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Midnight for Charlie Bone

The Children of the Red King series, Book 1

Scholastic
Fiction, MG Fantasy
Themes: Hidden Wonders, Magic Workers, Mind Powers, Schools
***+

Description

For ten years, Charlie Bone thought he was an ordinary boy - until he started hearing voices from photographs. Suddenly, his nasty grandmother and broody aunts take an interest in him, forcing him to attend the elite Bloor's Academy for "endowed" children: those who, like Charlie, have peculiar gifts or rare talent. Charlie doesn't want to be special, not if it means having to abandon his best friend Benjamin and rub shoulders with unpleasant people like the Bloors... but somehow he's become caught up in a decade-old mystery involving a missing girl, a mystery that itself ties into the centuries-old history of the Red King and his squabbling descendants.

Review

Hidden mages in modern times, a special academy, a boy with perpetually unruly hair discovering a secret family legacy... The comparisons to Harry Potter are hard to avoid, though they are most likely creative coincidence. Charlie's not as dynamic a character as Harry, being almost agonizingly slow on the uptake at several points (his unendowed friend Benjamin's even a little quicker on the draw), and Nimmo's world feels darker, nastier, and less inviting than Rowling's invention in many respects. Not all "endowed" people are bad apples, but the majority seem to be, with cooperation and friendship seeming like rare exceptions. With most characters lining up about as one expects from the first meeting and relatively few twists, a strong sense of pulled punches and deliberately-blunted edges, plus a finale that (skirting spoilers) doesn't involve the main character as much as one might expect, the story overall didn't feel especially satisfying. That said, there are some nice ideas and images here, and younger readers will likely enjoy it more. I guess I'm just a little too old and jaded to succumb to Charlie's simpler charms.

 

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Griffin's Castle


Scholastic
Fiction, MG Fantasy/Horror
Themes: Buildings with Character, Cross-Genre, Ghosts and Spirits, Girl Power
****+

Description

In a world that rushes headlong toward the future, eleven-year-old Dinah looks only to the past - a far more interesting and stable place than her chaotic life, dragged by her drifting mother Rosalie from house to hovel, shelter to back room. She's used to the loneliness by now, but she longs for a place to call home for more than a few months. When she arrives at their latest dwelling, a run-down old house loaned by Rosalie's latest boyfriend (and now employer) Gomer, Dinah is determined to stay. She even names the place: Griffin's Castle, after the crumbling stone griffin she finds in the front garden. But Gomer has other plans for the house and for Rosalie - plans that don't include Dinah. Then she finds a stone lioness from a castle wall following her home - and realizes she may have a way to defend herself and her newfound castle, especially when more beasts come to the garden of Griffin's Castle. But are her shadowy companions protectors, or something more sinister?

Review

This book straddles a line between fantasy and horror. Dinah's a misfit who always seems to be in the wrong place or say the wrong thing, an inquisitive girl born to a mother who can't reliably remember to sign her up for school or buy groceries. It's not simple, childish play that makes her imagine the past and future glories of Griffin's Castle so fiercely, but an unspoken rage and deep longing to belong somewhere, even if that somewhere's in another time. How is she able to summon the spirits of stone animals to life? Even she doesn't know, balanced as she is on that knife-edge between childhood and adulthood, between the power of magical thinking and cold reality. Having managed the feat, she learns that these beasts, much like her own building resentment and anger, aren't quite so easy to control as she first thought. Two boys from her new school, scrawny bookish Barry and oddball giant Jason, try in their own ways to help, each wrestling with their own flawed lives, but Dinah's so used to being on her own that she can't or won't understand that she doesn't have to go it alone... a blindness with potentially dire consequences. The tale has some interesting layers to it, with nobody being quite so flat and simple as they seem at first. With chilling overtones, the tale of Dinah's unraveling life and increasing reliance on, and imprisonment by, her shadowy stone companions unfolds in a struggle between past and present, isolation and companionship, even despair and hope. The ending's a little sudden and neat, but it ultimately fits the story. Considering that I found it for a buck at a clearance sale, I'm more than satisfied.

 

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