I have been putting this off for a while now….just haven’t felt like doing it. But, I’m 3 books down and all the things I wanted to say about them just after reading them have left me, so I figured I better get what little things I DO remember down on the internet or they’re going to be lost forever.
The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster
This is supposed to be a children’s book, but I’m not sure what age group the author was going for. I know that it’s a little too old for my 9 y/o, but I can’t imagine a 12 y/o reading what is basically a fairy tale, either. What I mean by too old for the 9 y/o: I’m not sure he would understand the “Island of Conclusions” and how you can only get there by jumping. (You know…..“jumping to conclusions”?) The book has a lot of puns, basically, and I KNOW he’s not going to get any puns. However, the book was written in 1961, and maybe kids were smarter then.
Anyway, it’s about a boy named Milo who is unhappy. “Wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he’d bothered. Nothing really interested him—least of all the things that should have.” One day he comes home from school to find a box in his room. The accompanying note says FOR MILO, WHO HAS PLENTY OF TIME. He opens it, and it’s a tollbooth. A purple tollbooth. The assembles it, shrugs, drives his toy car through it, and ends up in a CRAZY WILD ADVENTURE!!!!! He meets a part-dog-part-alarm clock tamed Tock, a “humbug” named Humbug, King Azaz the Unabridged, and the Mathmagician. By the end he has a new appreciation for knowledge, he’s saved the kingdom, and he’s a kid who wants to explore and play, etc. Eventually he gets home, and the next day the tollbooth is gone, just as mysteriously as it came.
The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
It’s set in the early 60s, and it’s told by 3 women: Skeeter, a 23 y/o white girl, single, still living with her parents, missing her family’s former maid, and wishing to be a writer. Aibileen, a black maid who’s great with her bosses’ children, moves on to a new job when the kids get old enough to stop loving her and start hating blacks. Minnie, black maid with loud mouth, works best for deaf old ladies who can’t hear her talk back.
Skeeter gets an idea: a book of interviews of black maids for their side of life—what it’s like to work for white women and raise white kids while simultaneously being treated as if they are barely human and not fit to breathe the same air.
I cannot do this book justice, so I’m not writing anything else. Just this: I loved it, and Mom loved it.
I Am the Messenger, by Markus Zusak
I read a book by Zusak before, called “The Book Thief” and I simply loved it, so I was prepared to love this as well. It’s not just a “Book Thief 2”….it’s good, but definitely in a different way. Like Book Thief, it’s not my age group. Technically, it’s young adult. What is the age range of young adult? I’m pretty sure most moms in this town wouldn’t let their 13 y/o read this book. If I were to recommend it to anyone, I’d say maybe 16 and up, just so I don’t get parents mad at me. However, I’d let my 13 y/o read it, if I had one. And I was reading worse when I was 13, anyway.
Synopsis: Ed Kennedy gets chosen. For what, he doesn’t know. He just starts getting playing cards in the mail and phone calls at night and visits from hooligans. According to the first card, he is to go to 3 addresses at the time specified. It’s not until he gets to the first address that he figures out what, exactly, he is supposed to DO. He is supposed to help! The types of help vary—one involves murder, one involves the impersonation of a dead man, the other involves an empty shoe box. When that card is finished, he receives another. And then another. One for every suit. By the end, he has made things better for a few people for a little while, and he has made things way better for a few people for a long while. He goes to 12 addresses, but some addresses have more than one person who benefits, so he ends up helping like 25 people. It’s very, very, very, very sweet! I loved all the cards, even the ones that were very hard for him to complete. The last card is my favorite, because it’s the most personal. My only beef with the book was the shitty ending. I wanted to person behind the cards to be some kindly, old benefactor who noticed some things that were wrong, somehow, and decided to pick Ed to fix them, so that Ed could learn an important lesson in the process. Instead Zusak himself shows up, says HI, I CREATED ALL THIS. TO, LIKE, SHOW HUMANITY THAT AN ORDINARY PERSON CAN DO EXTRAORDINARY THINGS. BUT THEN I COULDN’T END IT, SO I JUST CRAPPED THIS OUT. SEE YA.
Ok, really? Truthfully? I love Markus Zusak. That man has a fucking way with words. I wish I had marked every sentence that I loved so that I could write a few of them here, but I didn’t, and a quick flip-through of the book didn’t give me any. Just read this or The Book Thief. You’ll know what I mean.
