Glengarry School Days: a free book review

Glengarry School Days was written by Ralph Connor in 1902. It's available both as an e-book and an audiobook.

The story is difficult to explain. There is no one main character, though there are only a few major characters, and the baton passes from one to another a few times. Yet I never felt lost in the story.

Simply put, however, it's about some kids at a rural school in Ontario in the mid-nineteenth century and how they interact and mature. The schoolmasters also figure prominently for good or ill.

It is a Christian story in the best possible sense: unlike much modern Christian fiction I've encountered, it is neither preachy nor worldly. It will inspire you to be better, to follow God more closely. It models the change that a few truly righteous people can make. We need more books like this, and I doubt we have the guts or skill to write them.

I will also recommend the audiobook in particular. I usually recommend a text, and I may find the reader(s) of the audio version tolerable. But Bruce Pirie is the perfect reader for this classic text, and the even better news is that he is now preparing another Ralph Conner story, The Man from Glengarry.

Even if this isn't your preferred genre--it surely isn't mine--this is worth reading, or better yet listening to.

Glengarry School Days:
E-book
Audiobook

The House of Arden: A Free Book Review

The House of Arden (free audiobook here) by Edith Nesbit is about a brother and sister who try to find an ancestral treasure so they can restore the ancestral home. All this naturally involves a magical white mole and a lot of time travel.

The setup is simple enough: Edred and Elfrida Arden live with their Aunt Edith (wink-wink, nudge-nudge), who seldom ridicules them for their names. Their dad has gone to South America with Uncle Jim (just Aunt Edith's fiancé thus far) to make a lot of money and be declared dead. Everyone needs a hobby.

Incidentally, Ardens are dropping like flies (everyone still needs a hobby), and Lord Arden's passing sends his title looking for an heir; with Papa Arden out of the way, it lands on Edred with the unerring accuracy of a cartoon piano. This means that Edred has a couple of days to find and utter a spell that will lead to the revelation of the long-lost family treasure. Plucky monkey that he is, he succeeds, but all he gets is a grumpy mole that tells him he needs some old-fashioned character development first. This can only mean a bunch of adventures.

And it's here that the story starts to wobble a bit. For one thing, we've already been told that each generation of Ardens conveniently features a boy and girl named Edred and Elfrida, respectively, whose place our pair manage to take in whatever time they appear. Then we encounter a nice old lady who is called a witch by superstitious rustics when she's really just really, really smart and does time travel and can summon the mole and--wait, she is a witch, though, isn't she? Hmm.

That's never clarified, unfortunately. The line between magic and really weird science is vague at best here, and perhaps what she does can be considered non-magical in terms of the story. But I doubt it--and that means the author has lied about the witch's nature, which is a no-no.

There is some good historical fiction in the adventures, which is a positive. But we also start generating lose ends. People turn up and are apparently important, but the arcs go nowhere. This becomes especially bad near the end, where several situations are set up only to evaporate, and in the end we get a Big Cosmic Lesson that is fine but contrary to the overall direction of the story.

In sum, I got the impression that Nesbit had a major change of personality while writing the story. In fact, there are a few places where the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next simply don't mesh. But the last chapter doesn't mesh with the rest of the book, and that's fatally bad. So while I'm generally a fan of Nesbit's work, I can't recommend this one.

Mr. Wicker's Window: a Free Book review

[Sorry about the delay; it was a bad week.]

True to my threats, I'm reviewing an old book available free online in both text and audio book form.

Chris Mason has Problems. Not the typical, modern, angsty ones: his dad's away being naval, and his mom's apparently come down with a bad case of Incipient Death. So he does what any twelve-year-old would do: he goes out for a walk in his native Georgetown and gets talked into visiting an antiques store to ask the owner about giving a job to a friend.

Little does he know that the owner, Mr. Wicker, is a wizard recruiting for a job back in the 1790s. It's the sort of thing most kids would miss. Anyway, before even Chris can say, "Golly Moses!" (his typical exclamation), he's back in time and on the verge of a mission to help finance the fledgling American economy by doing something that would actually lead to a disastrous downturn in the prices of precious metals and gems and probably produce a global financial catastrophe. I hope no congresscreatures are reading this.

Anyway... The story features magic, sea adventure, near-fatal events, and some Amazingly Bad People for villains. It's a good yarn, but I'll mention a few issues:

1. Despite Mr. Wicker's claim that it's all really high tech, we're talking about magic here: magic words, sometimes with some material component, modifying reality. It's mostly about shape-changing, though there are some magic gadgets that are vaguely techy. Chris even brings a wooden statue to life, which is theologically problematic, but then, this isn't a Christian book.

2. The story goes downhill a bit toward the end, as though the author suddenly noticed a deadline. Specifically, the scene change between chapters 27 and 28 was so large and sudden that I actually thought for a moment that a chapter or two had disappeared. Similarly, there's a brief summary at the end of Chapter 31 that I would've fleshed out and made into a short chapter. And a duel introduced in Chapter 33 is never resolved, though I would like to have known who won.

3. A note about the audio book: while generally good, there are a few chapters that combine poor audio with a non-native speaker with a heavy accent rushing through the text. Under anything but optimal conditions (or with better equipment than my portable player), the result is hard to follow. You're better off reading the book there. The problem chapters are 2, 3, 18, and 19. The reader is intelligible in other chapters she reads, and I had no problem understanding these chapters when using my computer at home.

4. There is a fiddly point that can't be right: I'm certain that any professional sailor of the period could have recognized a slightly disguised ship he was already familiar with--the ship's lines, its movement, etc.

But these points aside, it is a good yarn, mostly on the right side of modern political correctness. There is violence, especially when the arch-villain, Claggett Chew, uses his whip, but it's well below Harry Potter level. The running time of the audio book is just under six hours, and I would suggest audio books as a good way to teach munchkins about the joys of being read to and of using their own imagination.

If Only You Knew 3: Weak points and conclusion

Time for the weak points ofMags Storey's If Only You Knew. I'll start with a theological matter that's a bit involved but that explains some quirks elsewhere.

Q & A? No way! One of the annoying features of the Gathering is that it has a question-and-answer format. This is a bad idea on several levels. For one thing, honest questions can generally be better addressed one on one or using a Web site. Doing it in public will lead to grandstanding and arguments. This is not how evangelism is done.

Worse yet, at one point they set up debates on topics such as abortion. Again, ill-conceived on several levels. Someone is going to wind up trying to defend something evil, and he'll probably be a new believer. It won't end well.

Let's look at an example involving abortion. The pro-life side was lazy, just assuming that everyone knew abortion was wrong. Now, it's true we should be able to explain why we believe what we believe. But the actions of the pro-abortion side were inexcusable:

The girl who was arguing the other side was a really quiet girl named Ronnie. She had done a lot of research. I mean a lot. She had even visited an abortion clinic and done interviews. She had looked up all types of Bible verses, including one in Ecclesiastes where Solomon says that no human being knows when an unborn baby gets a soul, and one in Exodus that says the punishment for killing a person is not the same as killing an unborn baby. Ronnie talked very slowly and very quietly, and you could tell people were listening. When she started talking about showing compassion to girls who had been raped, one of the other girls started to cry. (p. 68)

She later says that she doesn't believe that abortion's right, but “I think some issues are more complicated than some people want to believe sometimes.” (p. 68)

Let's consider this a bit.

1. Ronnie defends an action she considers wrong just to show that it's more complex than people think. But it's still wrong, and she's still defending it. And she's doing so before impressionable new believers and unbelievers.

2. Despite wanting to show people the complexity of the issue, she resorts to bad reasoning. The Bible passages given (Eccl 11:5 and Ex 21:22-25) do not say what the speaker (and by extension the author) claim. The verse in Ecclesiastes is a variant interpretation, and not a likely one; neither would it greatly affect the debate were it accurate. The passage in Exodus is irrelevant because it does not say that the baby dies, only that the mother gives birth prematurely, and even if the baby does die, (1) life for life is demanded or (2) one could argue that the death was unintentional and the case is like that in Num 35:22-25, only with a different procedure.

So we can see why debating such things is a very bad idea. But this attitude of doing evil that good may come of it and presenting complexity (even if spurious) does explain something about the book as a whole.

All Jerks, All the Time! I have to admit, I don't like the characters, except perhaps Kat. She's actually likable, and by an amazing coincidence, she doesn't appear to be a Christian. Everyone else is a jerk, and most of them have some kind of Danish prince complex as well. They got angst in their pants, and they wanna pose and brood and occasionally scream a lot. I found myself wondering how quite so many inmates managed to escape the asylum, but the Abortion Debate enlightened me: this is yet another case of showing complexity.

Now, it's true that Everyone Has Problems, and teens frequently haven't got a grip on the "quiet" part of leading lives of quiet desperation. This still strikes me as overblown. And it does bother me that the Christians seem to be more obnoxious than the unsaved. I sometimes think that's true, and if so, it likely involves the pressure of going against the flow. But I also generally leave the Evil Christian meme to the secular writers.

And where does this attempt at balance get us? As a Christian, I was sufficiently annoyed that I wouldn't have bothered finishing this had it not been assigned reading, so to speak. But if I had been unsaved, while I might have revelled in seeing the Christians portrayed as losers, when I reached the place where they inevitably started to play nice and take their meds, I'd probably have dropped it unfinished anyway.

Conclusion. The ending is good, and there are some good points made in the last several pages. But the first 80% of the story is troubling. If you're aware of the issues, you may find the story "mostly harmless." As for me, I will hope that the writer turns her considerable talents--for she is an excellent writer--to better stories in the future.

Enough heresy! Check out the actual CFRB tour:


Purchase If Only You Knew at
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If Only You Knew 2: Good points

Mags Storey's If Only You Knew has some worthwhile features; let's look at them.

Readability. Especially for the first half or so, it moves swiftly and easily. I admit that I started bogging down about a quarter of the way through, for reasons I'll explain tomorrow. But I tend to be unusual in such respects. Most readers probably will have no problems.

Humor. The main character is a klutz, and some of the others are also (from their own standpoints) unintentionally funny at times. The teen angst undercuts this a bit, especially toward the end, and it's hard to balance suspense and humor effectively. Still, there are funny bits throughout, and as usual, they make the more fraught moments bearable.

Characters. Mixed bag: granted their existence as defined, their actions are generally believable. That's good, because this is essentially character driven.

Ending. The ending is reasonably strong--there's a loose end with an obvious resolution, but that's fairly trivial. More important, there is a good message at the end.

Next time I'll look at some problem areas and present a conclusion.

But in the meantime, check out the actual CFRB tour:


Purchase If Only You Knew at
Barnes and Noble, Christianbook and Amazon.

If Only You Knew 1: Intro

This will nearly be a first: CFRB is touring Mags Storey's If Only You Knew, and I am more or less tagging along. The buttons are there at the bottom, but I'm not on the tour proper, the better to mention a few issues freely. On with the show!

Jo has just graduated from high school and is spending the summer with her cousin Kat when she encounters an apocalyptic break-up scene between an apparently nice guy and the girlfriend from Hell. While she's taking this in, a total hunk nearly runs her over. Soon she falls off a pier, gets invited to a church group, and is sort-of quasi dating two guys, which is pretty impressive for someone who never really got much attention.

Oh, yes: she also sees a guy she had earlier witnessed being run over, and he's living large. Or anyway, he's living and large, and she starts meeting fun people she dubs "Motor-Oil-Guy" and "Red-Jacket."

They aren't superheroes.

Meanwhile, Kevin, the hunk, is a relatively new Christian attending The Gathering, which is a laid-back Christian encounter group for Seekers and maybe even some Hiders. Meanwhile Sam, the average guy with the psycho ex-girlfriend, hates God's guts and figures the feeling's mutual. Jo, of course, is caught in the middle.

Everyone has some kind of Dark Secret that involves Brooding Silence, Overwrought Outbursts, and Colliding Solipsisms that don't so much drive the plot as blast it forward like the Columbiad firing its giant bullet at the moon, and with perhaps similar results.

Are Motor-Oil-Guy and Red-Jacket out to kill Jo, or are they just really, really awkward around girls? Given the choice between Kevin and Sam, will Jo go with the bigger Dark Secret? Will Nate admit that he never was run over at all, but was just trying to bench-press his car while a friend changed the tire?

I'm not telling.

But in the meantime, check out the actual CFRB tour:


Purchase If Only You Knew at
Barnes and Noble, Christianbook and Amazon.

The Light Across the River 3: Weak points and conclusion

So what are the weak points of Stephanie Reed's The Light Across the River?

Good question. There are some false negatives, as I call them: the characterization of Johnny and the portrayal of his mouthiness could be considered heavy-handed, for example--but not for a Young Adult book. Likewise, the ending may seem as abrupt as that of its predecessor, but not if you realize that the story hinges on character development.

Since I'm a geek for all seasons, I did wish she had given more historical background: she has a "Historical Note" mostly about the Eliza-Johnny connection, but I would've liked to know more specifics about her research; I was surprised how much was historically based. But my preferences reflect my post-grad status; the footnotes I'd like would sink the book for its YA audience. Still, since this will likely attract home schoolers, a more extensive study guide would help.

Conclusion. This is a short post at the end of a long day, but I really don't find serious flaws in the story. I recommend it and Across the Wide River, especially for the home school crowd. They aren't as long or as demanding as Uncle Tom's Cabin, but they can prepare young readers for that story, which would be a good follow-up.

You can purchase The Light Across the River at

Christian Books

Amazon

Target

And Yahoo.

I've pushed the book; let's see if you can push my buttons!

The Light Across the River 2: Good points

When I was in high school, our US history class had a role-playing exercise. As I recall, we were a community in the 1850s somewhere in the US that apparently had no specific law covering escaped slaves. (I find this doubtful now, but anyway...) And we happened to have an escaped slave turn up in our midst. What a stroke of luck!

Everyone had some kind of part to play, of course. I was the editor of an Abolitionist newspaper.

Now, the odd things were

1. Though practically all Abolitionists were devout Christians, there was no hint of that for my character, though I provided it, and

2. The local minister was rabidly pro-slavery.

There were pro-slavery ministers back then, as Stephanie Reed acknowledges in her books. But while the pro-slavery position was open to Christian and non-Christian alike, Abolitionism was dominated by Christians of some kind or other, and the major voices for freeing the slaves were at least sympathetic to Christianity and usually dedicated to that faith.

Why did our exercise ignore that fact?

Well, the simple (and probably accurate) answer involves the word "bigotry." If they're going to lie, we need to tell the truth loud and clear. I wish I had had Reed's books back then, but at least the current crop will have this resource. That's my first and probably strongest reason for recommending these two books.

(In case anyone's interested, since the minister was wanting to throw the slave to the wolves, I decided to out-Christian him: my argument was exclusively Biblical, and my opening text was Deuteronomy 23:15--"Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee." That's about as clear a proof-text as you could want. I was mildly surprised that it didn't turn up in Reed's first book, but it's in this one.)

Where The Light Across the River itself is concerned, the strengths are

Stronger focus. The first book had to establish the setting, and there were places where it lost focus as a result: although I technically knew Lowry was the main character, there were times when it was easy to forget that fact. Here, the focus is split between Johnny and Eliza, but so precisely that there's never any doubt. The marked contrast between Eliza and Johnny also helps.

More action. The Light Across the River is primarily character-driven, but there's more action and suspense throughout than in Across the Wide River, where the action came in lumps, so to speak.

More direct. The meandering tendency of the first story pretty well disappears.

More Christian. The Christian element here is stronger as well. While not absent from the first story, it wasn't as focused there and sometimes came across as generically spiritual or inspirational. Not so here.

(And tomorrow, as usual, I'll explore the story's weaknesses.)

You can purchase The Light Across the River at

Christian Books

Amazon

Target

And Yahoo.

I've pushed the book; let's see if you can push my buttons!

The Light Across the River 1: Intro

Stephanie Reed's The Light Across the River takes up where Across the Wide River left off, only now we see Lowry in a less sympathetic, indeed obnoxious, light. He's berating his younger brother Johnny for having the loosest lips before Mick Jagger. (Those familiar with the previous story will remember that Lowry's besetting problem was lockjaw.) Since the Rankin family has a dangerous secret--Reed explains the penalties for helping slaves escape quite thoroughly--a blabbermouth could cause a lot of misery and even some death here and there. And to make matters worse, Johnny doesn't even have anyone to tell about it.

Now, in Johnny's defense, he sincerely believes that if everyone knew the truth, they would rally to the good and abolish evil. This is technically known as "Why, yes! I will buy the Brooklyn Bridge" syndrome. A few brushes with people who are eager to be evil for a buck settles him a bit, as does a brush with a nice lady devoid of fashion sense.

Hands up, everyone who has read Uncle Tom's Cabin! Okay, I guess I'll include movie and comic-book versions just to nudge this toward double digits. You can download it as a free audio book, you know. Anyway--one of the most famous characters, even better known really than Uncle Tom himself, is Eliza (Indian name: Dances with Ice Floes), who crosses a broken ice field to elude slave hunters. For extra points, she carries a baby with her. She was based on a real, live slave.

Guess what?

In real life, this real escapee passed through the Rankin station of the Underground Railroad, so she becomes the second main character in the current story. In fact, she and Johnny alternate chapters as they get more and more involved in the dangerous world of rescuing slaves. (There is a lot more violence, threatened and actual, in this story.) She also brings along a token agnostic, a French Canadian who's with the Canuck navy, presumably as a Frog man. (Why, yes, that was gratuitous. Thanks for noticing.) He threatens to kill people a lot, but it's really just his way of saying he cares. Anyway, the new guy, Gil, would have been watching way to many action movies if they'd been invented yet.

Will Eliza get everyone to safety? Will Gil be eaten by a nearsighted Cajun? Will Johnny someday put a cork in it? For answers to these and other questions, read the book.

(And tomorrow, as usual, I'll explore the story's strengths.)

You can purchase The Light Across the River at

Christian Books

Amazon

Target

And Yahoo.

I've pushed the book; let's see if you can push my buttons!

Across the Wide River 3: Weak points

Strength and weakness are often different sides of the same coin, and Stephanie Reed's Across the Wide River is no exception. So this post will be a mirror-image or Devil's Advocate version of yesterday's in many respects.

Character. I don't think most kids these days are used to character-driven stories. Character is an incidental matter; action generally drives things. Now, there is action in Across the Wide River, usually to do with a slave escape, but it's mostly about character development, in this case Lowry's shyness. If you don't understand that, the ending is going to hit you like a brick wall beyond a door: you'll have a sudden, jolting stop for no reason. But from the standpoint of a character-driven story, the end has arrived, and Reed evidently doesn't believe in loitering. (As I mentioned yesterday, fans of Austen or the Brontës will probably get into this: those older stories were strongly character-driven.)

Life choices. Lowry's wavering about his eventual career does get a bit tedious. It's realistic, but so is a couple guys on a couch trading "What do you want to do?"/"I dunno" dialog. Sometimes you can see where a choice leads, but in other cases it seems pointless. Mind you, this is totally sane and gripping compared to some of the stuff the kids will read in college or even a college-prep class.

If I were Lowry... One thing that bothered me about Lowry is that he seemed to think only an abstract argument could answer the pro-slavery side. Rubbish. The pro-slavery argument at its strongest emphasized needs: the need of the Blacks for a support system, given their lack of education or advanced work skills (though of course that lack was not an accident but part of the system), and the need of the local economy for cheap labor. Absent the cheap labor, the economies of many areas and states would be ruined, causing innocent (White) people to suffer. As I mentioned recently, the power of experiential apologetics is great, usually greater than that of an abstract argument, and I've found it emboldening. Instead of trying a generalized argument about suffering, Lowry could have said, "I have seen human beings tortured; I have seen perversion being thrust upon the innocent"--and given examples. That's what Harriet Beecher Stowe did in Uncle Tom's Cabin: she gave examples, and they rang true. This point comes up in the sequel, The Light Across the River, which I'll post about tomorrow.

Conclusion. While there are some problem areas, overall this is a good and timely book. I've heard people say that it isn't fast enough for kids, and I would say it's fast enough for any kid who isn't really slow. (If we keep pandering and lowering the bar, we might as well anticipate the trend and go back to painting on cave walls.) But I have more confidence in kids; I think they have the class for something like this. And by recognizing the horror and heroism of a bygone age, perhaps they will be better equipped to be heroes against the horrors of this age.

Tomorrow we'll look at the sequel, The Light Across the River.

In the meantime, is there more on the CFRB tour? You bet your buttons! Or better yet, try mine: