March 21, 2008 at 10:02 am · Filed under Book Reviews, Children's Literature, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
39. The Mansion in the Mist by John Bellairs (Children’s Gothic) 170 p.
This is the last of the four Anthony Monday books ever written. Miss Eells and her brother Emerson are going up to a cottage in Canada for the summer, and 13-year-old Anthony is eager to join them. Miss Eells worries that he’ll be bored, on an island without television or electricity, with only two people for company (both of them pushing seventy!) Without any close friends his own age, Anthony knows he’ll be miserable if he stays at home, and there’s one other inducement: Emerson has reason to suspect that there is something supernatural about the cottage. Three tourists he rented it to in a previous summer all disappeared, and were never heard from again.
When they get to the cottage, they find everything quiet and peaceful, although both Anthony and Miss Eells feel the place has a sinister atmosphere. Then Anthony finds an old chest in one of the empty rooms, and discovers that it contains the doorway to another dimension, a dimension where a cabal of evil wizards who calls themselves the Autarchs are plotting to destroy the world.
After their path to that world is shattered, it seems there’s no hope of Anthony, Emerson, or Miss Eells being able to fight the Autarchs. That is, until Anthony and Miss Eells make a strange discovery during a drive in the country.
I was very amused by Emerson and Miss Eells in this book, particularly a scene where Miss Eells—a very nice woman but prone to swearing and saying exactly what’s on her mind—has to spend hours being polite at a dinner party. Her rather desperate cheeriness was hilarious.
Pages read: 10,711
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, Anthony Monday, John Bellairs
March 21, 2008 at 9:50 am · Filed under Book Reviews, Children's Literature, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
38. The Lamp from the Warlock’s Tomb by John Bellairs (Children’s Gothic) 168 p.
In this third instalment of the Anthony Monday series, Miss Eells inadvertently buys an antique oil lamp possessed by an evil spirit. It turns out that the lamp came from the strange tomb of a warlock who died some years earlier. Lighting the lamp has already caused one strange death, so when Anthony and Miss Monday find what seems to be a second victim of the lamp, they drive up to do some poking around in the dead warlock’s hometown.
Not bad, although not one of the best. The one I really want to read is The Dark Secret of Weatherend, which was the only one I owned as a child. I must have got rid of it, although I can’t think why. Of course, it’s now one of the ones I can’t find anywhere.
Pages read: 10,541
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, Anthony Monday, John Bellairs
March 19, 2008 at 9:20 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Children's Literature, Mystery and Suspense
36. The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn by John Bellairs (Children’s Gothic) 180 p.
This first novel in the Anthony Monday series wasn’t quite what I expected, since it didn’t actually have anything supernatural in it (although the rest of the series definitely does.) Unusual for John Bellairs. Otherwise, it has a lot in common with his other books.
Like the other Bellairs heroes, Johnny Dixon and Lewis Barnavelt, Anthony Monday is a bit of a loner. His closest friend is Miss Myra Eells, the elderly librarian in his small hometown of Hoosac, Minnesota. Although he lives with his parents, his father works late at the saloon he owns (”In the town where the Mondays lived, nice people didn’t run saloons, and the Mondays tried hard to be nice people, so they called it a cigar store: Monday’s Cigar Store.”) Anthony’s mother doesn’t work, of course, but she’s a fairly unpleasant person who “always seemed to be bawling him out or telling him that he was worthless and stupid and selfish.”
Everyone in Hoosac knows about the treasure Alpheus Winterborn, an eccentric millionaire, is supposed to have brought back from an archaeological dig in the Near East, although no one knows precisely what it is. After Miss Eells hires Anthony as a library page, he finds a cryptic message from Alpheus Winterborn hidden in a wall carving in the public library, which he designed and had built for the town.
Anthony’s mother worries about money constantly, and Anthony hopes to find the treasure, hopefully worth enough money to calm Mrs. Monday’s fears. Instead, he finds that the treasure may be a hoax, and that even if it is real, he has formidable competition in the form of Hugo Philpotts, vice-president of the Hoosac bank and Alpheus Winterborn’s own nephew.
I’m very pleased with the credit John Bellairs gives his characters. Sure, they do stupid things every now and then, but he takes care to show the enormous pressure they’re under before they do something really idiotic. I only wish some adult authors would do the same.
Oh, and I’m sorry, Judith Gwyn Brown, but I hated your illustrations for this book. They’re too childish and cute for the story. They look like they belong in a picture book or an after-school cartoon. This is a children’s gothic novel, not an episode of The Magic Schoolbus. Publishers, if you’re not going to use artists whose style suits your book, why bother including pictures at all?
Pages read: 10,185
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, Anthony Monday, John Bellairs
