Scott's life started off on the wrong foot when his struggling actor father vowed to name his soon-to-be-born son after the next job he got...
thus his full name, Scottish Play Doe. (Though to be fair, his kid sister, Polly Ester, named after the fake plant in the hospital waiting room,
didn't get off much easier.) Then his dad's career took off; the rest of his family only sees him on screens big or small anymore. Now his
scientist mother has landed a job with Goodco, the cereal megacorporation whose sugary products start countless children's mornings, which
requires the family to move to the company town of Goodborough and the kids to start all over at yet another school.
When he sees a bunny-headed man on the way to classes, Scott just knows his first day will be even worse than expected.
He's seen odd things all his life, usually precursors to migraines. Only in Goodborough, the hallucinations seem awfully persistent... and
disturbingly real. Then he crosses paths with the leprechaun who calls himself Mick, a fugitive from Goodco's factories, and things get even
weirder - and more dangerous. It turns out that the company slogan - "There's a little magic in every box!" - isn't just ad hype. Goodco has
been capturing fantastical beasts and beings and stripping their magic for its products. Now Scott and his new friends, the siblings Erno and
Emily, may be the only ones who can stop a diabolical plot from coming to fruition.
Review
I really enjoyed Rex's The True Meaning of Smekday, and found myself again in need of an audiobook to keep work somewhat tolerable
(an increasingly tall order), so I decided to try this one. Like Smekday, Cold Cereal strikes a brilliant, tricky balance
between silly and serious, with characters and situations that have a little more to them than one might expect, weaving in elements of faerie
lore, the King Arthur myth cycle, and secret societies, not to mention corporate corruption. There's plenty of humor, but also a strong dark
element running under parts of the tale, as fairy tale creatures are hunted down (and not just in the "catch and cage" sense; Scott's visit to
a trophy room, while bloodless in text, implies a whole mess of death and violence under the surface, not to mention what it says about the
sociopathic Goodco employees and executives whom he crosses paths with). This weight adds some nice depth to a story that could've easily been
superficial candy fluff; kids' lives and relationships can be complicated, even without megalomaniac magic-stealing cereal companies plotting
global domination, and Rex's story respects his audience by acknowledging that complexity. Everyone's authentically flawed, even the grown-ups,
who aren't completely shut out of the story (as they sometimes are in middle-grade titles - Scott and his friends obviously take the lead, but
adults are part of the process, too, and not just clueless lunkheads who mess everything up because Too Old), which takes a little bit of time
to build momentum but moves pretty fast once it gets going. The ending, naturally, sets up the next installment, which I will have to track
down sooner rather than later. My main complaint is that the audiobook narrator wasn't the best I've heard, particularly his tendency to drop
his voice to mumbles or whispers or raise it high and squeaky; as I've mentioned, I usually listen to audiobooks at work, which is a large,
loud warehouse environment not conducive to hearing mumbles or whispers or high, squeaky dialog. (I really, really preferred the woman who read
The True Meaning of Smekday...)
Zelda's day started like any other. She woke in her bedroom in the little yellow house, she heads out through the front gate whose
creaking sounds like a friendly frog, she went jogging into town past the frisbee-playing boys by the courthouse, she smiled at the
clown in the laundromat, and suddenly realized she had a geology (or is it geometry?) quiz in five minutes... but today, she grabs a
bike and tries to beat the bell to class, cutting in front of a car - and that's when she sees him: a teen boy, who tries to warn her
of the danger she doesn't see until nearly too late.
A boy she has never seen before - and she knows every face in town like her own fingerprints.
The next morning, she wakes again in her bedroom, and goes out again on a jog... but she can't shake the memory of the stranger, or
the sense that something isn't quite right about the world around her. It's all a little too perfect, like something out of a dream.
But is she the dreamer, or is someone else - and what will happen when it's time to wake up for real?
Review
It's very, very seldom that a book can pull of a "dream" ending without becoming an automatic wall-bouncer. It's a different matter
entirely when the book admits it's a dream upfront - and when the question at its heart is who the dreamer is, and what the dream is
trying to accomplish for them, what story their mind needs to tell itself, before they're allowed to wake. This makes the dream and its
inhabitants matter, and allows the reader to invest in them and their fates. With frequently surreal imagery and imaginative turns of
phrase, Adam Rex captures the peculiar nature and illogical logic of dreams, which can so often seem much, much bigger than the insides
of a single human mind, populated by people and places that can feel as solid as anything in the waking world - complete with sounds,
textures, scents, tastes, and even (despite the popular trope) pain.
From the first ring of her alarm clock, Zelda's world is both too perfect and too strange to be truly real, but she never thinks to
question it, or question how everything and everyone seems to center on her; the town's inhabitants all know her by name even if she
doesn't know them, and the Frisbee bros remind her of the test she's about to miss... even though part of her knows she's graduated
already. But it's only the arrival of the stranger, Langston, that shakes her complacency... that, and when she hears a strange, deep,
disembodied voice that nobody else hears. The arrival of Patches the cat, who not only died when she was a young girl but now speaks
with a decidedly philosophical and poetic bent, also helps tip the scales, as does the realization that she cannot seem to read long
stretches of words; letters can be jumbled, and she might read small bits and pieces but they change as often as not when she blinks or
looks away. When she alerts the rest of the town to the fact that they're all in a dream, chaos erupts; every one of them believes
themselves to be the dreamer, as they all have lives and memories... and the rest cannot handle the idea that they and their memories
aren't real, because they are so very real to themselves. Zelda is certain she's the one - doesn't everything in this place seem to
center on her? - but Patches also makes convincing arguments, and neither can entirely rule out the shy boy Langston. But this dream
has been going on an awfully long time, and grown impossibly complex; surely something must be very, very wrong with whoever is
dreaming this world into being. Thus, Zelda determines to find a way to wake up, accompanied by Patches and Langston. Thus begins a
trek to the edge of the dream... but any mind that has stayed this deep in slumber is not one that wants to face the waking world, and
innumerable distractions and obstacles soon emerge. As the trio travel and navigate challenges, they continue to wonder which of them
is the real person, or if any of them are; it's entirely possible that each of them is just a fragment of the dreamer, bits and pieces
of their personality given independent form, either to work through something or simply through the random dance of neural electrical
firings in a possibly-damaged brain.
Even given the inherent peculiarity of life in a (literal) dream world, the story managed to keep my interest and make me care about
the characters (especially Patches) - even knowing that some (or even all) might not "survive" the ending. Given how hard they work for
the sake of the dreamer, the lengths they go to in order to unravel each complication and persist in their quest to wake up, slowly
piecing together what happened to create a dream this deep and determined to persist, it becomes a true quest requiring true
sacrifice... and even if they aren't all "real" in a conventional sense, they're more than real enough to do their part, and some spark
of them may well live on (skirting spoilers, the events of the dream and what the dreamer experiences and learns do indeed matter in
the waking world, so it wasn't all wasted effort; some parts of the dream, therefore, do live on beyond the end of the dream itself,
and in some way always will).
As a closing note, one point where Rex "failed" in capturing dream logic is where the dream characters don't recognize that they're not
real when confronted. In my experience, you never ask a someone in a dream if they're real if you don't want to know, because they will
tell you the truth (and it will depress you far more than it will them, because danged if some of the best people I meet aren't in my
own dreams).
Gratuity "Tip" Tucci needs to write an essay for a school contest about Smekday, the day the alien Boov first came to Earth... but there's more to write
than five pages can possibly hold, and more to say than she wants to reveal.
She was eleven when the Boov arrived, and she knew they were trouble before anyone else, as the first thing they did was abduct her mother. Then they
relocated the entire population of America to Florida, claiming the rest for themselves... but Tip doesn't trust their rocket ships, opting instead to drive
herself and her pet cat Pig from Pennsylvania. (It's okay - she had to teach herself to drive a while ago, as her flighty mother couldn't always be trusted
to run errands, and she only had that one mishap on a sidewalk.) When she reluctantly picks up a mechanic Boov who calls himself J.Lo (and who modifies her
hatchback for hoverflight), what started as a simple road trip becomes a cross-country quest to find her mother and save the world - not from the Boov, but
from the monstrous aliens who followed the Boov to Smekland (formerly Earth.)
Review
This award-winning title still gets decent circulation at the library where I work, so I figured it was worth a read (or a listen; this is the first
audiobook I've reviewed.) From the title and cover blurb, I expected something lightweight, silly even. What I got certainly had plenty of silliness, but
with a tooth underneath that occasionally reminded me of Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett, only geared for a younger audience. The Boov have bubble-based
writing and some outwardly ridiculous trappings, but their history mirrors humanity in some sobering ways, and not just their tendency to treat the "noble
savage" humans as inferior entities to be swept away into the corner of lands that now "rightfully" belong to them; to paraphrase Tip, the Boov are too smart
and too stupid to be anything but regular people like humans. Tip is a resourceful girl - she's had to be, with a mother prone to blowing savings on vacuums
or forgetting to buy food - but she has her limits, and is pushed to them more than once on a trying road trip with her alien companion... an alien she
initially hates, for what his kind did to her mother and her species, but whom she slowly comes to understand. She also has to come to understand the strengths
and weaknesses of other people she encounters, from a group of "lost boys" hiding in an abandoned theme park to self-deluded UFOlogists camped out in Roswell.
Several lines had me snickering out loud as I listened, though the silliness (almost) never overstayed its welcome, and there were some moments of gut-sluggingly
deep emotion. Aside from an occasional sense of meandering and Tip taking a little too long to figure out one element leading to the climax, I enjoyed the ride,
not to mention the audio presentation (by Bahni Turpin.)
