Tensy Farlow and the Home for Mislaid Children, Jen Storer. Book 4

So, some author background first up: Jen Storer. Jen is an Australian author with a couple other titles for young ‘uns under her belt. There isn’t too much information around the net on her unfortunately. BUT she is rather lucky to have a writer’s residence at the Abbotsford Convent http://www.abbotsfordconvent.com.au/. A massive old gothic building full of the ghosts of catholic nuns. It’s gorgeous and I’m filled with jealous rage whenever I think of the lucky few who get to use it as their muse. Plus, the added bonus of the Collingwood Children’s Farm a stone’s throw away down the lane. http://www.farm.org.au/ Both are equally picturesque and vital to Melbourne’s cultural lifeblood.

This is an ingenious and entertaining little story that is getting in early on the latest angels craze that is apparently sweeping the planet. I really haven’t explored the world of angels in much of my reading and frankly, they sound boring as all get out. But Tensy definitely isn’t a boring book – it’s action packed and fast-paced. The cover and page design is gorgeous and lends an aura of shadows to it. The book and it’s design have done quite well in terms of award nominations in Australia.
BUT, I have one big problem with this book – there isn’t going to be a sequel. Tensy is a fantastic character and so are the other kids. They are screaming out for more adventures – although Tensy is now situated far and away from the miserable lot that is ours, contentedly living the life of an Archangel. This ending was a tiny bit twee in my opinion, but I guess it’s what the kiddies like. Actually it was literally a Deus Ex Machina – an Angelus Ex Machina, perhaps??

The main characters – or at least the majority of the ‘good’ characters are interesting and full of potential, but Jen rarely lets them reach their full potential. Albie possibly does, but the rest are kind of sidelined by Tensy’s angelic glory at the end. This is a pity, because whenever there is a chance to bring one of them to the fore, Tensy comes in and pushes the story ahead on her own. However, her arch-enemy, Matron Pluckrose does also push the action ahead, but that’s nearly it.
For a medium sized kid’s book with a prime audience range of children to young adult there are actually a lot of mainish characters to have to keep track of. It’s nearly a mini War and Peace! It was tough even for me keeping track of everyone. I do think it’s to Jen’s credit that she does a great job of keeping them sufficiently unique so that I knew who was who by the end. But I wonder if it would be easier for young kids to do the same. Off the top of my head, I can think of 15 characters moving around that participate in the primary action. That’s a lot.
So Tensy is found by Albie (he is a gorgeously innocent and tenacious character – I completely fell in love with him) in the river Charon. She is on the verge (or SO we think) of being taken by a dark creature lurking in the reeds nearby. Albie takes her home and falls in love with her immediately but his mum makes him take her to the Home for Mislaid Children. Ten years or so later, the action begins. Tensy is returned to the home, Albie soon finds out she is alive, we discover everyone has a guardian angel who operate in heaven in a similar manner to the movie ‘A Life Less Ordinary’. The home is run by the dread Matron Pluckrose who makes a deal with the river creature who turns out to be Lythia – a guardian angel gone bad who is trying to steal the souls of the orphanage children so she can enter the world and wreak havoc.
Tensy mysteriously doesn’t have a guardian angel, yet she radiates kindness and compassion. Don’t get me wrong, she’s a gorgeous little charmer and you really do fall in love with her along with everyone else. How can you go wrong with a name like Tensy Farlow? We don’t know why she’s missing a GA either until the very end when it turns out all she needed to do was touch Lythia and she transforms into an Archangel, destroying Lythia in one go. No one else need have bothered. If Albie had just left her in the river all those years ago, would Lythia have been destroyed the moment she touched Tensy?? Who knows… Anyway after Lythia is gone, everyone’s happy and Tensy goes to live in the ether with the other Archangels.
When it became clear that this means there ain’t gonna be no sequel, I found myself feeling a bit cheated by the book. So many little other kids with potential and nowhere to go.
So I say, drag Tensy back from happyland, make the kids unhappy and give us some more adventures at the Home for Mislaid Children!

The Map That Changed the World, Simon Winchester. Book 3

I've been a while since the last book - mainly because this one was a teency bit of a slug and I'm in the middle of another three books as well.

Mr Winchester - Details: The guy has an OBE (services to journalism & literature and rightly so). Born in 1944. Studied geology – hence the knowledge of William Smith, I guess. Worked as a foreign correspondent for The Guardian for 20 years, he now does stuff for Conde Nast Traveler, Smithsonian Museum, Nat Geo and reviews books for New York Times (somebody slow this man down!).

He was also held captive in the Falklands by Argentinian forces – mamma mia!

He got his start in journalism by A, just deciding to be a journalist one day, then B, calling countless newspapers until one took him on as a junior reporter. This was in the 60s. Do you know how hard it is to get work in any sort of publishing nowadays! Don’t start me – and baby boomers complain that the young folk nowadays don’t want to work. If it were that easy – I’d be head editor of the New York Review by now!

Anyway, regardless of dubiously smoothly-pathed career beginnings, Simon W is a legend. His interests include letterpress printing, bee-keeping, astronomy, stamp-collecting, model railways and cider-making.

I recommend having a further look at his bio – it is fascinating.

So. I generally love a bit of the Simon in my literary non-fiction. But this time, I'm underwhelmed, I must say. The story of William Smith who put together the first geological map of Britain. He figured out the whole strata-fossil relationship and that strata was in fact just that - stratified layers of rock and other bits and pieces (I ain't no geologist). The story isn't that thrilling I'm afraid. Winchester I think does his absolute best but William Smith was a fairly boring personality in the science world and not much can be done about that.
Ooh - found a new word in this book - chamfered.
Winchester emphasises early on the importance of this map to the entire world and to humanity and it's consequences for mining/trade/religion/science, etc. The reader can't not understand this if they read the book, but Will is a bit of non-entity. I appreciate that he worked extremely hard to prove his theory of stratified rock once he cottoned on to the idea, and I heartily bemoan the fact that the twitty-snobs who ruled the roost in Geological circles ripped him off and ignored his existence. It's crap that he went into debtor's prison for 10 weeks and that he married a loony. These last two tantalising pieces of information are barely dealt with because of lack of historical data on it. This malady affects much of William Smith's life and thus Winchester is left with repetition of what he does know and a lot of conjecture. One middle chapter is a lively account of Simon's own youth and his journey in William's footsteps through a small section of Britain. This chapter glows with vigour and life. The rest of the book feels dead in comparison.
We are taken through coal mining, canal building at it's driest and descriptions of strata.
Winchester makes the mistake, I feel of letting the reader know pretty much everything that happens to William Smith in advance. We know he is the first to 'discover' strata, we know he is going to go broke, go to prison, then get invited back to London in his late years to receive full accolades for his work. This is revealed early on in what feels like an effort to hype up the text. I just wanted it to end.
I could go on and on, which I'm afraid Winchester did for far too long. So I'll stop her and say that on a Winchester scale, I'm giving this a big fat 3/10.

Book 2. Runcible Jones and the Frozen Compass, Ian Irvine

Spoiler Alert – Book 3 in the Runcible Jones series.
(Ian's bio details are at the end as I did that part after reading the book and I suspect that was a good thing or I may not have finished the book in disgust!)

Yeah, book three. The reason I have only this title is because it was going cheap at a Penguin sale and I’d heard good things about Ian and wanted to have a gander.

So.

Wow – there’s a REMARKABLE RESEMBLANCE TO A CERTAIN SEVEN PART SERIES about a BOY WIZARD that sold a couple of copies recently. Nuff said.
Actually, not enough said. Come on, Ian. Get some originality here – and I have just checked and the first one came out in 2006. When you have a large and hairy character in your book named Rhagrid (or along those lines), regardless if he is evil, you’re just begging for HP comparisons really.

I wasn’t a big fan of this book. Maybe it’s because I came in at book 3 and didn’t have the emotional links to the main characters that reading the previous 2 would have created.

There are some elements I just wasn’t comfortable with.

Firstly, this book is about a 13 year old wizard whose name is Runcible. Why are people calling him ‘Runcie’? And why is he letting them get away with it? If anyone had added ‘ie’ to the end of my name when I was older than 7, I would have been really pissed at them. Why not just call him ‘Runcie-poos’?

Secondly, the four main characters (all children) are a touch too quick to be viciously mean to one another and then just forget all about it ten minutes later. Maybe I’m just totally out of touch with the younger generation...

Thirdly, the prime baddie, (the Voldemort of the series, if you will) is named ‘Shambles’. Again, I just don’t know about the ‘gravity’ of this name for your average dark lord. I just kept picturing a doddering old fella in a really messy room. Or as someone who messes up all the time – in fact, someone who makes a bit of a ‘shambles’ of things, if you will.
The Macquarie Dictionary gives three definitions of shambles:
1. slaughterhouse
2. any place of carnage.
3. any place or thing in confusion or disorder.
The first two definitions fit in wonderfully with the image of a dark lord, but in my ignorant opinion, the third definition is the most popular in public usage and that is what kids are going to see it as also.

Fourthly, the character Sleeth, a fellow magician who bears a grudge against Runcie. Again, remarkable resemblance to an enemy-character in a certain HP series. But it don’t stop there, at the end of this book, once Runcie discovers the burden Sleeth has placed upon himself to save his father, well, all enmity ceases and there is grudging respect on both sides. Is this familiar to anyone out there at all??? I know that both JK and Ian have made use of classic archetype characters, but come on Ian, couldn’t you have even changed the sex around a bit more? Admittedly the head good wizard is female and apparently rather attractive – which works.

He also seems to have echoes of another highly original series by a Mr Pullman. The natives of Ilium have mindsakes, animals that they can commune with mentally.

The entire book feels a bit rushed. They have quite a few adventures in the 13 days or so they have to make it to Shambles’ hideout to stop him. There’s a lot going on and we are shoved through the land of Ilium without much time to stop and smell the roses. In this time, the characters argue, bitch, self-deprecate and win the day, discovering how to be true to themselves and their past.

There are six books planned for this series – maybe the kids who read this are the type of kids who grow up to love Dan Brown when they get older. I just dunno.
Maybe I’ll get round to reading the first one to see if it irons out the problems with this book. But it definitely won’t be until after this project is finished.

Ian Irvine Bio

Australian and has a PhD in marine science.
He is an expert in the contamination of marine sediments. As a result of his work, he has travelled to virtually every island paradise planet Earth has to offer.

He’s written at least 20 young adult fantasy/sci fi books/futurist eco-thrillers. He started his first series as an escape from a thesis (something I totally relate to as I have homework sitting in my room, glaring at me as I type). He has used some of his experiences in his books – although not the paradise part as a lot of the books seem to be dystopian.

It’s very interesting that number 1 on Ian’s ‘How to succeed in fiction-writing’ list on his website is: Be original but not TOO original.
Hmm, something to think about...