Freaks. By Kieran Larwood.
Chicken House/Scholastic. $16.99.
Hold Fast. By Blue Balliett.
Scholastic. $17.99.
At its heart, in its
soul, Kieran Larwood’s Freaks is a
tale like so many others for preteens and young teenagers: a story of being an
outsider, of being left out, of desperately wanting to belong, of needing a
family, of eventually finding family ties with unexpected people in
unanticipated ways. But this wonderful book is so much more than that, and the
reason is its largest, most sprawling and powerful character. No, not Gigantus,
the seven-foot-tall powerhouse with a fondness for pigeons and a dream of
becoming a romance novelist. And not
even Sheba, primary protagonist of this astonishingly involving debut novel,
the hairy girl with eyes that flash orange and clawlike fingers. No, the most
potent character here is the city of London, specifically Victorian London,
very specifically the filthy, unutterably foul-smelling, crowded, murky,
horrendous-and-marvelous-at-once city so memorably word-painted by Charles
Dickens and now painted equally memorably, albeit in a very different way, by
Larwood. London is everything here: the
scene, the setting, the only place where this story could possibly happen.
London crawls into readers’ pores, permeating the atmosphere as surely as the
foul fog that permeates London itself. This is a London so crowded, so
bustling, so filthy, so jammed with ne’er-do-wells, and above all so smelly, that it takes on more life than
the characters who move through it – even though they are plenty lively
themselves. Freaks is the story of a
group called the Peculiars, “freaks” in the parlance of the 19th
century, people with deformities who can make a bare-subsistence living only by
putting themselves on display: tailed, dung-throwing, stinking Monkeyboy;
slit-eyed ninja Sister Moon; pipe-smoking rodent fancier and trainer Mama Rat;
as well as Gigantus and Sheba (Wolfgirl).
Like Dickens 150 years ago, Larwood, a kindergarten teacher on the Isle
of Wight, expertly crafts just-bizarre-enough names for many of his characters:
Grunchgirdle, Plumpscuttle, Sneepsnood. But unlike paid-by-the-word Dickens,
with his very Victorian endless sentences combined into endless paragraphs,
Larwood – who, after all, is writing for young book readers rather than adult
readers of magazine serializations – keeps his communication clear and to the
point, focusing on action and mystery and painting his amazing portrait of
Victorian London almost as an aside. Yet
it is that picture of London that is more memorable than anything else in Freaks, for all the derring-do (and some
derring-don’t) of the characters and all their admirable individuation. The plot has Sheba joining Plumpscuttle’s
freak show after being purchased from an even seedier one, then making a brief
connection with a “mudlark” named Till – a desperately poor little girl who
searches the filthy mud of the Thames for salable bits and pieces of what-have-you.
When Till disappears mysteriously, Sheba and the Peculiars embark on a strange,
twisting odyssey of detection and mystery-solving, and this scaffolding holds
the plot together very neatly indeed while pulling in just enough real-world
characters (notably Michael Faraday) to make the story plausible and almost
possible. In another universe, it would be possible. This is not a
“steampunk” book, although steam power is important in it – instead, it is
mystery-cum-alternative-history, with memorable characters in an
even-more-memorable setting to which Larwood hints he will return in another
book. Readers will hope so – and will also hope to see more of his character
renditions, a portfolio of which appears at the back of the book as a
most-welcome bonus. Freaks is a gem
of a novel.
A great city is
central as well to Blue Balliett’s latest novel, Hold Fast, but this is a modern city and an American one: Chicago.
Balliett, a more-polished writer than Larwood, at this stage of her career is
somewhat too enamored of cleverness for its own sake: the first and last
sections of Hold Fast are called
“Ice,” and the other 12 have “C” titles (“Click,” “Crash,” “Cling,” “Clutch,”
and so forth), with each word defined in several ways before each section. As in her four previous books, Balliett looks
into the past for elements of this one, which springs from a major diamond
heist in 2003. But unlike her prior books, which at their best were fascinatingly
art-focused, Hold Fast is essentially
the simple story of a family sundered and eventually reunited, with passing and
rather simplistic nods to causes of the day, such as homelessness, which
Balliett sees (according to a note at the book’s end) as a simple matter of
matching those without houses to abandoned and foreclosed buildings – a
“solution” whose overwhelming naïveté is something less than charming. The book itself does have charm, though, even
if it comes across as somewhat too contrived.
The basic family unit consists of Dashel (Dash) Pearl; his wife, Summer;
son, Jubilation (Jubie); and daughter, Early, the book’s protagonist. The
mystery here emerges quickly, as Dash tosses out some apparently unimportant (but
perhaps crucial) number problems from a poem by Langston Hughes, and shortly
thereafter vanishes mysteriously, leaving behind a notebook containing various
numbers and a final line, “Must research number rhythms.” The disappearance,
the notebook and Hughes are all recurring themes here, along with the issues of
what a home really is, what homelessness means, and how people make it through extremely
difficult times. Balliett goes out of her way to show how wonderful
homeless-shelter operators and volunteers are. “If one of you gets sick, we’ll
connect you with medical care. Chicago HOPES, a wonderful after-school tutoring
organization, keeps a room here with books and games in it, a place to get
homework help and some one-on-one attention.” And so on. The good guys here are
so good – and the bad ones so bad – that Hold
Fast is more unidimensional than Balliett’s other books; and the ongoing
advocacy, however well-meant and justifiable based on Balliett’s sociopolitical
views, gives the book more of a pamphlet’s stridency than is really good for
it. The characters become types more
than fully formed individuals as a result, and while they endure and overcome
hardship, and Balliett pulls the plot strands together expertly, the overall
feeling of this book is that it has a point to make rather than a story to
tell. Hold Fast has enough strong elements and fine writing to get a
(+++) rating, but it is not at the high quality level of which Balliett has
elsewhere shown herself capable – its story is the victim of its own good
intentions.
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