So, as you are aware, Gentle Reader, Your Humble Blogger is attempting to blog every single book read. This is, on occasion, disconcerting, when I discover that I haven’t blogged a book that I know I’ve read. As for instance, when beginning to write a note for The Sea of Trolls, and wanting to refer back to what I had said about Nancy Farmer’s really magnificent earlier book The House of the Scorpion, and discovering that evidently I never read it. Which is wrong. I did read it. I’m fairly certain I read it in August or September of last year, but that could well be wrong. However, I’m really quite certain I didn’t read it before I began blogging my reading in January 2004. I got it from a library, for one thing, but which one and when ... I can’t remember. Sometimes, when I do this, I go back and write a whole note for it, but since I can’t really put my finger on when I read it, I don’t want to do that, and besides, I am finding the whole thing terrible and surprisingly disorienting. It’s as if having not blogged it, I must not have really done it. Which is too bad, because it really is a marvelous book, and I suspect that I had intended to talk about (and in fact have a vague recollection of writing) about why such a book is a ‘young adult’ book at all, since it’s nice, chewy, juicy reading, every bit as good a book as many specfic novels I’ve read in the last few years, and I don’t see why it should be banned from the grown-up part of the library.
Anyway, this latest Nancy Farmer book, although still quite good, feels a lot more juvenile, in the sense that I felt, whilst reading it, that it wasn’t really meant for me, that it wasn’t meant to challenge or scare or provoke me very much. I’m not sure I could say what it is that feels that way; it’s not (I think) the vocabulary, or the difference in the amount of death, disease and depression, or the scariness of the bad guys. Well, I suppose it is, in some way, the scariness of the bad guys; in this, there is a Bad Guy, she is a half-troll, a shape-shifter, and a rider of Nightmares. And although she was the Bad Guy, she wasn’t a bit scary; she was a buffoon baddie, not a serious threat to either kill or ensorcel Our Hero. But I don’t think that’s the difference, either, as I felt it long before we met or heard of her. Hm.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.