Racing the Moon. By Alan
Armstrong. Illustrated by Tim Jessell. Random House. $16.99.
Laugh with the Moon. By Shana
Burg. Delacorte Press. $16.99.
The Ghost of Graylock. By Dan
Poblocki. Scholastic. $16.99.
These books for
preteens and young teenagers take adventure in a variety of directions. Alan Armstrong’s Racing the Moon takes it into history, and then pretty much all
over the place. Set in 1947 and ostensibly
the story of 11-year-old Alexis (Alex) Hart, the book focuses more on her older
brother, Chuck, and on the budding U.S. space program right after World War
II. The tides of history run deeper than
the late 1940s: the young protagonists befriend an Army scientist named Captain
Ebbs who tells them that she is descended from Captain John Smith of Pocahontas
fame. The three – Alex, Chuck and
Captain Ebbs – meet Wernher von Braun, the Nazi scientist who created the
deadly V2 rocket for Hitler’s regime, then defected and became instrumental in
the early United States space race. So
there are multiple threads here: postwar space-program issues (Captain Ebbs, an
interesting character who is not very well treated by Chuck, is working to
develop food for future astronauts), the history of Captain John Smith, the
background of Wernher von Braun (touched upon rather lightly), and through it
all, the adventures of Alex and Chuck.
This is a lot to pack into a book, and it does not all fit together
seamlessly. The book’s climax is a
top-secret rocket launch, under von Braun’s auspices, which Chuck and Alex get
to witness after rather preposterously breaking into a military
installation. Everything ends well,
especially for Chuck, with the far-fetched nature of the whole book perhaps
being more palatable to young readers because the events in it happened such a
long, long time ago, by their standards.
The moon is quite
different – well, it’s the same moon, but in a very different context – in
Shana Burg’s Laugh with the Moon. Here the adventure takes readers to
Africa. This is a coming-of-age tale about
13-year-old Clare Silver, whose mother has recently died and whose father has
spirited her away to Malawi for six months – not so she can heal but so he can do healing: he is a doctor who
has worked in Malawi before. Clare is
determined to give her father the silent treatment for the entire six months,
and is dismayed by pretty much everything, from learning a new language at
Mzanga Full Primary School to being surrounded by insects and roosters. What is going to happen here is obvious:
Clare will find out that others have lost even more than she has; she will come
to appreciate the culture of a land very different from hers; she will be
reconciled with her father; she will have startling, sometimes slightly amusing
encounters with African wildlife; and she will have done more than six months
of growing up by the end of the trip. Burg
hits all those plot points, and because she has actually been to Malawi, she
hits them in a context that she portrays well and with obvious sympathy and
concern. Clare is an attractive
character if not a very individuated one: she is loving and in pain,
intelligent but stubborn, artistic and proud.
She learns just how much she has to offer others, and how much more
there is to life than what she has gone through already. These are very common lessons in books for
this age level, but if there is little significant freshness to the plot here,
there is a good deal that is unusual in the locale – making the book more
interesting than many others that proceed along similar lines.
The setting is an
ordinary American town called Hedston in The
Ghost of Graylock, but what is intended to be exotic in Dan Poblocki’s
ghost story is the setting within
that setting. Brother and sister Neil and
Bree Cady, staying with their aunts for the summer, soon learn about the
shuttered psychiatric hospital called Graylock (a typically ominous fictional name
that real-world hospital administrators would avoid like the plague). Intended as a place of healing, Graylock
somehow “went bad,” according to townspeople, and several young patients died
under mysterious circumstances. Now the
place is closed and abandoned, and said to be haunted by the ghost of a
murderous nurse. So of course it simply
must be explored – by Neil, Bree and their new friends, Wesley and Eric. All the usual trappings of a ghost story are
here: ominous dreams, unexpected camera images, mistaken identity, scary
appearance of bits of the lake weed in which the drowned children were found
long ago, discovery of unexpected relationships, and so forth. Many of the scenes are 100% typical for this
sort of book: “There was a flash of light, a crash of thunder, and the room
went suddenly dark. They both screamed, then
moved so quickly toward each other on the couch that they nearly bumped
heads.” Slick steps, damp stone walls, a
scary basement – all the typical elements of ghostly tales are here in
profusion. And of course there really is
a ghost, although not the one the townspeople have led Neil and Bree to
expect. But there is also a
very-much-alive bad guy, and it is only after the siblings have dealt with both
that they can at last relax and Neil can finally sleep peacefully. The
Ghost of Graylock is not particularly original, but Poblocki paces it well,
with enough shivery anticipation to keep young ghost-story lovers involved and
worried about what will happen next. And
he does pull together all the elements of the narrative at the end for a
satisfying conclusion. This is not a
very distinctive book, but it is a solid genre entry that will satisfy readers
looking for a modest portion of thrills and chills.
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