“Fiddle-de-dee’s not English.”

Over the course of the Christmas/new year’s day week, I read three books by Christopher Pike. My sister also read the same three books. We used to read a lot of his books when we were younger — though apparently not really that many! We went through the titles and couldn’t recall many of them, causing a great deal of shrieking (with laughter, of course) as we went through the plots we remembered. Here, for your pleasure — all three of you reading this — are recaps of the books. Uh. Beware of spoilers?

See You Later

This one I never read before. I, uh, will not try to be kind. This one, while it has a seriously WTF-is-going-on-here plot, was still predictable. Of course you knew who the girl was! Who wouldn’t? This had to be the worse of the lot, at least plot-wise.

It also felt like Pike was trying to smack the back of our heads with some sort of personal philosophy. Reincarnation! Trying to rationalise cause and effect to explain the paradoxes set by time travel! Those weren’t the things I needed paragraphs of rambling upon, thanks.

My sister read this book after I did. I had a blast watching her expressions as she flipped through the pages — she’s a very expressive girl. There was a point I was sure she was going to throw the book across the room, but of course she didn’t.

Among other reactions from my sister: “What kind of title is See You Later? It doesn’t make sense! See who later? Yourself? And what the heck is on the cover? The Eye of Sauron?” Ahahaha.

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Spellbound

This I definitely read before. This one has your standard shaman, transfer students and people turning into animals and of course the quiet, pretty transfer girl is obviously the one to look out for. Beware of English chicks. Seriously.

It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t really good either.

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Gimme a Kiss

I probably read this one before. A mystery/thriller, this time, instead of horror or something with supernatural elements. Rather slipshod when it came to resolving the whole story, but maybe my twelve-year-old self wouldn’t have been too critical about the too-nice girls always being the evil ones. (Or maybe I would have been. I was one of those too-nice girls once.)

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. . . but this is not why we are here

I am here to tell you the reason why I am thankful for Christopher Pike. Strange thing to do, I suppose, after rather dour recap of three books.

My first language isn’t English. I never had much trouble with English, and languages in general, since my parents liked books and I had always liked to read. When I went to school, though, I pretty much despaired at the state of some of my classmates’ command of the English language. The good ones were very good. The bad ones were really, really bad. It didn’t seem possible that after six years of classes in primary school, you can’t get a sentence like “This are is a cat.” right. In another school, it probably would have been more believable — yet still not acceptable, if I have any say in the matter — but I went to one of the boarding schools, one of those supposedly “good” schools where you got in based on merit.

There was a girl I was rather close to when I was in the second form. She would come to me with her English homework, asking me for help, and I would feel more like a harassed teacher instead of a friend when I had to underline and cross out things in her essays and workbooks and struggle to explain to her why this is correct and that is not. (I was not a good teacher and never will be. I lack the patience to explain the same thing over and over after I’ve explained it once, and I don’t have the grace to give a kind word when needed.) I never corrected things for her. I only pointed out what was wrong and forced her to fix those mistakes until she got everything right — I think her English teacher was a bit suspicious how she managed to write as well as she did. She would come very close to giving up sometimes, looking sadly at the sentences I kept underlining.

She didn’t read many English books, this friend. (I can’t remember what was required reading when we were in the second form, but I certainly know that you should never force The Red Badge of Courage on lower secondary students who had naught of American history. Even the abridged version.) I tried recommending books from the school library but they were either too hard or she wasn’t interested in them, so that was a dead end. I figured if I could get her to read more, it would solve a lot of her problems.

One day I found her reading an old copy of one of Pike’s books I had brought from home. I was quite surprised — I didn’t think she would have liked horror. I can’t even remember which book it was. I couldn’t tear her away from it. She asked me if I had any other books like that book, and I had shoved all the Pike books I had to her. Her English improved. She started reading other books. She got an A for the exam we took in third form. I was happy for her.

She’s a teacher now. No, she doesn’t teach English, but she probably could have if she wanted to.

See? These books can be useful, after all. XD If you can use them to get a kid to read, then I’m happy enough.

Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer
Puffin Books 2002
336 pages

Poor Artemis. The book ended up on my not-so-honourable mentions for 2007. I was surprised myself — I certainly didn’t expect that to happen when I picked up the book in the bookstore. Kids loved it, and there are numerous sequels (four now, I think?) and the cover was bright and sparkly and blue. And it had a young boy who is a genius trying to restore his family fortune, a loyal, kick-ass butler following the boy everywhere, and fairies. What’s not to like about a book like that?

Quite a few things, apparently, at least on my side. The first being the writing style. There were sentence fragments all over the place asfdfgdjjafk;. OK, sometimes they weren’t really sentence fragments — more like one-word sentences. It drove me nuts. Here, let me try scanning a random page from the book — this is somewhere on page 181:

Mulch nodded. Another room. Before his time ran out.

And again on page 185.

. . . There! Every ten seconds, a slight jump. On every screen.

I know using short sentences and having only one sentence in a paragraph is a common (and very easy way) to create a sense of urgency. Here I think Colfer went over the top. It irked me to a point that I was grinding my teeth as I skimmed down the pages. Well — that’s another benefit of really short sentences, I guess. You can read them really, really quickly. Also, there was an overuse of ellipses at times. As much as we like those three dots, they aren’t meant to be at the end of each paragraph in a suspenseful “let’s find the fairies” sequence.

It didn’t help that I didn’t like the first chapter. White kid and butler going about bossing and bullying people around in Ho Chi Minh City! Misplaced white supremacy in the twenty-first century in a South-East Asian country! What is this! (Of course, I realised later that Artemis treats everyone like that, but still, it ruffled my feathers at that point in time.)

Some of the themes about the conservation of the environment were about as subtle as a mallet to the head. The sense of humour didn’t appeal much to me either. Sorry, but jokes about dwarves passing gas isn’t really my cup of tea. Throwaway references in the narrative about the story — “but that is a story for another book”, “but that could only be read in an adult book”, etc — and other unsubtle hints to a sequel aren’t appreciated either. And while I try not to categorise books as “for girls” or “for boys”, I found myself thinking (somewhat guiltily) that maybe an eleven-year-old boy would enjoy this a lot more than I would. I wonder if that’s true.

I didn’t care much for any of the characters. The story itself was fast paced and action packed. A lot of bad-assery going on, with a touch of too much action/adventure. I half-expected something to go “KAPOW!” or “SPLAT!” in bright, colourful fonts. Possibly the graphic novel adapted from the book would have been a better media for me? It did, after all, win in the graphic novels for elementary/middle grade category for the Cybils.

I’m probably not picking the next books in the series. Unless someone convinces me otherwise. :p

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It’s always easier to rant about a book you disliked than praise something you really loved. I wonder why.