mostly. Nightjar demands tribute in the form of children whom she lures into her dead zones, from which they never emerge. When Khuyên was a child she was invited to the dead zones by her cousin Anh, but she refused. Later she did the unthinkable: she left Nightjar for the broken Empire, where she rose to the post of Magistrate. Now Khuyên has returned to Nightjar for her grandmother's funeral, where she is met with a complex mixture of disdain

★★★☆☆ A surprisingly appealing murderer

The Punisher Steve Lightfoot, Marvel, Netflix The Punisher, Frank Castle, first appeared as a villain in the excellent Marvel Netflix series Daredevil . Matt Murdock, the hero of Daredevil is a vigilante who beats up on bad people. But there is one line that Matt won't cross: he doesn't kill. Frank does. The social contract we live under gives the government a monopoly on force. This is more or less what John Adams meant when he said, "We are a nation of laws, not men." The contract leaks like a sieve and is unsatisfactory in many ways, but for all its faults, this system is better than any alternative anyone has worked out. So both Matt and Frank are criminals. Matt, who is a lawyer, is well aware that his actions are illegal, and the tension informs his character. And of course, it partly informs his determination not to kill. Frank is no lawyer -- he's a former US Marine and has worked with special forces. He has no powers, but he is very, very good at fight

★★★☆☆ Bears in the White Mountains

Moment 14 - Reynolds: Allcroft, NH. November 2015 Ben Aaronovitch Today is the official release date of a new novella in Ben Aaronovitch 's Rivers of London series , Winter's Gifts . To celebrate the occasion, Aaronovitch has released a new Moment. This is Moment 14 by my (probably inaccurate) count. Since the new novella takes place in the USA and stars FBI agent Kim Reynolds, this moment also takes place in the USA, specifically the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and stars Reynolds. There are bears in the White Mountains. OK, that's not news to anyone. In other non-news, there are foxes in England, and wolves in Germany. If you're an old Rivers of London fan, you know where this is going. The bears have been looting homes, because of course they have. Unfortunately, this is all second-hand -- we don't get up close and personal with the bears in this Moment. Moment 14 - Reynolds: Allcroft, NH. November 2015 . Note -- this link sends you to a newsletter ann

★★★★☆ Spy School in Africa

Spy School Goes Wild Stuart Gibbs As I wrote previously , this is the Spy School formula Spy School novels have a formula. We have Ben Ripley, a gifted kid who achieves excellent results by not being stupid, Ben's friends who are well-intentioned and sometimes competent, and the ever-expanding dysfunctional Hale family made up of the World's worst spies, who believe themselves to be the World's best spies, including toothsome teen sisters Erica and Trixie Hale. Gibbs picks a setting (frequently this is the site of a vacation or a sight-seeing visit he made), then makes up a silly James Bond-esque plot to play out there, with jokes! The main questions one asks on picking up a new Spy School book are "Where will it happen?" and "How will character relationships change?" In the previous novel, Spy School Goes North , we picked up a new team member, Svetlana Shumovsky, whom Gibbs describes as "the Russian version of Erica", meaning that sh

Search This Blog