Book Review: Three Times Lucky

by Sheila Turnage.  Middle grade fiction, 312 pages.

Tupelo Landing, North Carolina, population about what you can fit in a dinky cafe, including one Mo LoBeau, age 11.  Mo washed into town as a newborn, carried on flood debris from a hurricane.  Now she lives with Miss Lana and the Colonel (he washed up in that same storm, and has no memory of what went before) in what by any standards would be a non-traditional family.  But even though Mo is pretty happy with the way her summer-before-sixth-grade is shaping up, she has never stopped looking for her "Upstream Mother," the one who lost her in that flood.  Then things get difficult.

Though the story is, as near as I can tell, in a contemporary setting, Tupelo Landing has the feel of a town from about 1950, possibly because it pretty much stopped changing 60 years ago.  Turnage captures the slow, dusty summer feel, not to mention the feeling of everyone knowing everyone's business, beautifully.  That the story ends up showing that they may not know each other as well as they thought is no coincidence, I'm sure.

A murder, an old crime, and a kidnapping, and Mo's summer isn't turning out quite the way she expected.  She and her best friend Dale set out to solve it all, with maybe just a little help from Joe Starr, a detective from the big city.  They need to take time, too, to help his big brother with a little financial setback.  The story moves fast, in its leisurely summer way, and captures beautifully the equally pressing importance (to Mo) of things that an adult might consider to be at very different levels of significance.  It all matters to eleven.

In the end, with the help of another  hurricane, all the loose ends are tied up, and Mo makes some surprising discoveries about the meaning of family.

Overall, I found it a good read, fast-moving and with enough suspense to make me stay up too late finishing it.  I did get a little confused at the end about how certain issues untangled themselves, but otherwise have no complaints.  4.5 stars.

 

I somehow got myself committed to two 3rd-Wednesday posts, and this is the first.  Later today (seconds before midnight?) (okay, or maybe tomorrow.  Sheesh.) I'll post the other, my contribution to the Progressive Book Club's discussion of Save the Cat, a how-to book on screenwriting, which I am reading and discussing as a writer of novels, not movies.

Book Review: The Secret Adversary

A Tommy and Tuppence Adventure, by Agatha Christie.  c. 1922   224 pages.

I have long been familiar, of course, with Agatha Christie's Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, but this pair of "Young Adventurers" was new to me.  If it weren't that there was really no such category in 1922, I think this would be a Young Adult novel, what with the youth of the protagonists (not much past 20) and the mixture of light-heartedness and hair-raising close calls.

About a year after the end of WWI (The War as it is to them), the pair of old friends meet up on the street.  Each has been "demobbed" (demobilized, i.e. let go from the Army/VAD) and, despite being more or less of the upper class, they are stone cold broke and getting nowhere looking for work.  Upshot: they decide to team up and run an ad as the "Young Adventurers" and take on whatever comes their way, for a steep fee, of course.

What comes their way is a complex case that mixes them up with whatever passed at that time for the British Secret Service, a Bolshevist plot (the 1920s were are great time for Bolshevist plots in English literature), a search for a girl of about Tuppence's age who is in grave peril, and above all the desperate race to find and recover some papers that could destroy the Empire if they fell into the wrong (i.e. Bolshevik) hands.

Naturally, they blunder, take up with the wrong folks, and get themselves into no end of life-threatening situations.  Equally naturally, they get out of those situations through a bit of luck and a lot of pluck and occasionally even some clear thinking.  In the end, as we expect, the Empire is saved, and everyone is united with the right partner.

Unlike the Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot mysteries, this book spends little time in "exercising the little grey cells," and a great deal more time in racing from adventure to adventure (another reason it feels more YA than Ms. Christie's other works).  I was pretty certain who the culprit was soon after his/her introduction, but the plot twisted enough to make me doubt my conclusions more than once, so it didn't feel too obvious.

The book fits well with the conventions of its time: black and white moral situations, wonderful stereotypes of American characters, and lots of British phlegm in response to near-death situations.  The writing is clear and coherent, editing as you would expect is top-notch.  In sum, the book is very pleasant brain candy.  If you like this sort of thing (Peter Wimsey and P.G. Wodehouse meet the Hardy Boys) you'll love it.

Oh, dang.  That star thing.  Well, not 5 stars because the villain was too easy to spot.  We'll give it 4, and go find the next in the series.

Flash Fiction yet again

  This week's Chuck Wendig Flash Fiction Challenge involved a random-sentence generator.  I played a few times, and ended up with the sentence, "The novice crawls underneath the doomed mount."  I tweaked it just a bit to make it work.  

User warning: This story is a little grimmer than my usual.

Death of Innocence

When disaster struck, Yonson was a happy-natured novice zergmunt tender, learning to care for the complex beasts from the ground up, as it were.  The disaster, as so often happens, came in the form of human prejudice.  Someone stirred up the people to fear the great, horned, flying creatures, and next thing the zergmunt aerie knew, they were under attack by peasants with pitchforks and torches, denouncing the beasts as demonic invaders.

Within a week, Yonson was handed his riding harness and a bow, and told he was part of the mounted flying corps, ready to pair with a zerg and fight for his new home.  He didn’t mind, since they let him pair with Gorg, the zerg he’d been most drawn to from the beginning.  As a novice, he had tended to the needs of a number of as-yet unpaired zergmunts.  Translated, that meant he’d mucked out the stables.  A vegetarian creature the size of a small cottage produces a lot of by-product, so Yonson had been busy.  But Gorg always acknowledged his presence, and he always took a moment to stroke the zerg’s head.

Rider training usually lasted months as the youngsters learned to harness, fly, and direct the zergs in lifting and hauling.   Then they’d be sent about the country to help build large projects and move freight.  Now Yonson learned as much as he was going to in a week, thanked his stars he already knew how to shoot, and began flying patrols.  The aerie sat atop a high hill, not quite a spire, to give the creatures an edge in launching themselves.  A zerg could launch from flat ground, but it took more effort than most cared to expend.  That one fact had saved them, as the disgruntled peasants couldn’t attack effectively up the near-vertical slopes.  A pair of the alien fliers with armed riders could protect the aerie.  The Zergtenant had sent to the king for help, but no one expected too much.  The unrest seemed to be wide-spread, though no one at the aerie knew who or what had started it.  The king had plenty of problems, bigger than a threat to a minor zerg aerie in a distant province.

So the aerie was safe, but the beasts had to eat.  They had to eat a lot.  And that meant flying to nearby meadows where they could graze, as the villagers would no longer send up hay and oats for them.  Two riders remained in flight to guard while the rest of the herd grazed, their riders lying around in the sun and resting, though still watchful.  Yonson landed Gorg with the rest, and stroked the large, furry head.  Gorg leaned against him a moment, a slight, fleeting pressure that spoke of the unusual bond between them, for the beasts seldom acknowledged their riders when dismounted, though they obeyed willingly in flight.

The zergs had been grazing for some quarter hour when the first one raised its head, gave a mournful gurgle, and toppled over.  Yonson, along with the other riders, stared in horror, then ran to his mount, as the realization came over him: the field had been poisoned, salted with one of the many local plants deadly to the aliens.  Yelling for them all to stop eating, he prayed he was in time, though he believed in no gods.  Gorg had been a little later arriving than the rest.  Surely he had not eaten as much as dead beast had, and would be fine if he could be made to vomit up the poison.

He reached the animal’s side in time to see a half-dozen more zergs topple over, and knew in his heart he was too late.  Still, he tugged at Gorg’s head, reaching an arm fearlessly into the great mouth and down the throat, hoping that zergs, like people, would vomit at that stimulus.  Vomit Gorg did, but it was too late.  One last time Gorg touched his head to Yonson’s shoulder, gave the same gurgle as the others, and sank to his knees.  Before the beast could topple and crush him, the novice rider crawled from beneath his doomed mount and held as much of the head as he could while Gorg died.  By the time the zerg breathed his last, Yonson was a novice no longer.

Slowly he stood and faced the valley.  In their ignorance and superstition, the fools had killed the animals that only served to help them.  Creatures that, for all their size, could not or would not kill.

Yonson was no zerg.  Covered with the vomit of his dying mount, broken with grief, he stood unmoving and made a vow, and as he did so his face hardened and aged.  Those who promoted fear and suspicion of that which was no threat would know the dread and horror of his vengeance.  The death of Gorg had slain the happy-natured boy, and left only a cold, angry man who knew neither love nor mercy.