At the start I thought this would be really cheesy, but it ended up almost making me cry. I did say “almost.” Merry Christmas, everyone.
P.S. I realize that cheesiness and being brought close to tears are not necessarily mutually exclusive states, so the video clip can and in fact does meet both criteria for a special Christmastime message.
Finally, that Alvin and the Chipmunks / Manheim Steamroller collaboration we’ve all been waiting for! Basically sounding the same as a walk past the entrance of a Kay Bee Toys, try this album if you enjoy xylophones, talking robots, the demo button on that old synthesizer at Grandpa’s house, motion-activated cackling witches, xylophones, Max Headroom, battery-powered monkeys banging cymbals together, a dog barking “Jingle Bells,” video game soundtracks of the early 90s, and xylophones. This is crazed carnival clown music taken to a new sample-laden, frenetic frenzy. Full of blooping, looping, endless repetition, two-year-olds may really get into this. Unfortunately we may never know, since I don’t have children yet and I don’t feel good about subjecting my nieces and nephews to this, nor their parents, nor random children at a school playground, because that would just be creepy. Two stars; unless you are in the mood for something really obnoxious (I get that mood myself from time to time) or you want to send a stressed-out person into an actual nervous breakdown, in which case it goes up to four stars. Merry Christmas!
Dan Deacon: Bromst
Carpark Records
Released March 24, 2009
Try “Woof Woof” ( Track 8 ) right here right now for some fun, free, immediate gratification. It’s just as easy as pushing that button your parents really don’t want you to push. Go ahead, push the button. PUSH THE BUTTON!
Cameron is an aimless, sarcastic stoner who is alienated from his family and has no real friends of which to speak. When he starts having hallucinations and loses control of his body a couple of times, everyone assumes he must be using hallucinogenic drugs. Not true: after getting fired from Buddha Burger, getting suspended from school, being forced into therapy by his parents, and having a run-in with a flaming toaster oven, he is finally diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob (a.k.a. “Mad Cow”) disease. It will deteriorate his brain and kill him.
It is at this point when things get interesting. A pink-haired punker angel, complete with combat boots, torn fishnets, and actual feather wings spray-painted with graffiti, appears to Cameron in his hospital room. She urges Cameron to escape the hospital and undertake a quest to find the mysterious Dr. X, a traveler through dimensions who has inadvertently brought dark energy back with him to our universe. It is this dark energy that is attacking Cameron’s brain, not Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and if he can find Dr. X and get him to close up the wormhole, he will not only find a cure for himself but save the universe!
What follows is a kaleidoscopic adventure full of quirky characters and a million plot twists and details. The book is stuffed with a mess of references, touching on everything from Norse mythology to Star Wars, quantum mechanics to MTV Spring Break. Best of all, some of the hippest “references,” such as the legendary mystical free jazz trumpet player Junior Webster, are actually entirely made up by the author. While the book at times reads like both a Percy Jackson title for the 17+ crowd and Paper Towns on acid, Don Quixote looms large in the background and the idea of living out one’s life in a week’s time hearkens back to Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Hilarious, weird, life affirming, surreal and ironic, above all Going Bovine is just a whole lot of wacky fun. (four stars)
[Flags: this book depicts drug use, pervasive profanity, and an irresponsible and somewhat ridiculous teenage fantasy sex scene. I hate sex scenes in books in general, and this one specifically knocks a half-point off my rating and makes it a definite “high school only” title. But really, if a dying teenage boy actually is dreaming his way through the end of his life, among other things of course he is going to dream himself up some sex, so maybe it can be forgiven?]
Going Bovine
Written by Libba Bray
Delacorte Books for Young Readers
496 pages
ISBN: 978-0385733977
Release Date: 22 September 2009
GoingBovine.com
Libba Bray – Official Website
I still think about the letter you asked me to write. It nags at me, even though you’re gone and there’s no one to give it to anymore. Sometimes I work on it in my head, trying to map out the story you asked me to tell, about everything that happened this past fall and winter. It’s all still there, like a movie I can watch when I want to. Which is never.
(When You Reach Me, page 2)
Miranda is finding notes addressed to her in the most obscure of places, asking her to write a letter. The note writer says he is coming to save the life of Miranda’s friend, and her letter will help him do it. Stranger still, the cryptic predictions included in the notes are starting to come true. Meanwhile, Miranda is just trying to get through life as a latchkey sixth grader in New York City. Sal, her lifelong best friend and neighbor, gets beat up randomly by a kid neither of them know, and afterward tells her he doesn’t want to be friends with her anymore. Now Miranda must focus on troubles such as trying to make new friends and avoiding the crazy homeless man that hangs out at the mailbox around the corner from her house. Placing the mysterious in the midst of the mundane, Rebecca Stead gives us a down-to-earth story of the home and school life of a twelve-year-old girl, interwoven with intriguing science fiction and mystery elements.
Young readers will immediately identify with the believable voice of Miranda, particularly as she navigates the tough social world of sixth grade. In fact, all of the characters are engaging and fully-realized. The storyline is extremely enveloping. Smart, shifting narrative that jumps forward and back in time keeps the clues and ideas coming without revealing too much. However, what puts this book into the running for greatness is that the day-to-day interactions of Miranda with her friends and her mother are just as captivating as the bizarre happenings with the notes, and often the notes totally escape your mind, just as they do Miranda’s. The realistic and the speculative are on entirely equal terms.
It could be easy to take for granted just how perfectly When You Reach Me fulfills the dictates of a great children’s novel. The book is clever and intricate, but not confusing. It introduces many big ideas and morals, but in small and subtle ways. It’s a relatively high interest read, and yet it also could hold up to the scrutiny of any elementary upper grade language arts curriculum. For the quality of this book and its likely ability to please young people, educators, and parents all at the same time, it seems like a serious contender for the Newbery. Indeed, search the Internet and you will find many people saying so. Unfortunately, it’s possible that such a little book could be smothered by the hype that has preceded it and that this review further promulgates, as new readers may come to it with unreal expectations. Remember, it’s not a book unlike anything you’ve ever read, it’s not a grandiose fantasy, and it’s probably never going to sell five million copies and give rise to a series of blockbuster movies. It’s just a little novel done extremely well, which turns out to be a rare thing. (Five Stars)
When You Reach Me
Written by Rebecca Stead
Wendy Lamb Books / Random House
200 pages
ISBN: 978-0-385-90664-7
Release Date: 14 Jul 2009
www.rebeccasteadbooks.com
Okay, even though I said that I would post pictures from my hike, I am starting out with one from last week taken on the long way home from work one day, driving up through American Fork Canyon on a road that is often referred to as the Alpine Loop. Again, this is a perfect spot for a much better picture than this, but I’ll work with what I’ve got. I love the way the trees just gather in places like this.
Yesterday morning, having the day off from work, I finally got out of bed at a decent time and got myself on a little hike. It is intolerable how few times I have gone hiking since I moved into Provo Canyon. (It’s also intolerable that, although I live yards away from the Provo River, I’ve never been fly fishing, but that’s another story. Somebody help me, please!)
I went to explore a nice little side fork into the cliffs on the North side of the canyon.
There is a mysterious parking lot on the north side of the canyon, across from what may or may not be called Upper Falls. I have never seen more than one car at a time parked in this lot, and for the most part it is a ghost lot. At some point I noticed a little trail running up the hillside through the grasses and into the cliffs, and I have always wanted to try it. I have no idea if the parking lot is designed as a trailhead for this trail, or as a viewing area for Upper Falls, and I have no idea if this fork or trail has a name. I know I could look at a USGS map and research the trail, but that would ruin much of the allure of my random morning excursion. Even having been there I’m not sure if I’m ready to let go of its unnamed status. I may not be living in this canyon forever, so I chose this as my first of (hopefully) many hikes since it is kind of a wild card excursion. It seemed the place I would be least likely to plan and drive back to hike if I no longer lived close to it, so it was an appropriate and easy place to start.
As it turned out, my hike didn’t last all that long. The canyon soon narrows into a creek bed surrounded by steep rock faces, and the creek still has a respectable amount of water rushing down it. Some of the rock walls were mossy and weeping. I’m no rock climber, and I hadn’t come prepared for going through much water, so eventually I chose to turn around. I didn’t really want to risk ruining my camera. That’s a good excuse, isn’t it? The shot at the top of this article is the view down the canyon from the point that I turned around. It would be fun to splash up the rest of this hike, and I might try it again in a month or two if we haven’t gotten snow yet, and see if the water flow has reduced, or maybe sooner were I to get some fancy hiking sandals. At any rate, I did take some pictures, as I am often wont to do, and a few of them will be popping up here on the Freez in the next couple of days.
I have a a whole list of hikes that I feel it would be unconscionable if I did not attempt while living in this beautiful area. The list includes a possible climb to Cascade Mountain and/or Provo Peak, but culminates with ascending Mt. Timpanogos, something I have never done. I mainly posted all of this for selfish reasons; I want to provide myself some accountability for these hikes. So, I hereby announce my plan to hike Timp sometime in the next month or two, before the snow arrives. So let it be written, so let it be done.
Kate DiCamillo can render vivid and stunning scenes with simplicity. She can create heartbreak with a single sentence. She can lead you line by line through a story and have you hanging on every word. Her seemingly magical mastery of tone is perhaps unparalleled in contemporary children’s literature. The problem with DiCamillo comes when one recognizes that she could potentially use this incredible linguistic power to enchant the reader with any story, however poorly plotted or characterized. Mesmerized by the charisma of her written word, we may not even realize that we were actually reading a very silly book. Now, I’m not saying that The Magician’s Elephant is a silly book. I’m just saying that I am so drawn in by DiCamillo’s writing style that it doesn’t really matter what tale she’s telling, I want to read and hear the whole of it.
So, the tale at hand: Peter Augustus Duchene, an orphan boy in an imaginary European city, is sent to the market with money given him by his guardian, an aging, ailing soldier. Instead of buying bread and fish, he gives the money to a fortune teller. She informs him that his deepest hope is true: his sister is alive. Furthermore, in a perplexing and cryptic instruction, the fortune teller counsels Peter that an elephant will lead him to his sister. Two days later, a magician, performing before the rich and noble of the city, intends to produce a bouquet of lilies for the audience. Instead, in a burst of hubris, he calls forth an elephant. It crashes through the roof of the opera house and lands in the lap of one Madame LaVaughn, permanently crippling her legs. The magician is imprisoned, and the citizens of the entire city, most especially Peter, become obsessed with the portentous pachyderm, very much still in existence but hidden in an undisclosed location in the city. A succession of short scenes given from the perspectives of numerous characters, including the hapless elephant herself, moves the story towards some magical eventuality that promises to provide something great for everyone, i.e., a happy ending.
My only complaint with the story is that, unlike the endings of traditional fairy tales, DiCamillo perhaps spreads the happy ending too thin between too many characters; many of them do not seem to have passed through the extreme magic-curse-based ordeals which are usually required to earn a fairy tale ending. Instead, they have passed through more realistic ordeals: disease, loneliness, guilt, poverty, etc. In a relatively short book such as this, these trials and burdens don’t necessarily impress themselves as strongly on a reader as, say, being pursued by a man-eating giant or being forced to live in a castle with a monster. The magic displayed in the book is as out-of-the-ordinary to the characters in the story as it is to us; DiCamillo clearly wanted this magic to happen in some place resembling the real world. Even the elephant, who the other characters look to as a magical being, does not consider herself magical and is as confused and powerless as anyone to the magic that has occurred. She’s just an elephant that has suddenly found herself in a strange, cold place without friends. DiCamillo is quoted on the back flap of the book as saying, “I wanted, I needed, I longed to tell a story of love and magic.” It may be that the book, although dealing with magic, is more a fable than a fairy tale; all along the way, we read scenes that illustrate despair and hope, empathy, perseverance, charity, and forgiveness. Perhaps the magic DiCamillo so longs for the reader to see is nothing other than love itself, and thus it is only appropriate that she would want to spread it around to as many characters as possible.
Stylistically, as well as story-wise, DiCamillo walks the line between fairy tale, fable, and magical realism. The book is filled with beautiful, imagistic scenes and dreams that are described with the succinctness and surrealism of prose poems. The magical elements are reported matter-of-fact-ly alongside the many realistic elements of the story. Cold, overcast skies and snow storms are so vividly realized, right down to the footprints of the elephant in the snow, that the reader more readily identifies with what the characters are feeling. Sly authorial interjections do occasionally pop up in the text, (“And what did the magician say? You know full well the words he spoke,”) but they do not seem to be as pervasive as they were in Desperaux. For better or for worse, this time around we don’t receive any of the author’s idiosyncratic definitions (although there certainly are a lot of new vocabulary words for young readers in this book.) As in her other books, the strong built-in storytelling voice lends itself to a great read-aloud experience.
All in all, we have another magical little book from DiCamillo. Is the story ridiculous? You know full well it’s ridiculous; all fairy tales and fantasies are. It is nonetheless a beautifully rendered and engaging book, filled with fables of hope, empathy, forgiveness, humility, and love that will speak to children and adults alike. Four-and-a-half stars.
The Magician’s Elephant
Written by Kate DiCamillo
Illustrated by Yoko Tanaka
200 pages
ISBN: 978-0-7636-4410-9
Release Date: September 8, 2009
www.themagicianselephant.com
www.katedicamillo.com
www.yokotanaka.com
Nayeli, a recent high school graduate who works at a taco shop/internet cafe in the tiny tropical town of Tres Camarones in Sinaloa, Mexico, arrives one day at a startling realization: there are no men in Tres Camarones. Her own father, formerly the only cop in town, left several years ago for the fabled United States, and so did all the others. Not only do Nayeli and her girlfriends have no one to date and eventually marry, but now they have no one to protect them from the bottom-feeding narcos and bandidos who, anxious for their own territory, have recently moved in on the remote, defenseless village. Watching The Magnificent Seven at the local movie house, Nayeli is inspired with the solution to the plight of Tres Camerones: she will travel North to “Los Yunaites” and round up her father and other able-bodied men to return to Mexico and save their village. So, with support from the village, Nayeli and three friends begin their hilarious and harrowing journey through Mexico to Tijuana and eventually, hopefully, to the United States, where they expect to quickly enlist seven Mexican “soldiers and policeman” to repatriate and save their village in short order.
This book is at once a winning comedy and an epic adventure tale of a journey into mysterious, dangerous lands (such as Tijuana, Las Vegas, and the Colorado Rockies). It is also injected with striking moments of social realism, depicting the poverty and desperation of both those who cross the borders and those who stay behind. It provides a fascinating outsiders’ perspective on the United States as well as a Mexican perspective on border-crossing and immigration. Having read and loved several instances of Americans on adventures or misadventures in Mexico (e.g. Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses / Border Trilogy and Kerouac’s On the Road), it was refreshing to read of Mexicans on an adventure in the exotic United States.
This story is filled to overflowing with endearing, memorable and quirky characters (examples: Nayeli’s formidable Aunt Irma, nicknamed La Osa (“the she-bear”), in her younger years a Mexican bowling champion, now running for mayor or Tres Camerones; and Atómiko, a self-made samurai warrior and superhero refuse picker of the Tijuana garbage dump who gives new meaning to “trash talk.” The mood of much of this book is such that Jared Hess (writer/director of Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre) just might be an ideal choice as director of a film version. Though the characters are amusing and likeable, many of them are a little bit one-dimensional. The characters’ lack of depth holds the novel back from perfection, but is serviceable enough in a comedic adventure context.
Although marketed as an adult novel, the book might have great appeal to teenage readers because of the age and sentiments of its protagonists, its humorous and exciting storyline, and numerous youth culture references. Indeed, I almost wonder if, had this been Urrea’s first novel, a publisher might have marketed it as a young adult book. The cover art, though tasteful, does not seem to properly represent the book’s lighthearted tone and contemporary, adventurous story, and was probably designed to visually tie the book to Urrea’s successful adult novel The Hummingbird’s Daughter, which I have not yet read. It appears as though, in attempting to market this book to Urrea’s existing literary audience, they may have missed out on a potential new and different audience in teenagers. Furthermore, a quick survey of Internet reviews suggests that, because of this marketing misstep, some readers expecting “serious literature” have been turned off by the comedic elements and simple characterizations, two things that may actually work in its favor as a young adult book. All in all, I think I would actually recommend this book first and foremost as a book for teenagers; it would be at home in contemporary YA literature.
[Note: the book does contain some explicit language and, of course, an irritating, not-really-necessary and not-entirely-condoned but nonetheless-apparently-obligatory-in-contemporary-literature sex scene. Unfortunately, it’s nothing out of the ordinary even for YA literature.]
In her search for heroes, Nayeli becomes the true heroine of the story, her journey rife with ordeals, excitement, distractions, and sorrows. She saves the mission and their lives on numerous occasions, and after trying the hard and dangerous way, always manages to find the help they need in the most unlikely of places and people. The tragicomic, foreign, and fresh view of both Mexico and the U.S.A. that Urrea portrays through the journey of Nayeli and her companions will stay with the reader for a long time. Four stars.
Into the Beautiful North: A Novel
written by Luis Alberto Urrea
Little, Brown and Company
342 pages
ISBN: 978-0-316-02527-0
Release Date: May 19, 2009
www.luisurrea.com