Book Review -The Boundless

The Boundless  by Kenneth Oppel

Read to the 9yo.

Let's take a moment to appreciate that lovely cover art to start with.  Isn't that striking?  Okay , onward!

This is a novel that bridges several genres if there ever was one.  It's set at the time of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and actually opens with the railway nearing completion.  The historical fact is then heavily overlaid with a thick veneer of fiction and magical realism.  The railway is being completed,  but the work has been treacherous because of...murderous sasquatch?  A historical Cornelius Van Horne is almost swept over a cliff in an avalanche during the hammering of the historic last spike...which is made of $200,000 in gold and diamonds?!  It's all so bizarre and surreal and fantastical!   I remember my long, dull Canadian history classes, and this novel tickled my funnybone.  That first chapter sets us up for a jump three years into the future,  where the young boy protagonist  is now a young man, the poor railway worker father is now head of some department, and the semi-mythical Van Horne has achieved his greatest dream - the building of a several MILE long two-storey train called The Boundless.   And on that train is none other than...the entombed body of its creator,  forever crossing the country, clasping the diamond studded spike.  The perfect temptation for the unscrupulous aboard the Boundless on her maiden voyage.

The Bad
The main problem we encountered (as I've mentioned before), is that I'm reading a sensitive 9yo books that were written for the not-so-sensitive 9-12 year old middle school audience.   As you may imagine, this calls for some on-the-ball editing, which I'm actually pretty good at.  However, if you are just handing the book over, some topics might be more...challenging.   Fortunately my 9yo is not at that reading level so at the moment it's a moot point.

Here are some of the things I edited or was careful of: the son leaves town without telling his mother, a bad guy says bad guy type things, someone is stabbed in the woods ( the murder is part of solving the case in the book), creepy legends are told and creepy creatures exist, the protagonist  ( I think he's 14?) sees a boy and girl flirting and kissing, the father and son have a strained relationship,  a boy thinks about a girl's legs and blushes, and so forth.  For a teen reading this book, I don't think anything would fall outside of what you'd find in, say, an Agatha Christie novel, but for a 9yo, I edited.

The Good

History! Magic!

In short - I'd give it to a teen to read on their own, but not to a younger child.  However with a lot of editing you can make it work around age 10.

1) Around the house batteries!

I'm trying to tie up loose ends, friends!  I'm determined that if I just do one of the tasks I've been putting off per day, it will result in me having a much, much smaller to-do list of little, annoying tasks.  For me, the key is that I get things DONE.  Not done WELL, necessarily, but done.  Perfect is the enemy of good.  And every task has a whole, long backstory, illuminated with the twinkle of anxiety and confusion.

Keep this in mind.

Today, the task is this:

These are dead batteries.   Where I live, you can recycle batteries, and there are multiple places around town to drop them off.  I could throw them away, and I'm sure most people do this, but I feel as if I have the option to recycle,  then I should.

So I save them.  Dead batteries.  In a baggie.  Because this makes more sense than throwing them out, I guess.

But of course I never remember to take the dead battery baggie with me anywhere to drop them off, and they just keep building, and then the pandemic comes and everything closes except the grocery store battery recycling dropoff, and I  need to walk over and that requires time alone unless I'm bringing everyone and...

this is when something in the back of my head goes *ping* in a gentle, bell like tone.  *prepare for shut down in 3...2....1*  And then I mindlessly open a book and eat a piece of cheese.

Today it was rainy, and the dog was acting nuts and I knew she would insist on joining me, and I wasn't sure how that would work, and my injured foot hurt and David was tired and there were all sorts of reasons not to go, but I got the baggie of batteries, and I walked to the store, and I recycled them.  There.  One thing done.  Let's see if I can keep the momentum going.

Book Review (two books today!) - Lost In The Barrens and its sequel

My 10yo is finally old enough to listen to this excellent classic book from my own Canadian childhood, and boy was he invested in it!   It's a story of survival and courage and friendship that really did stand the test of time well.  Which is not to say there aren't aspects of the story that prove challenging, because there are.  The casual racisms of writing set in the mid-century are present in abundance, and if you are unfamiliar with where to skip, or alter terminology, or stop to explain, then some judicious pre-reading might be in order.

However, I think the struggle to edit is worth it, because rarely have I come across such a fantastic example of what a 10yo boy who was stretching his wings would care to read.

Jaime McNair and his Cree friend, Awasin Meewasin, join a hunt with the neighbouring Chippawa tribe in the forbidden Barrenlands, where Jaime's impetuous nature gets them separated from their companions.  They end up spending the winter in the Barrens, and the story gives a good mix of survival and triumph type storylines along with extra adventures that don't play primary rolls in the narrative.  The book ends with their safe return to the forests and their families.

And then, of course, if you read Lost in the Barrens you are left with all sorts of unanswered questions.  What happens to Peetyuk?  Whose grave did the boys pillage?  Do they return to the barrenland homestead?

Well, worry not, because the sequel can answer two of those questions.  Cough.

The sequel is more ethically challenging than the first book, and although (again) I think the adventure story, history, writing, etc. are worth having to stop and explain why we don't use a phrase anymore or having to skip several paragraphs, I can understand someone stopping after book one.  Jamie is less kind, here.  The law is evaded.  There are sad, and sometimes scary legends.  The racism is more apparent in Mowat's descriptions of the Inuit, and so forth.  There was only one scene I skipped entirely, when a young lady dismisses the unwelcome attentions of a man, although I changed how Peetyuk spoke and skipped the more gruesome bits of some legends.

In return, there is a thrilling, fast moving account of adventure and excitement and impending adulthood that offers children a glimpse into history and the feeling that they, too, can be the courageous heroes and save the people from ruin.

Book Review - Everything on a Waffle

I should be upfront here and say...Polly Horvath is one of my top five favourite modern children's authors.  Her writing is just amazing, her characters vibrant and real.  Although there is the occasional phrase I might skip over (usually a swear word), I cannot sing her praises highly enough.  I feel like when it comes to children's literature, authors are so keen to either 'make the story gritty and real' or 'pretend everything is going to turn out like a Hallmark movie' that they forget that the perfect genre for children has already been invented: the classic Fairy Tale.  And that's what Horvath gives us.  Not retelling the old tales, but her own stories in the format of the fairy tale.  There is good, and bad, there is moral and virtue and faith and striving and redemption.  And this is what children want; they want to know that the adults understand the imperfections of their child-worlds.  When I finished the book my 8yo kept telling me how much she had enjoyed it, how the bad person hadn't been empathetic, how the faith in return had been so strong.  It was a story that sparked so many conversations and I'm so happy, because I love all of the fairy stories!

Links To Videos For When You Can't Talk To The Children Anymore.

It is noon.  I have successfully done half a science lesson with two children who, I guarantee,  absorbed less than 10% of what I said because they couldn't keep their mouths closed to save their lives.  I think...maybe I was cut out for cloistered religious life and I missed my calling.  Here are a bunch of YouTube links we've recently watched...

This guy refined pure gold and silver from old jewelry and it looked very cool.

Ants eating a slice of banana.

And as a follow-up, ants eating a puddle of honey!

This guy hatched an emu egg in an incubator in his closet!  (Fyi- includes a dissection of a fertilized dead egg)

This girl completes the 'Wreck This Journal' books, and then flips through them.

The longest Rube Goldberg machine in the world turns on a Christmas tree.

Time lapse of what happens if you crack open an egg and then just leave it for a few weeks.

How to make clay from dirt.

Water mites swimming in a pond water sample.

Mantis versus spider, versus another, bigger mantis.  This did not end well for the smaller mantis.

Can a chicken raise a duck?

Viennese wild hamsters living in a graveyard.

Eleven incredibly fat racoons stuck in a porch.

A guy who owns a giant duck.

Turning a roll of tinfoil into a solid aluminum ball.

What if you put 1000 expanding dinosaurs in a bathtub?

What if you microwaved an avocado?  Or an egg?  Or a watermelon? 

A very odd British man put a GPS tracker on his cat for 24 hours just to see where it went.

Woodturning a burl into a coffee mug.

All, Nothing, Allnothing, Nothingall, Something in between, everyone is wrong, and why I'm almost certainly not doing this correctly.

Today an acquaintance posted something on social media explaining, yet again, why social distancing...blah blah blah.  Gotcha.  You know what I'm going to say, anyway.

It's proven, it's scientific, I've already talked about why it is likely really hard for everyone and how we can't get miffy when people talk about it being hard because our entire society is built on social interaction, but this article touched a nerve for me because of it's slightly patronizing and dismissive tone. 

You know why this is getting harder and harder for people?  Because of the complete disconnect between all this scoldy finger-wagging and the reality of life.  Jerks excepted (because there are always going to be jerks) people understand at this point that social distancing is the thing we are doing.  The jerks are not reading a shared article online and saying "golly, sounds legit, maybe I shouldn't be a jerk!" because they don't care about the articles.  So the articles are preaching to the choir at this stage in the game, not instructing, just preaching.  And making people hysterical.

Now the reality of life is that you can't not ever ever connect with people.  Can't.  You are going to have to be around people.  There is going to be some connection, at a store, on a sidewalk, when your window is down in the car and you stop at a red light and another car with their window down pulls beside you.  When your cat gets in a fight with another cat and you and your neighbor both go for them at the same time.  When you have to call the plumber because you have to call the blessed plumber, darn it. When elderly Mrs. Smith falls and you rush over to help her up. When that appointment can't not happen.  A million reasons.

Here's the alternative.  No one sees anyone else at all, ever, under any circumstances.  No exceptions.  Now, that will mean no one works at all, or all workers are quarantined with their co-workers.  No one will be allowed to leave their homes at all because property boundaries could lead to people talking over fences or through hedges and that breaks the 'rules'.  There can be no travel at all, obviously, no walking dogs, no grocery trips.  Whatever food you have, you have.  No leaving something on someone's porch, no waving at grandchildren through the window, no exceptions.

Oh, but, that's unreasonable!  This person's job is an essential job so they must be allowed to go to work and obviously they can't be forbidden from going home...

I live in an apartment!  Where is my dog supposed to go to the bathroom if I can't go outside??

But...I don't have food!! I need to go to the store!!!!

It's a medical emergency!  I'm having a baby, someone broke a leg, my medicine is gone and I need more...

A million reasons, a million exceptions.  Yes, of course you can go outside.  Yes, of course no one is asking you to starve.  Yes, go to the hospital with your broken leg or crowning baby, for the love of Pete.

But then, don't hug people, stand apart from people, wash your hands, stop the spread turns again into 'no you cannot visit your friend if you sit on your trunks twelve feet from each other and talk in a parking lot' 'no you cannot talk to your neighbor when you're on separate porches' Danger! Danger!

If it's that dangerous, you say, if I cannot speak to my friend from several yards away because I could inadvertently spread the virus, then wouldn't it also stand to reason that the person who walks past me in the grocery store shouldn't be allowed in the same aisle?  Should we even be allowed to go outside at the same time? 

No, no, that's too extreme!  Be reasonable. Except also be slightly hysterical.  Except don't be that because it causes panic.  And around we go.

And that's another reason why people are having a hard time.

Disgruntled

The introvert / extrovert thing has missed something in all of this social isolation blah.

Your energy-acquiring preferences have almost nothing to do with why social isolation /quarantine situations are challenging.  I'm actually getting a little annoyed at all the comments I see about how easy all of this is for homeschoolers, or introverted people, or bookworms,  or (insert some group of 'others') because this is all just false advertising.

To start with, the labels of introvert/extrovert apply to how we feel energized and renewed and inspired - is it through contact with others or time apart?

I would call myself an introvert - and I am having a hard time with all of this, and here's why.

Firstly - I am never alone now, and I think a lot of introverts can agree with me on this one.  If you are renewed by solitary pursuits, and you have exactly zero minutes during the day when you are apart from your family,  this does not make for a peaceful time.  Not that I had hours to myself daily before,  but I certainly had more time than this.

Secondly - I had a life previously that involved activities I love, and all of that is gone.  Just because I'm an introvert doesn't mean I never left my house or dreaded every activity!   I can't browse my favorite second hand bookstore.  I can't take my children to the library.  I can't go into a grocery store to pick out food to cook.  I can't go for an evening walk with a friend or meet someone for coffee.  I can't go to church.

Thirdly - I've never met an extrovert who wanted to never ever be alone, ever.  Who always wanted to be with others.  And likewise I have never met an introvert who wanted to live their lives completely removed from all outside human contact.  And if I did meet a person in one of those extremes I would assume they suffered from an illness because that is not a normal human response.    Even the most extroverted person wants some time alone.  Even the serious introverts of the world would still like some interaction with others.

This is hard for many people,  which is completely fine because it is supposed to be difficult to spend extended time away from your loved ones, your friends,  your favourite activities and joys in life.  The fact that this is hard means you've been doing life well up to now!  You've made connections and put down roots!  That's a healthy thing.

I just wish that it could stop being an 'us and them' thing. Extroverts aren't seeing their people and introverts aren't seeing their people either.  Introverts aren't getting their time alone and extroverts also aren't getting their time alone.   This is a sucky time for everyone.   Be kind.