I finished a number of books over the last few weeks and haven’t had time or inclination to do a full review of them, but I thought I’d talk about them just briefly here.

Last month I reviewed Vicious Cycle by Terri Blackstock, which was the second in a trilogy, so I went back and listened to the first book, Intervention, from an audiobook and then read the newest and last in the series, Downfall, with my Kindle app for the Touchpad and iPhone.

In Intervention, Barbara Covington’s daughter, Emily, is an out of control addict, and after trying everything else she could, Barbara pays for a treatment center out of state which sends an interventionist to take Emily to the center. But the interventionist is killed in the airport parking lot and Emily is missing. Did she kill the woman, or is she in danger as well?

In Downfall, the Covington family has moved to Atlanta for a new start, but trouble seems to follow them with an attempt to bomb Emily’s car and two murders of people from the new treatment  center where she works. Though she’s been clean, evidence begins point to her involvement. Has she relapsed, or is she being framed?

This series arose from a situation in Terri’s own family (addiction, not murders), and with Jim and I both having members of extended family who have had trouble with drugs, I found the struggles both Emily and her family faced to be very realistic. And if you like suspense, Terri’s your girl! Her characters are realistically flawed while seeking God’s will. I enjoyed both of these.

The Big 5-OH! by Sandra D. Bricker is the next birthday of Olivia Wallace, and Liv is convinced that something dreadful is going to happen because of her “birthday curse”: something has happened on every birthday she can remember, all the way from losing a boyfriend to blizzards to a cancer diagnosis. For a change of venue and outlook, her friend urges her to go to her mother’s (the friend’s mother’s) place in Florida while her mother visits her there in Ohio , so Liv takes her up on the offer. Besides taking care of a dog in a lampshade collar, finding an alligator in a pool, and having a flirty 80-year-old as a neighbor, Liv meets another neighbor with a “toothpaste commercial smile” and begins to wonder if this birthday will be the best yet. This book was light, cute, fun — a nice beach or vacation read or just a change of pace from “heavier” books. I had found it on a clearance table at the Christian bookstore, but Amazon and Christianbook.com both have e-version for free at the moment.

I read Practical Happiness: A Young Man’s Guide to a Contented Life by Bob Schultz with my youngest son, Jesse, after having read two other books by that author, Boyhood and Beyond: Practical Wisdom for Becoming a Man and Created For Work. Though this has a lot of good points to ponder, I didn’t like it quite as well as the first two. It just seemed a little wordy and not as focused. He spends several chapters on knowing God’s voice and hearing Him speak, and I disagreed with him on some points there (I am always instantly suspicious when people say, “God told me…” anything), but it provided a good foundation for a discussion with my son on different views of that. But overall the book has more good points on the topic of happiness, contentment, and their enemies than it has problems.

So…I think that about catches me up. 🙂

Have you read any good books lately?

In The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart, a number of children answer an ad for “gifted children looking for special opportunities” and take a series of tests. Four children ultimately pass all the tests and are asked to help a Mr. Benedict, who designed the tests, on a special mission. The four children also happen to be orphans except for one who ran away from home. The children are:

Reynard (Reynie) Muldoon, who has a special knack for logic, solving puzzles, figuring out “trick” questions, thinking “outside the box.”

George (“Sticky”) Washington, who remembers everything he reads and is generally very nervous.

Kate Wetherall, the most physical of the group (having spent most of her life with the circus), an one-woman (or girl) MacGyver with an ever-present bucket of useful items, including a spyglass disguised as a kaleidoscope.

Constance Contraire, who is very…contrary, small, sleeps a lot, and argues even more. The reason for her contrariness isn’t revealed until the last chapter, and it’s hilarious. It makes her behavior all through the book make sense.

The children are asked to go on a dangerous but important mission to thwart an evil Ledroptha Curtain, a mission that only children could successfully accomplish (all manner of government officials have not seen the danger despite Mr. Benedict’s numerous attempts to inform them), and in the process learn about themselves, about how to work as a team, about how to face fears and extend themselves. I can’t tell you much more than that without giving too much away, and this book is best unfolded at its own pace (for that reason, I’d advise not reading the Wikipedia entry on it til you’re done — it has way too many spoilers).

I have to admit it took me a while to get into the book. I had heard it lauded so much I think I was expecting to be wowed within moments, but it took a while for it to grow on me. It’s not until 80 or so pages in that I began to get some inkling what was going on, and I thought the remaining 400+ pages were going to go by slowly. But the kids are in the same boat as the reader, so it takes a while first for the clues to fall into place and then to figure out what to do about them, and it does reach “hard to put down” status after a while. I have to admit I almost rolled my eyes a little at the “world domination through thought control” idea (which made me think of Pinky and the Brain), but that’s the stuff of many a children’s book and superhero story.

But these children are not superheroes. I love that they are very real. They are gifted in different ways, but they each have their own struggles, strengths, weaknesses, doubts. They have to learn to lean on each other, to seek guidance yet to think for themselves. I love when books bring a character beyond what they think they can do, like Frodo and Sam in Lord of the Rings or Abbie in Keep the Lights Burning, Abbie (one of my favorite children’s books).

Though the book is not written from a Christian viewpoint, there are several underlying truths in it (someone once said “All truth is God’s truth”). Carrie saw some parallels to spiritual warfare and to differently-gifted people working together as a cohesive whole in the church, and I can see that. There is also an underlying love of truth throughout the book and a resistance to evil. It disturbed me when the children had to both cheat and lie at a couple of points, but it was justified as something which one would do in warfare that one wouldn’t normally do, and I can see that as well.

The word “clever” kept coming to mind as I read this, both in the wordplay and in the writing. I had wondered, with the idea of thought control coming through television and radios, whether the book was some kind of allegory concerning technology or wasting brains with media, but Carrie’s research indicated the author wrote in “all in good fun” with the main message being “Kids are people, too.”

I think my children would have liked this book when they were younger. I think my oldest in particular would have liked it during his Encyclopedia Brown days. I think they’d like it now, actually. Like Narnia, Anne of Green Gables, and the Little House books, it has great appeal to adults as well.

So…real, clever, interesting, fun, dramatic at points, all upon a bedrock of truth…I’d say those are components of a great book.