Amos Daragon #2: The Key of
Braha. By Bryan Perro. Translated by Y. Maudet. Delacorte Press. $16.99.
Calvin Coconut #7: Man Trip.
By Graham Salisbury. Illustrated by Jacqueline Rogers. Wendy Lamb Books.
$12.99.
Baseball Great #3: Best of the
Best. By Tim Green. Harper. $6.99.
Baseball Great #4: Pinch Hit.
By Tim Green. Harper. $16.99.
Bryan Perro’s
well-written Amos Daragon series,
nicely translated from the French by Y. Maudet, gets even more interesting in
the second of its 12 books, The Key of
Braha. These under-200-page
adventure novels are interestingly enough plotted to appeal to boys who are
reluctant readers, but not so intricate as to make exceptional demands on
readers’ time or understanding. They
skate along on the edge of not taking themselves quite seriously, yet they
retain enough elements of traditional quest tales to give readers a sense of
familiarity among the strange occurrences.
In The Key of Braha, sequel to
The Mask Wearer, the first thing that
happens to Amos is that he dies. Not
sort-of dies, not did-he-die-or-not dies, but dies. Stabbed to death by Queen
Lolya of the Dogons, who immediately and rather unbelievably insists that Amos
is not really dead, Amos soon finds himself at the River Styx, meeting Charon,
who insists that Amos is not dead, until a man carrying his head under his arm
gives Charon a letter stating that yes, Amos is indeed dead, so Charon takes
him aboard his ship. And then things get
weird, or weirder. The head-carrying
man, Jerik Svenkhamr, has been assigned to accompany Amos to a place called
Braha, the city of the dead, where Amos alone – only he, because of one of
those prophecies that are inevitable in adventures like this one – can retrieve
a certain key that is needed to open the doors to heaven and hell, which have
been blocked by gods who are in the midst of a feud. And if that seems unclear, do not worry,
since it doesn’t get much clearer. “‘The
key of Braha does exist,’” one
character explains to another. “‘But it
is only meant to open the passage at the top of the pyramid, not the doors of
the positive and negative worlds. It is
used to open an ethereal pathway between Braha and the world of the
living.’” So now that that’s clarified, the adventure can
continue, as Amos visits Braha and encounters an old enemy, who proclaims in
true villainous fashion, “‘I am glad to see you again. You caused my demise. Well, I am the one who is going to dispatch
you into darkness and oblivion, into the nothingness of nonexistence.’” But of course he can do nothing of the sort, and
Amos, after answering three riddles (again, a common element in supernatural
quests) and using his mind to overcome a demonic figure, gets the chance to
become a god – and refuses – and forgets everything that has happened – but,
thanks again to his own cleverness, has found a way to prompt his unremembering
self to take certain actions that make everything turn out just fine. Until the next book, that is.
Much milder and more
unassuming, and even shorter than the Amos
Daragon books, the latest Calvin
Coconut volume features Calvin taking a trip to the Big Island of Hawaii
with his mom’s boyfriend, Ledward. Man Trip has Calvin catching a big fish
for the first time, then finding out what happens when someone catches a really big one: Ledward hooks a gigantic marlin. “‘Marlin are the most violent creatures in
the sea, worse than sharks. They eat and attack, eat and attack. That’s their life,’” one character
explains. Calvin gets to help tag and
release the marlin, is proclaimed “a real fisherman,” learns a bit about
himself and life, and then returns home to confront more-ordinary problems,
such as being paired with Shayla on a school project and saving the lives of 17
toads. Like Graham Salisbury’s earlier
Calvin Coconut books, Man Trip, which
gets a (+++) rating, features some slices of life, Hawaii style, and Jacqueline
Rogers illustrations that amusingly complement the text. Young readers not yet familiar with the books
can start with this one, or any of them, and pick up enough of the background
to enjoy what they read.
The first three Baseball Great novels are also
more-or-less independent, despite their recurring characters. What unites them is primarily Tim Green’s
focus on baseball and the young people whose lives revolve around it. The third book in the series, following Baseball Great (2009) and Rivals (2010), is the (+++) Best of the Best, originally published
last year and now available in paperback.
Like the first two books, it features Josh LeBlanc and his friends Jaden
and Benji. As in the two previous novels,
Green, a former National Football League player, is at his best when writing
about sporting events: interactions among the characters tend to sound forced,
and dialogue is self-consciously with-it.
The big problem here for Josh isn’t playing during the summer with an
all-star team (the play-by-play is what Green does best). It is the possible splitting up of Josh’s
parents, and his dad’s taking up with a woman named Diane, one of whose
children – Zamboni – is really nasty to Josh, who in turn is really nasty to
him, so they get into a fight, and…well, there isn’t very much unexpected on
the interpersonal side here. Josh and
Benji hatch a plan to use Skype to catch Zamboni doing something he shouldn’t,
to give Josh a tactical advantage, but of course they find out something
unexpected that changes Josh’s attitude toward Zamboni. The book reads as if Josh’s family issues get
in the way of the more-important baseball playing, which is really his focus
and Green’s, rather than the other way around.
“‘You can’t live your life in a constant state of bleeding,’” Josh’s mom
says at one point, adding that her marital problem “‘has nothing to do with
baseball. …This is life.’” Josh says
that in that case, “‘baseball is way better.
You know what you have to do and you either do it and you win, or you
don’t and you lose. You know who’s for you because you all wear the same
colors. Nobody changes teams during a baseball game.’” Green intends, of course, to show that
baseball really is like life; whether he does so successfully will depend on
just how much readers like the game and how believable they find Josh to be.
The same positives and
negatives of style and approach apply as well to the latest Baseball Great novel, the standalone Pinch Hit. This one, which also gets a (+++) rating, is
a variation on the age-old prince-and-pauper place-switching plot. Trevor, who has a lead role in a feature film
and lives in a mansion, looks almost exactly like Sam, whose family barely
makes ends meet but who is a top baseball player. Trevor, it turns out, doesn’t really want his
own limousine, bowling alley and swimming pool – he wants to play baseball for
real, not just by hitting balls from a pitching machine. And Sam wants to use his talent to make it to
the Major Leagues – but he also wants success for his father, a struggling
screenwriter. So when Trevor and Sam
happen to meet on a movie set and notice their close resemblance, they hatch a swap-lives
plot so each can make his and his family’s dreams come true. But things go awry, not surprisingly at
all. “The thrill for Trevor didn’t
last,” begins one of the short chapters that focus sometimes on one boy’s
experiences, sometimes on the other’s.
Indeed, the thrill doesn’t last for either boy. “The whole thing was awful, and [Trevor]
asked himself what he’d been thinking,” and Sam has issues as well, involving
family matters and friendship and other things.
Once again, it is the descriptions of the sporting events that Green
handles best – even with Mark Twain as a model, he just doesn’t get human
interactions quite right, and he certainly lacks Twain’s finely honed sense of
humor. The climactic game, and Sam’s
success in it, is coupled with some bittersweet self-awareness for Trevor, and
the idea is that both boys end up wiser as a result of temporarily trading
lives. But the focus is so firmly on the
details of baseball that Pinch Hit,
like the earlier Baseball Great
books, is strictly for sports lovers who want some off-the-field melodrama to
go with the on-field plays.
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