Midnight for Charlie Bone and Charlie Bone and the Time Twister by Jenny Nimmo
Ahha, I love these books. I can so see why they’re are among the best sellers of young adult fantasy, because they’re fast paced - any oh yeah, complete harry potter rip-offs. Not in a bad way, just, let’s go over the evidence: a boy, who’s 11 I believe, or close to it, suddenly getting taken from his humdrum life to go to a boarding school to learn magic, because he just found out he has magical powers. He meet all the expected archetypes, and people are pegged at on the “good” or “bad” side. He breaks rules and has adventures and sneaks out of his bed at night, and oh, it is so very harry potterish. Speaking of which, I picked up the third book yesterday, and it starts off with “An owl swooped over the roof of number nine Filbert Street.” (Nimmo, 1) I mean, c’mon, can we all think of a book that started that way? Down to the single digit street number, which is actually pretty rare these days?
This book is chock full of things for me to comment on, but granted, I writing this so late that I’ve probably forgotten most of them. So, let’s start with gripes. First of all, oh my god stop referring to Billy Raven as “the albino boy” simply as a way to vary your nouns. This is so third grade writing. For a professional writer, it is only appropriate when the main character doesn’t know said character’s name yet, and can only define him or her by physical appearence or character traits. But if you keep doing it, it’s like this is the main defining character of him, which is so dumb. It half borders on albino discrimination, which I know, I know, I need to get over myself, but still, major pet peeve. Oh, and then she goes and makes Billy evil, to further my annoyance. He was a cool character! Pssshh. Well, maybe he gets a reprieve in later books.
Other annoyance: there’s blatant good and evil, and then there’s a blatant middle. Oh, it’s so weird, I don’t know how to explain it. It is rather black and white, though, with each character seeming to half a good, bad, or middle label. Not nuanced enough, maybe. But then, its weirdness is also part of its appeal. I’ve never read a book quite like this, in that sense. The history is that the Red King had 10 children, 5 good, 5 bad, who were all magic users, or “endowed.” (P.S. to author: I know it’s a children’s book, but man, couldn’t you have picked a better word?) So, his descendents sometimes have certain powers, that come from this line. Somehow the principles of genetics were possibly lost on the author, who you’d think wouldn’t have realized how many descendents the 10 children of the Red King, born in the 12 century, would have by now, even if some of them didn’t have kids. I don’t know what’s up with this, but somehow there are only 10 “endowed” children at Charlie’s boarding school - the rest are talented in music, dance, art etc.
An interesting aspect of this book I rather liked was that the kids all had specific, sometimes odd powers, rather than just talent for general magic use. Manfred is a hypotist (also evil), Gabriel Silk can feel the feelings of the previous wearers of clothes (so his parents have to get all new clothes for him), and Charlie can hear people in photographs, and sometimes go inside them and talk to him. So you can see how this would aid him in solving mysteries and discovering his past, etc. Oh, and there’s a catch here, which I love: if the person in the photograph is alive, he or she will see Charlie’s face, kind of as a hallucination in front of them. So Charlie can’t be looking at pictures willy nilly.
The character of Charlie’s Uncle Paton is a great one as well. He can’t go out during the day because he unconsciously bursts light bulbs. Now, I’m not sure how much this makes sense, seeing as how there are more lights on at night than during the day, but it’s interesting because it’s all Paton’s-got-a-secret kind of thing. Furthering on that note, there should be a nice blatant metaphor for Paton being the ambiguously gay uncle, but no such luck. He keeps going on dates (interrupted by bursting lightbulbs of course) with Miss Inglewood.
Ships: As usual, kids’ books, so there’s not much canon-wise other than Paton/Inglewood, but, for when the kids are older, I have come up with the following: either Charlie/Emma or Charlie/Olivia - Olivia is pretty much my favorite character, because she’s spontaneous and impulsive, and creative enough to do what needs to be done. The people person, rather Hermione-like in fact. Emma is kind of elusive, at least as compares to Charlie, but she can fly and she has guts, sometimes, so I could see her liking Charlie in the future. Also, I am a terrible person, but: Tancred/Lysander. It is slightly slashy and there, in the sense that it’s extremely vague, and totally isn’t but I totally like to think it is. It’s the whole best friend thing, you know? Take it out of context, and yeah. See, Tancred and Lysander had a fight, so Tancred locked himself in his room and started creating storms for like a week. Lovers’ quarrel right there.
This book is chock full of things for me to comment on, but granted, I writing this so late that I’ve probably forgotten most of them. So, let’s start with gripes. First of all, oh my god stop referring to Billy Raven as “the albino boy” simply as a way to vary your nouns. This is so third grade writing. For a professional writer, it is only appropriate when the main character doesn’t know said character’s name yet, and can only define him or her by physical appearence or character traits. But if you keep doing it, it’s like this is the main defining character of him, which is so dumb. It half borders on albino discrimination, which I know, I know, I need to get over myself, but still, major pet peeve. Oh, and then she goes and makes Billy evil, to further my annoyance. He was a cool character! Pssshh. Well, maybe he gets a reprieve in later books.
Other annoyance: there’s blatant good and evil, and then there’s a blatant middle. Oh, it’s so weird, I don’t know how to explain it. It is rather black and white, though, with each character seeming to half a good, bad, or middle label. Not nuanced enough, maybe. But then, its weirdness is also part of its appeal. I’ve never read a book quite like this, in that sense. The history is that the Red King had 10 children, 5 good, 5 bad, who were all magic users, or “endowed.” (P.S. to author: I know it’s a children’s book, but man, couldn’t you have picked a better word?) So, his descendents sometimes have certain powers, that come from this line. Somehow the principles of genetics were possibly lost on the author, who you’d think wouldn’t have realized how many descendents the 10 children of the Red King, born in the 12 century, would have by now, even if some of them didn’t have kids. I don’t know what’s up with this, but somehow there are only 10 “endowed” children at Charlie’s boarding school - the rest are talented in music, dance, art etc.
An interesting aspect of this book I rather liked was that the kids all had specific, sometimes odd powers, rather than just talent for general magic use. Manfred is a hypotist (also evil), Gabriel Silk can feel the feelings of the previous wearers of clothes (so his parents have to get all new clothes for him), and Charlie can hear people in photographs, and sometimes go inside them and talk to him. So you can see how this would aid him in solving mysteries and discovering his past, etc. Oh, and there’s a catch here, which I love: if the person in the photograph is alive, he or she will see Charlie’s face, kind of as a hallucination in front of them. So Charlie can’t be looking at pictures willy nilly.
The character of Charlie’s Uncle Paton is a great one as well. He can’t go out during the day because he unconsciously bursts light bulbs. Now, I’m not sure how much this makes sense, seeing as how there are more lights on at night than during the day, but it’s interesting because it’s all Paton’s-got-a-secret kind of thing. Furthering on that note, there should be a nice blatant metaphor for Paton being the ambiguously gay uncle, but no such luck. He keeps going on dates (interrupted by bursting lightbulbs of course) with Miss Inglewood.
Ships: As usual, kids’ books, so there’s not much canon-wise other than Paton/Inglewood, but, for when the kids are older, I have come up with the following: either Charlie/Emma or Charlie/Olivia - Olivia is pretty much my favorite character, because she’s spontaneous and impulsive, and creative enough to do what needs to be done. The people person, rather Hermione-like in fact. Emma is kind of elusive, at least as compares to Charlie, but she can fly and she has guts, sometimes, so I could see her liking Charlie in the future. Also, I am a terrible person, but: Tancred/Lysander. It is slightly slashy and there, in the sense that it’s extremely vague, and totally isn’t but I totally like to think it is. It’s the whole best friend thing, you know? Take it out of context, and yeah. See, Tancred and Lysander had a fight, so Tancred locked himself in his room and started creating storms for like a week. Lovers’ quarrel right there.
posted by Taira @ 1:17 AM
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