Floors, Book 2: 3 Below. By
Patrick Carman. Scholastic. $16.99.
Troubletwisters, Book Two: The
Monster. By Garth Nix and Sean Williams. Scholastic. $16.99.
Sammy Keyes and the Power of
Justice Jack. By Wendelin Van Draanen. Knopf. $16.99.
Blogtastic! Novel No. 3: Secrets
from the Sleeping Bag. By Rose Cooper. Delacorte Press. $12.99.
There’s plenty of new
adventure where the old adventures came from in these series, which bring back
characters with whom readers will already be familiar and send them through a
whole new set of twists and turns. The
second books in the Floors and Troubletwisters series expand on the
themes laid out in the series openers. Floors is about the exceedingly odd
Whippet Hotel, which now belongs to Leo Fillmore because of what happened in
the first book and which, in 3 Below,
features from the start the same cast of characters: Leo’s best friend, Remi;
Mr. Phipps, the gardener; six cooperative but mischievous ducklings; a
talkative little robot named Blop; and others.
The underlying theme of this second book is the same as in the first
one: nefarious characters trying to wrest the Whippet Hotel away from its
rightful owner for their own dark purposes, with Leo and friends exploring the
hotel’s many byways and secret passages while also foiling the evildoers. The redoubtable Patrick Carman is an old pro
at ringing changes on essentially similar plots: “And so it was that when Leo
and Remi returned to the lobby expecting to find Ms. Pompadore, they found
their old nemesis instead. Ms. Sparks
had taken up residence in precisely the same place from which she’d run the
hotel with an iron fist for years: behind the registration desk.” But even though, analytically, the plot of 3 Below is not all that different from
the plot of the first book – which was simply called Floors – Carman makes sure to throw enough odd occurrences and peculiar
characters into 3 Below to keep
readers amused. Typical bit of dialogue:
“You can only get Floogers from Dr. Flart. …He’s not as easy to deal with as I
am. Mad scientists are by nature…unpredictable.” Just how unpredictable? Well, there is a drink called Flart’s Fizz,
and “a bright green stream of Glooooob” that is “sour, sweet, syrupy, sparkling
perfection,” and then there are characters such as Captain Rickenbacker, who
“whip[ped] his cape behind him as he went into stealth superhero mode in search
of monkeys and missing children,” and a dancing Wyro – and when Remi comments
at one point, “My life just gets weirder and weirder,” readers will smile and
probably cheer, since weirdness and fun are what the Floors series is all about.
Troubletwisters is more serious, but it too benefits from highly
professional writing (both Garth Nix and Sean Williams are expert storytellers)
and a series of well-wrought variations on a traditional and fairly common
plot. This one is about twins with
magical powers – Jaidith (Jaide) and Jackaran (Jack) Shield, in this case. The kids’ surname makes it clear that their
magic is protective in some way (although it can also go awry, as they found
out in the first book, simply called Troubletwisters). In The
Monster, Jaide and Jack find out what they need to protect against – the
creature of the title, and a deadly force called, with a singular lack of
originality, The Evil. All the usual
elements of supernatural adventure for preteens are here: small, isolated town;
nameless forces conspiring to do dastardly deeds; humans keeping dark secrets;
creatures leaving trails of slime as they slither along; and alleged
explanations that actually explain nothing at all. For example, the twins receive postcards from
their father in Europe, one card breaking off mid-sentence and the other
picking up there, and the cards refer to an event that happened just one day
earlier – a fact that mystifies Jaide and Jack until Jaide figures it out:
“He’s a Warden. …I guess he can do things like this.” And that is supposed to be sufficient
explanation. The twins are living with
Grandma X (obvious names are part of the style of this series), and through her
and others, they learn more about their father’s past and what sort of thing
they must shield the world from – something derived in part from the stories of
H.P. Lovecraft, but without anything close to that author’s mastery of fright:
“A new island had appeared out of the ocean floor and The Evil had found a way
into our world through it. The enemy was well established by the time we
arrived, inhabiting albatrosses and sharks, even the stones of the island,
which rose up against us in the form of granite giants.” The eventual confrontation with The Evil
includes predictable dialogue: “We grow weary of this dance,” “You have but
delayed the inevitable,” and all that.
And of course nothing definitive happens, since this is only the series’
second book – which concludes with a clear look ahead at what will come next.
Wendelin Van Draanen’s
Sammy Keyes series has been going for quite some time, since 1998, with Sammy Keyes and the Power of Justice Jack
being the 15th entry.
Reliably written, well-paced and often amusing, the Sammy Keyes books
are certainly formulaic – Sammy inevitably gets into the middle of a mystery
that she must solve to extricate herself from difficult circumstances – but
just as certainly enjoyable. In the new
one, Sammy’s town, Santa Martina, has its very own superhero, Justice Jack, a
guy who dresses up in spandex and rides around on a dirt bike, looking for
crime to fight. Sammy doesn’t think much
of him, but lots of townspeople do, to the point of asking him to track down a
woman who may have absconded with a lot of people’s money. Sammy’s usual personality quirks keep the
book lively (“Grams hates it when I’m on the loose with hot sauce”), as do her
observations, such as this one about Rose Wedgewood, the neighbor who has gone
missing: “The Mighty Wedge is not a normal neighbor. And the Mighty Wedge doesn’t make small
sounds. From falling off the toilet, to
pounding on the wall for help, to lumbering across the floor with her walker,
to breathing, everything Mrs.
Wedgewood does is seismic.” Justice Jack
actually does help find Mrs. Wedgewood, but that is by no means the end of the
neighbor’s story or of this book, because it is only a subsidiary mystery, and
not very mysterious at that. The larger
issue here, which Sammy gets to solve, includes peculiar tire tracks, an
ominous shortcut past a junkyard, a stolen statue, and a bid for a reality
show. The eventual happy ending is thoroughly
overdone here, with crimes forgiven and a few too many happily-ever-afters, but
Sammy’s fans won’t care, since she once again shows her pluck, thoughtful
ideas, cleverness and all-around likability.
There is plenty of
likability in Rose Cooper’s Blogtastic!
novels, too, and the third one – with a summer-camp setting – carries on in the
style of the first two, Gossip from the
Girls’ Room and Rumors from the Boys’
Room. This time, Sofia and best
friend Nona are at camp together, but in different cabins, with Sofia forced to
endure a counselor named Priscilla Jane but called The Priss – who is known to
be, in Nona’s words, “way too strict and uptight.” There is also a girl named Olivia in Sofia’s
cabin, which has the unfortunate name of The Gray Hairstreaks, who appears to
hate Sofia and maybe everyone else. The
plot here is identical to that of just about every summer-camp book ever
written for preteens: canoeing, hiking, rules, pranks, boys, spooky stories –
nothing unusual at all. What makes the
book fun is what made its predecessors enjoyable: the many cute black-and-white
drawings of the camp, the campers, and everything from a shower stall to a
snake to a can of baked beans. There are
also “random camp observation” boxes with such comments as “butterflies are
ugly” and “pranks can be an awesome way to have fun.” Of course, Sofia finds out that pretty much
everything that worried her wasn’t worth worrying about, and everything at camp
is pretty cool, and by the end of the book, she realizes she will really miss
the camp and all the BFFs she met there – even a boy. Intended for ages 10 and up but with the
feeling and sensibility of a book for younger readers, Secrets from the Sleeping Bag is amusingly entertaining because of
its pictorial elements, which give its twice-told plot enough interesting
twists so that fans of Cooper’s storytelling will look forward to the next
entry in this series.
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