July 7, 2008 at 4:20 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Children's Literature, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
92. The Trolley to Yesterday by John Bellairs (Juvenile fiction, fantasy) 183 p.
This is another John Bellairs novel I hadn’t read as a child, and I can’t say I missed anything. Professor Childermass, who teaches history, has often been moved to tears over the plight of the people of 15th-century Constantinople, some of whom took refuge in the Church of Holy Wisdom when the Turks besieged the city, and were slaughtered. When he discovers a time-travel machine in his basement, the Professor conceives a nutty plan to go back in time and rescue the people in the city.
I definitely am not the person to have patience with this book. Could any historian possibly be so concerned about the individual fates of the people in the period he studies? The whole premise of the book was absurd–and even the two boys, Johnny and Fergie, realized perfectly well what a ridiculous plan it was. This is one of those times when Bellairs’s books are just not readable for anyone over the age of eight.
Rating: 3 out of 10
Pages read: 27,031
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, John Bellairs, Johnny Dixon
July 7, 2008 at 3:24 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Children's Literature, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
87. The Chessmen of Doom by John Bellairs (Juvenile fiction, horror) 155 p.
This is one of the later books in Bellairs’s Johnny Dixon series, and one I never read as a child. I don’t know if it just isn’t as good as the others, or if the fact that I have no nostalgia for the story makes a difference, but I didn’t like it as much as most of Bellairs’s work.
When Professor Childermass’s brother dies, he leaves a cryptic rhyme and a series of instructions in his will, leading the Professor, Johnny, and Fergie to stay in his broken-down mansion for the summer. While there, they have some msyterious and sinister experiences, and uncover a malign plot to end the world.
These books, unlike some of the other juvenile and young adult fiction I read, are really strictly for children. Although they aren’t a bad way to occupy an idle hour, there’s really nothing in them that would appeal to an adult whose never encountered them before, except perhaps the charm of the 1950’s setting. As a child, Bellairs’s books scared me and my roommate (and childhood best friend) to death, but no one over the age of ten would feel the slightest twinge of anxiety. They’re ideal for seven- or eight-year-olds, though!
Rating: 6 out of 10
Pages read: 25,325
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, A ~ Z Reading Challenge, John Bellairs, Johnny Dixon
March 21, 2008 at 10:19 am · Filed under Book Reviews, Children's Literature, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
40. The Doom of the Haunted Opera by John Bellairs; completed by Brad Strickland (Children’s Gothic) 153 p.
After the death of John Bellairs in 1991, another author, Brad Strickland, completed two unfinished novels and wrote two more books from one-page summaries, of which this is one of the latter. (He also went on to write his own novels continuing the series.)
While Uncle Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmerman are away at an old friend’s funeral in Florida, Lewis and Rose Rita find an old opera score while poking around the old New Zebedee Opera House. Written by the late Immanuel Vanderhelm, the music immediately becomes a hit with New Zebedee adults. When the composer’s grandson, Henry Vanderhelm, arrives in town and offers to mount the opera at his own expense, the town jumps at the chance—not realizing that performing the opera will raise the dead and enslave them to Vanderhelm, allowing him to take over the world.
Under Vanderhelm’s spell, the town’s inhabitants don’t seem to notice when New Zebedee is cut off from the outside world by a magical fog. Radio and television signals don’t penetrate, and no one can enter or leave the town. Without magical assistance, Lewis and Rose Rita are at a loss as to how to stop Vaderhelm’s evil plan, but that doesn’t stop them from trying everything they can think of.
Brad Strickland did a good job of writing in Bellairs’s style; even knowing that he wrote it, I couldn’t really tell the book apart from any of the Bellairs books I’ve read lately—except, perhaps, for the pacing. Ordinarily, Bellairs allows events to unfold over a period of months, perfectly content to fast-forward through weeks or months in which nothing much happens. In contrast, The Doom of the Haunted Opera takes place over a period of days. It’s not all that important of a distinction; although the pacing is one of the things I particularly notice about Bellairs’s novels, I don’t find that it adds anything to the story. I’m curious to know if this book is an exception, or if Brad Strickland always uses this more traditional time scale.
Pages read: 10,864
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, Brad Strickland, John Bellairs, Lewis Barnavelt
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 10:11 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Children's Literature, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
37. The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring by John Bellairs (Children’s Gothic) 188 p.
When I was young, I always got this book confused with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which I finally got around to reading a year or two ago. As it turns out, they have roughly nothing in common.
At the end of The House with a Clock in Its Walls, 10-year-old Lewis Barnavelt mentions that he’s made a new friend, a tomboy called Rose Rita Pottinger. I haven’t been able to get my hands on the second book in the trilogy, The Figure in the Shadows, but by the beginning of The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring, Lewis and Rose Rita are best friends. Lewis, now 12, is spending the summer at boy scout camp, and 13-year-old Rose Rita is feeling depressed and a little angry at her friend for leaving her in the lurch. Luckily, one of her favourite people, Mrs. Florence Zimmerman, has a plan to cheer her up.
Rose Rita and Mrs. Zimmerman set off on a car trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, stopping on the way to settle some of Mrs. Zimmerman’s family affairs. It seems a rather peculiar cousin of hers has died, leaving her his farm, as well as a ring he believes may be magic. When the two arrive at the farmhouse, they find the place has been ransacked, the locked desk drawer containing the ring has been forced open, and the ring is gone. It’s a sinister start to their vacation, but they resolve to have fun anyway and try to forget the incident.
Soon, worse things happen; things that aren’t so easy to brush aside. Mrs. Zimmerman finds evidence that suggests she had a deadly enemy—a suspicion confirmed by a sudden, unexplained attack of pain. She recovers, but it isn’t long before worse happens: Mrs. Zimmerman disappears! Left alone in a place she doesn’t know, Rose Rita has to find out what happened to her friend, and save her.
I like Rose Rita, and some of her problems were a nice change of pace from the ones usually faced by Bellairs heroes.
I should have been a boy, Rose Rita thought. Homely boys didn’t have as many problems as homely girls did. Also, boys could go to boy scout camp, and girls couldn’t. Boys could get together for a game of flies and grounders and nobody thought there was anything strange about it. Boys didn’t have to wear nylons and pleated skirts and starched blouses to church on Sunday. As far as Rose Rita was concerned, boys really had the life. But she had been born a girl, and there didn’t seem to be much she could do about it.
Mrs. Zimmerman is a fun character. I liked her in the first book, and I liked her here, too. She reminds me a little of one of my aunts, in that she’s in her sixties and her favourite colour is purple, and she wears a lot of purple clothes and has a lot of purple things in her house. Unlike Mrs. Zimmerman, my aunt does not do magic or smoke cigars. At least, not in front of me.
Pages read: 10,373
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, John Bellairs, Lewis Barnavelt
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
March 18, 2008 at 11:44 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Children's Literature, Favourite Books, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
35. The Mummy, the Will, and the Crypt by John Bellairs (Children’s Horror) 168 p.
This is the second Johnny Dixon novel, coming between The Curse of the Blue Figurine and The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull. At the Glomus mansion, a museum of art treasures collected by the late H. Bagwell Glomus, a rich eccentric, Johnny and Professor Childermass learn about a $10,000 reward for the discovery of the dead man’s will. Three items on a table are supposedly clues to its whereabout: a chess set, a Greek newspaper titled National Herald, and a battered old sign lettered YE OLDE TEA SHOPPE.
The clues seem meaningless; the riddle, unsolvable. Johnny doesn’t think of it again (much) until a series of events make him desperate for money. Determined to earn the reward, he runs away to search for the missing will and save his family.
This is the book where Johnny meets his best friend, Byron Ferguson, called Fergie “on account of nobody in their right mind wants to be called Byron.” I continue to be charmed by the characters and the 1950’s setting of this series.
Pages read: 10,005
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, John Bellairs, Johnny Dixon
March 18, 2008 at 11:18 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Children's Literature, Favourite Books, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
34. The House with a Clock in Its Walls by John Bellairs (Children’s Horror) 179 p.
This is John Bellairs’s most well-known book, and for some reason, it’s the one I remembered best. (Probably because a minor plot point, the Hand of Glory—a candle growing out of the back of a severed hand—made a deep impression on me when I first read it.)
The House with a Clock in Its Walls is actually surprisingly creepy. It’s the first of three books featuring Lewis Barnavelt, a shy 10-year-old whose parents have recently died in a car accident. When the book opens, Lewis is on a bus, on his way to New Zebedee, Michigan, where he will live with his Uncle Jonathan, who he’s never met:
Of course, Lewis had heard a few things about Uncle Jonathan, like that he smoked and drank and played poker. These were not such bad things in a Catholic family, but Lewis had two maiden aunts who were Baptists, and they had warned him about Jonathan. He hoped that the warnings would turn out to be unnecessary.
And at first, they do seem to be unnecessary. Jonathan is a very friendly man, but he soon turns out to have some strange habits. Lewis finds out that his uncle is a warlock, and their next-door neighbour and Jonathan’s best friend, Florence Zimmerman, is a witch. This turns out to be rather a good thing—the real problem is the ominous ticking which seems to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.
I should mention that I’m quite pleased by this edition (pictured above), because even though it doesn’t have the Gorey cover, it does have his original illustrations inside. Like the one below:
Without being particularly preachy, this book gives a great object lesson on why you should never try to bribe or impress someone to keep their friendship. Especially by using witchcraft and necromancy.
If you want to try out a John Bellairs book, or know a child who might, The House with a Clock in Its Walls is a great place to start. It’s an excellent, scary story, it’s the first in a series, and it’s actually the first children’s book Bellairs wrote.
Pages read: 9,837
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, John Bellairs, Lewis Barnavelt
March 17, 2008 at 11:10 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Children's Literature, Favourite Books, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
33. The Curse of the Blue Figurine by John Bellairs (Children’s Horror) 200 p.
I was lucky enough to find a used bookstore in Toronto that had copies of several of John Bellairs’s children’s books in the old Bantam Skylark softcover editions, for only $3 each. The special thing about them is that, unlike the “updated” cover art on new editions, these older versions feature the Edward Gorey cover art—and they’re the editions I read as a child.
The Curse of the Blue Figurine is the first in Bellairs’s longest-running series, featuring 12-year-old Johnny Dixon and his friend, Professor Roderick Childermass. (Like all Bellairs protagonists, Johhny is a smart, somewhat lonely boy who gets along better with adults than with most kids his age, and who has a close friendship with an intelligent and sympathetic adult.)
The story is set in 1951, and Johnny’s mother has just died. His father, who was an air force pilot during World War II, has jumped at the chance to fly in the Korean War, and has sent Johnny to live with Grandpa and Gramma Dixon, in Duston Heights, Massachusetts. He and his grandparents go to St. Michael’s Church, and he attends the attached Catholic school.
One winter night, after Johnny and his Grandpa have helped to shovel out Professor Childermass’s car, the Professor tells Johhny the story of Father Baart, a 19th-century priest, formerly the rector of St. Michael’s, who may have been an evil sorcerer, and who is said to haunt the church. When Johnny finds a blue figurine and an ominous warning hidden in a hollowed-out book in the church basement, he becomes convinced it has something to do with Father Baart.
I found John Bellairs’s books incredibly frightening when I was a child. Even though they don’t hold the same level of suspense for me these days, they’re still lovely and charming to read. Bellairs creates some wonderfully quirky personalities, and every character vibrates with life, from Johnny’s Gramma to the school bully. I love Johnny, who is a shy and timid, a bookworm and a worrier—not the kind of kid who regularly stars in horror novels.
The most entertaining character is Professor Childermass, a small, middle-aged man with a bad temper and a kind heart. And he has a fuss closet!—a place where, dressed in sweatpants and a sweatshirt, he can vent his frustrations by ranting, yelling, cursing, and pounding on the walls. On the inside of the door is a sign, bearing the words:
TO FUSS IS HUMAN;
TO RANT, DIVINE!
I love it.
It’s such a shame that this book, and all of Bellairs’s kids’ books, were re-issued without the Edward Gorey covers, because they were, and are, such an integral part of my enjoyment of the books. Unlike many illustrators, who seem never to have opened the book, or even glanced at a synopsis or description of the characters, Edward Gorey always drew actual scenes from the book, and the characters always looked exactly right. I couldn’t find a good picture of the cover, but the drawing of Father Baart is perfect; I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cover that was so right.
Pages read: 9,658
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, John Bellairs, Johnny Dixon, What's in a Name?
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