“Who Could That Be at This Hour?” – a Review

First of all, Happy Birthday, Daniel Handler, a.k.a. Lemony Snicket.

As a lover of sarcasm, black humor, and dry wit, Lemony Snicket’s books have always appealed to me. I loved A Series of Unfortunate Events, featuring the Baudelaire orphans and the wicked Count Olaf. Snicket's latest novel,“Who Could That Be at This Hour?” is in the same vein, and I wouldn’t give it any points on dramatic originality when compared to former work. Still, it’s plenty of fun.

 

Like ASOUE, in this, the first installment in the All the Wrong Questions series, we have a young protagonist who has to make his way in the world with little help from adults. The time period and location is ambiguous, sometimes feeling like the 1930s, sometimes like the modern day. There’s the same intriguing secret society that hovers around the edges of the tale, but never comes into full view. Lemony Snicket, who is the narrator and main character, loves books, hates coffee, and has had a very unusual education. He also has a female friend who never appears (for ASOUE fans, I suspect this might be the elusive Beatrice.)

 

The Maze Runner - a Review

Life can sometimes feel like a maze, but in The Maze Runner, it really is. A maze filled with ginormous monsters. And secrets. And nutty survivor dudes.

 

Here’s the long pitch from the hardcover edition:

 

When Thomas wakes up in the lift, the only thing he can remember is his first name. His memory is blank. But he’s not alone. When the lift’s doors open, Thomas finds himself surrounded by kids who welcome him to the Glade—a large, open expanse surrounded by stone walls.

 

Just like Thomas, the Gladers don’t know why or how they got to the Glade. All they know is that every morning the stone doors to the maze that surrounds them have opened. Every night they’ve closed tight. And every thirty days a new boy has been delivered in the lift.

 

Thomas was expected. But the next day, a girl is sent up—the first girl to ever arrive in the Glade. And more surprising yet is the message she delivers.

 

Thomas might be more important than he could ever guess. If only he could unlock the dark secrets buried within his mind.

Jepp, Who Defied the Stars - a Review

For centuries, human beings have disagreed about our destinies. Is the world only chaos, full of random choices, yet free ones? Is there freedom? Or are we bound to a fate written before our birth, written in a book that cannot be changed? Is God in control – or are we in control – or both?

 

That’s the question tackled in Katherine Marsh’s novel, Jepp, Who Defied the Stars. As the years have passed, I’ve grown less interested in YA fiction (though I continue to write it), but when I saw the title on a library shelf, it sounded too promising to pass up. Also, I love unlikely heroes, and Jepp seems certainly, ha, short, on the heroic potential.

 A teenage dwarf living in 16^th Century Europe, Jepp is immediately a distinct and unique voice, mixing old-fashioned, somewhat archaic language with simple, clear thinking. Living in the small town of Astraveld, he is raised to believe the stars decree a man’s fate. In this, he is similar to the author, who was raised in a family that focused strongly on astrology. But Jepp mixes the astrology with Christianity, and frequently uses Biblical allusions, something refreshing in a 21^st Century novel.

 

“There is no luck,” [Don] confided. “There are only the stars, Jepp. That is where our fortune or lack of it resides.

“Not with God?”

“God made the stars….But it is the celestial bodies that make us.”

If We Survive - A Review

It seems like every time I finish an Andrew Klavan book, I’m impressed anew with how easily he can drag me into a story. I like predicting things. I like working things out. After reading his first series: the Homelanders, I thought I’d done that. Well, I thought, undoubtedly, that was great suspense, but he works with a formula. Handsome, strong, Christian patriot dude fights people that don’t agree with him and Gets The Girl.

When I got Klavan’s next book, Crazy Dangerous, I settled myself in for some highbrow criticism. Ah ha! I said. Here’s a cleancut American Christian dude—this is the same thing. But it wasn’t. If Charlie West was Jet Li, Sam Hopkins was Barney Fife. He had no super cool blackbelt skills, and his obstacles were given a quite different flavor. The suspense was nail-bitingly good. But there was a beautiful secondary character who classified as The Girl, and was there to be Got. Phew. I had predicted one thing. Obviously, there was a formula somewhere.