Out of the Dust

Out of the Dust
by Karen Hesse
Recommended Ages: 12+

This novel, written entirely in poetry, presents itself as the diary of a teenage farm girl in the Oklahoma Panhandle during 1934-35, when the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl combined to make life excruciatingly hard. It couldn't get much harder for Billie Jo Kelby without killing her. A tall, skinny, boyish-looking redhead, at age 14 she loves nothing more than playing the piano. She does it well enough to earn a little money that her taciturn, mildly disapproving mother stashes away for Billie Jo's college fund. Her father, meanwhile, struggles to grow anything in fields that aren't getting enough rain. Whenever the wheat seems to be perking up, another dust storm blows through and decimates the crop.

By age 15, Billie Jo's outlook is rather darker. She all but gives up playing the piano after an accident with a pail of kerosene left her hands burned, her mother and a newborn brother dead, and a silence between her and her father as suffocating as the dust that blows through the cracks in the house and gets into everything. Today's reader, who may not have experienced anything like the dust storms that repeatedly afflict Billie Jo's panhandle, will be amazed to enter this book's world of food made gritty by dust, of barns pushed over by drifting dunes, of a building that collapsed when its attic filled with dust, of a funeral procession that started on a clear sunny day and had to stop midway due to a cloud of dust that stalled engines and turned day to night.

It's no wonder Billie Jo would want to run away from it. The wonder is that she doesn't, or at least not for long, in spite of the apparent hopelessness of her father's farming methods, the silence across their kitchen table, and the shadow of blame on both of them for her mother's death. That such a story can have an uplifting ending, and not one based on the characters fleeing to California, is owed to several factors, but chief among them is a heart-moving realization both father and daughter arrive at by the end.

At times while reading this book, I wasn't quite convinced of the concept of a novel in verse; quite often it seemed to amount to prose with arbitrary line breaks added to make the paragraphs look more spread-out. Sometimes I noticed that the line breaks carried rhythmic suggestions for reading the book out loud. And then there were stretches of flat-out lyricism, like this:

I hear the first drops.
Like the tapping of a stranger
at the door of a dream,
the rain changes everything.
It strokes the roof,
streaking the dusty tin,
ponging,
a concert of rain notes,
spilling from gutters,
gushing through gullies,
soaking into the thirsty earth outside.

And then I was convinced...for a while. Billie Jo never explains why she is writing her diary in the form of poetry, or even refers to writing it at all. Telling stories from the characters' point of view, in the style of poetry, seems to be just a Karen Hesse thing. She does something similar, I find, at least in Witness, the book I read immediately after this.

This book won the 1998 Newbery Medal award and the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction, among many other honors. Hesse's other titles include Phoenix Rising (about life after a nuclear accident), A Time of Angels (about the 1918 influenza epidemic), The Music of Dolphins (about a girl raised by dolphins), Witness (about the KKK in 1920s Vermont), and more.

The Byzantium Bazaar

The Byzantium Bazaar
by Stephen Elboz
Recommended Ages: 11+

Bridie begins to worry when her Gramps fails to meet her at the train station. She has been sent to visit him while the aunt she lives with recovers from surgery. But not only is Gramps not at home when she arrives at his salvage yard in a depressed part of the city; his cats, hens, and donkey are gone too. The nasty Crickbone twins, Amos and Deakin, have taken the place over, and they throw Bridie out on the street, stealing her luggage into the bargain. She has nowhere to go but Soap Hill, where the city's street people congregate around fires, and begin asking if anyone has seen her Gramps.

While no one seems to know where the old fellow went, a young fellow named Branwell offers to show her where Gramps' donkey lives. He leads Bridie to the Byzantium Bazaar, a dilapidated department store that his mother, Mrs. Firbanks, has turned into a shelter for abused and neglected animals. Bridie becomes a long-term guest there, helping feed the hundreds of cats and all the other tasks that need doing. But when Omar, the king of the street people, locates her Gramps, Bridie finds herself at the center of a terrible conflict between the animal-loving Firbankses and the seedy, greedy Crickbones. The thrilling action includes a daring rescue from a scene of animal cruelty, a battle in a junkyard between gangsters and street people, and an awful deal with the enemy that puts Bridie in the most danger of all.

Like most Elboz books that I have read, this one fits a lot into a few pages: characters for whom readers will cherish strong feelings; a strangely charming picture of a city's underbelly; crises not only of personal safety but of conscience as well. It shows the urban poor in a sympathetic light, but it also depicts frightening villains. In the Crickbones it conjures loathesome figures for whom, at the end, one feels a throb of pity. In Omar, it creates an impressive, perhaps even mythically powerful figure. In Shah, the king of the cats, it furnishes Omar with a four-legged equal. And in Bridie, it has a heroine who is totally out of her depth, yet still overcomes; a girl protagonist whose flaws and weaknesses provide the humanizing touches of a character with whom we wholly sympathize.

Besides the Kit Stixby quartet and three other books I have already reviewed, Stephen Elboz has also written The House of Rats, The Bottle Boy, A Store of Secrets, and several other interesting titles that I guess would make excellent reading choices to take along on a trip when you have to travel light. He seems especially skilled at writing a richly furnished world into existence with an economy of words that never seems stingy, and at fitting a lot of fun into a few pages.

Ghostlands

Ghostlands
by Stephen Elboz
Recommended Ages: 12+

Amazon informs me I bought this book more than eight years ago, apparently when reading the Kit Stixby quartet kindled an interest in its author's other work. A sticker on its front cover lists the price at £--60, which I guess means I got it from a used-books dealer in the U.K. (If you're interested, used copies of this book are still available online.) Why has it taken me until now to read it? You wouldn't ask if you had any idea how rapidly I was acquiring books at that time; far faster than I could read them. It isn't that I wasn't interested in the book, or that I'm incapable of reviewing a book when it's hot off the press. Rather, let the fact I kept it through several changes of address bear witness that, despite a thousand other books to read, this has always been on my "to-read" pile. It's just a ridiculously tall pile. And then a Stephen Elboz book (The Prisoner's Apprentice) came up in the "what shall I read next" lottery, after which I had to ransack my shelves for anything else by him. So, with apologies for tardiness...

Ewan Niles isn't thrilled when his parents receive an invitation from his dad's godfather to send him for a visit. Only the rare luxury of a first-class train ticket softens his resistance. But at the other end of a tiring journey, the sight of Dr. Malthus' house, with its unkempt garden and its lack of modern comforts, immediately makes him regret coming. It isn't fun to be entertained by a host who has no interest in seeing him, leaving him under the tut-tutting housekeeper's supervision, and forbidding him to climb the one good climbing tree in the garden - the one planted in memory of the doctor's son Ziggy, who died when he was Ewan's age.

Just when Ewan writes a letter to his parents urging them to bring him home, odd things start happening that soon change his mind again. He begins to suspect the house is haunted. Soon enough, he knows it for sure, as Ziggy's ghost introduces himself and flies Ewan to the graveyard to meet all his friends. No sooner has Ewan made up his mind that seeing dead people is fun, than the needle on the adventure-meter swings over to "dangerous and scary," thanks to a local coven of witches whose powers are drawn from enslaved ghosts. Behind them, and behind a kitschy theme park that uses genuine ghosts to provide thrills and chills, something even more sinister is at work. Ewan must join forces with some unlikely allies to save Ziggy and his ghost friends.

This is not a particularly thick book - my edition of it weighs in at 119 pages, divided into 18 chapters. But it is packed with excitement and fun, populated by memorable characters, and oozes imagery that will delight all the mind's senses. While Harry Potter fans - always the set I have in mind when I review books like this - may wrinkle their noses at Mrs. Mulligan's view of witchcraft as a vice of idle, uppity women, Phyllis Flight and her cronies make it fun to share that view. Also, I think Elboz may have found a better use for an endearingly silly headless-knight ghost than J.K. Rowling did. But this book's biggest shock for Potterheads may be its depiction of a poltergeist as a figure of terror rather than mere mischief. It's a ghost story that talks you out of being afraid of ghosts, before presenting something much, much scarier. If you're ready for such a book, now you know where to find it.

The Tower at Moonville

The Tower at Moonville
by Stephen Elboz
Recommended Ages: 10+

A mistreated orphan escapes from his mean uncle to go to an unconventional boarding school dominated by an adjacent astronomy tower... How can Harry Potter fans not be interested in this little novel by the creator of the magical Kit Stixby quartet?

To be sure, they don't learn magic at the Moonville school. They don't learn much at all. Run by a lax headmaster who seems to have no time for anything but his marital and financial troubles, the school is awash in unruly boys who scratch their names into the woodwork, gamble on frog races, and stay up all night hunting in the surrounding forest. The head boy posts a lookout so that, when Mr. Bentbeef makes one of his infrequent and brief appearances, the class can appear to be learning its times-eight tables or Latin declensions (bunk, bunk-off, bunk-up, bunkum...). It's pretty much every boy for himself.

But then, Nathan Wheatear isn't supposed to be there anyway. He ran away from his verminous vermin-catcher uncle Jago Blint, along with another orphan Jago had scrobbled on his way to catch the train to school. Young Sam Halliam would rather run away to the circus than go to school, so he proposes that Nathan go instead and pretend to be him. Nathan really wants to learn, though. So while his schoolmates horse around, he borrows books from Mr. Gentleman, the astronomer who lives in the tower, and who is in fact the school's landlord. The tower becomes his haven from the chaos of the school. And while Mr. Gentleman is away at a conference, Nathan assists him by continuing to fire nightly rockets off the tower roof, in the hope of communicating with extraterrestrial beings.

But then Uncle Jago finds him, and terrorizes Nathan into joining him in a series of thefts that leaves the boy tormented in his conscience. Then comes the fateful day when his best friend at the school is accused of attempting to burgle the Bentbeefs' house, and there's nothing left for Nathan but to show great courage, to make a daring escape, and to have one climactic adventure so wild and terrifying that it leaves circus-runaway Sam envious.

This short, fast-paced novel strains at the seams with vividly drawn characters, agonizing personal conflict, touching friendship, humor and action and thrills, ending with a spectacular bang and a flourish of weirdness. It echoes the moral crisis of the best part of Oliver Twist. It has well-described settings that light up the imagination, such as a wax-works museum full of ghoulish figures. It has villains pompous, coarse, and weaselish, all three. And it has representatives of certain boys'-school character types who will remind those homesick for Hogwarts of some students there. The idea of "escaping to school" is a funny sort of fantasy, but for some reason it has proven to work again and again. This book is another fine example of it.

Among other books that Elboz wrote are two that are next in line on my to-read pile: Ghostlands and The Byzantium Bazaar. I would also recommend his somewhat more substantial young-adult novel, The Prisoner's Apprentice.

The Prisoner's Apprentice

The Prisoner's Apprentice
by Stephen Elboz
Recommended Ages: 12+

Yanis is a boy who has lived all his life, so far, in a tsarist-era Russian orphanage where the children work as laundry drudges. Then a scientist named Dr. Gomarus shows up and chooses him as his assistant for a thousand-mile voyage to the village of Osva, to study the cranial measurements of convicts in a prison for revolutionary leaders. It's an opportunity that lights up the boy's gloomy life, enabling him not only to see more of the world and to meet strange and notorious people, but also to learn to read and develop photographs.

From their first moment on board the ski-ship that sails up a frozen river, Yanis is captivated by a beautiful young countess who has been exiled for displeasing the tsar. Once arrived in Osva, he similarly falls under the spell of a charming death-row prisoner named Nikolay Kolchak. Unwittingly, he becomes drawn into the middle of a secret correspondence between the two. Before he understands who should and shouldn't be trusted, he becomes entangled in a dangerous plot.

Unusual for young adult fiction in English, this story enters the perilous, conflict-torn world of the beginnings of the Russian revolution. It shows both sides in both a sympathetic and a critical light, from the paranoid repression of the tsarist regime to the cynical deceit and villainy of some revolutionary leaders. Characters of all classes show both attractive and repulsive features. The danger Yanis is in, and the developing beauty of his relationship with Dr. Gomarus, are both warmly felt. And the ending leaves the reader in the surprising position of having to finish the story for him- or herself.

This 2006-published novel is, with the exception of a chapter book titled Clever Monkeys, the latest book by the author of the four magical Kit Stixby adventures, the two Temmi books, two Kid Wonder books, The House of Rats, Games Board Map, The Bottle Boy, The Byzantium Bazaar, Ghostlands, The Tower at Moonville, and A Store of Secrets. It might be hard to find; Amazon doesn't seem to be aware it exists. But I found several Elboz titles through online used-book dealers, and after reading this book I moved the lot of them to the top of my to-read pile.

The Witch of Clatteringshaws

The Witch of Clatteringshaws
by Joan Aiken
Recommended Ages: 10+

My first impressions on reading this last book in the "Wolves Chronicles," published more than 40 years after The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and the year after its author's death in 2004, were that it was too short; that it was too lightweight; that it resolved things too quickly and too easily; that it had too many earmarks of an unrealized sketch, or an unfinished work, fleshed out or completed by a ghost-writer. By that time, however, I had been in touch with Lizza Aiken, daughter of the late Joan and administrator of the author's website. She admitted that other reviewers had picked up on the same vibes, but in fact the book was all Joan Aiken's work. And the reason the book reads that way is explained in the author's own afterword to the U.K. edition of the book - read it here, in case (like me) you were perplexed by a U.S. edition that omits it. And here is an essay Lizza wrote about how certain authors' final, posthumous works may be considered a parting gift to their fans - as evidenced not only by this book, but also by Terry Pratchett's The Shepherd's Crown. I am thankful to Lizza for directing me to all these resources. The sum-total TLDR of them is that Joan Aiken wanted to bring the story of Dido Twite and Simon Battersea to a satisfying conclusion, and to reveal her final intentions for the unique alternate-history fantasy world in which they dwell - but as she felt the energy to write leaving her, she decided writing a short book was better than starting a long one and not finishing it.

As the canon closes on the strange world of Dido Twite & Co., Simon - lately promoted from Duke of Battersea to King of England, against his will - has begun to wish somebody else would come forward with a believable claim to the throne. Dido, meanwhile, has turned down his proposal of marriage for the simple reason that she doesn't want to be queen. She isn't the only person who doesn't want Dido to be queen; a couple of Simon's counselors have begun to hatch a plot to put forward a pretender to the throne. Joined by her friend Piers, a.k.a. the Woodlouse, who has turned up surprisingly alive and well after being presumed dead in a previous adventure, Dido travels to the lochside village of Clatterinshaws, Scotland to check out a possible heir who has been reported by the local witch, Malise.

Malise is the final masterpiece in Aiken's long career of inventing unforgettable characters. Doing triple duty as a district health inspector, child welfare case worker, and magical practitioner, she consorts with an ancient otter-worm known to local folks as the monster of the loch, battles even ancienter nocturnal nasties known as the Hobyahs, has family connections with the Archbishop of Canterbury and the king's jester, and struggles daily with the guilt of having missed the dying words of an important saint whose prophecy was supposed to carry great importance for the kingdom. Also, she rides a golf club instead of a broom.

Between them, Dido and Malise have to protect a downtrodden orphan named Fred from an awful nursing-home matron and her worthless son, who have designs of their own on the British throne. Meanwhile Simon must lead an army equipped for warfare in another century to confront a threat that has landed on the Scottish shore. Though he is anything but a battle-hardened warrior, he must soon face the Wendish king in a goofy sort of single combat.

Though it all ties up faster than one would like, it does so with many fine, Aikenesque touches - such as Malise's remark about a case of athlete's foot turning out to be Achilles heel. Towards the end it has the plotting and pacing of some of the more preposterous operas of Rossini, and perhaps a similar style of music is meant to go with the silly lyrics that its characters sing increasingly often. But all is finally well in a kingdom blessed with an ex-king who has kind hands, a surprise heir, an all-too-knowing parrot, and a prophecy that comes to light with perfect timing. I wish there could have been more - but perhaps it is, as Aiken said, better to know how the author meant it to end than to be left wondering forever.

Cold Shoulder Road

Cold Shoulder Road
by Joan Aiken
Recommended Ages: 11+

Following Joan Aiken's "Wolves Chronicles," which I have also seen described as the "James III saga," is a bit challenging. A couple of the books have different titles in the U.S. than in the U.K. (Examples: Limbo Lodge=Dangerous Games; Is=Is Underground.) The fourth book in publication order, a prequel called The Whispering Mountain, is routinely left out of numbered lists of the canonincal series, which may lead to confusion about which book is the nth in the series. Midnight Is a Place is treated as a completely separate work, even though it shares the same alternate-history period-fantasy world as this series. And I've mentioned before that the title Is is a sovereign internet search killer. I had no luck finding a copy of it until I came across the omnibus edition of Is and this book: canonically the ninth, publicationally the tenth or eleventh book in what I believe is one of the great classic series of young-adult adventure novels.

Like Is, Cold Shoulder Road takes the point of view of Is (or Isabett) Twite, younger sister of Dido Twite, who left the home she shared with oldest sister Penny in Blackheath Edge, Kent, to honor a dying uncle's wish and find her vanished cousin Arun. Find him she did, in the form of a boy who thought he was a cat and lived accordingly. While recovering from the trauma that drove him into cathood, Arun has gradually reverted to boyhood. But when Is and Arun arrive in Cold Shoulder Road, where he last left his mother Ruth Twite and the strange, silent sect she belonged to, they find the whole street deserted. Is worries the shock might send Arun back to chasing mice and biting people's ankles. But the deeper the two cousins dig, the more serious the situation appears. For not only has the Sect upped stakes and moved to the next town up the coast, but Ruth has personally disappeared, and taken somebody else's child with her.

This is no ordinary kidnapping, though. Ruth seems to have run away with a child who was entrusted to the townsfolk in an exchange of hostages with a vicious gang of smugglers, known as the Merrie Gentry. Specializing in sneaking loads of mammoth tusks, used for making snuffboxes, through a railway tunnel under the English Channel, the Merrie Gentry make gruesome examples of anyone who crosses them. Before you can say, "Croopus!" Is and Arun are in the thick of things, with a sneaky retired admiral on one side, a mesmerizing cult leader on the other, and such oddities abroad as a frigate parked in the crotch of a chestnut tree, a kite-flying rider on a two-wheeled machine, a travelers' rest area under the shelter of standing stones, a garden hanging over the edge of a cliff, and a bunch of people who can communicate by thought waves. There is a buried treasure, a sinister string of jewels, a disagreeable child who proves worth the trouble, a trip to the dentist that proves nastier than expected, and a swarm of spiders the size of small dogs.

I don't think you will ever encounter a similar combination of villainy, magic, heroism, and weirdness if you read a thousand books a year for a thousand years. Save yourself the trouble and read this book, and all its companion books. They are funny, thrilling, heart-warming, spine-chilling, over-the-top fantastic by every definition of the word, and written by a prose master who sneaks her lyricism in under the cover of a quaint dialect and a curtly straightforward tone of voice. In almost any other author's hands, a character like Is (or Dido before her) would soon become tiresome. I look forward to my next outing with them.