Life As We Knew It IV: The Shade
of the Moon. By Susan Beth Pfeffer. Harcourt. $17.99.
The Never Girls #3: A Dandelion
Wish. By Kiki Thorpe. Illustrated by Jana Christy. Random House. $6.99.
The conclusion of the Life As We Knew It tetralogy is as dour
as the first three books and, like them, goes over a good deal of the same
story even while advancing the plot. The works are set in a post-apocalyptic
dystopia filled with many of the types usually found in such stories: good
people and bad, safe havens that prove less than safe, families and unrelated
people who bond as families, death and violence and threats thereof, and so on.
In the final book, readers rejoin Jon Evans and his family two years after they
have left Pennsylvania in their search for a safe place to live. They have
found one: a protected enclave called Sexton, where Jon is welcome along with
his stepmother, Lisa, and her son, Gabe, because they have three safe-town
passes and – equally important – Jon is a really good soccer player. His
abilities allow him to provide some protection to his sister, Miranda, who
lives outside Sexton’s walls; Miranda’s diary entries were the basis for the
first book in this series, about a meteor impact with the moon that drastically
alters Earth’s climate. In the latest book, Jon’s staying power depends on his
continued athletic ability, which makes it a fragile thing, and in this
typically paranoid and desperately unhappy world, he knows that stepping out of
line in any way – on the field or off it – could be disastrous. From this he
comes to a realization, quite typical in genre books like this, that a place
that appears safe is really a prison of sorts, and to be truly free and true to
himself, he will have to give up physical safety before it is arbitrarily taken
from him. This is an old, old plot – there is little new in Susan Beth
Pfeffer’s approach to her material in any of the Life As We Knew It books – but Pfeffer does handle the plot’s
progress with commendable skill, even when readers are sure to realize that
noble sacrifices and extremely tough decisions lie ahead not only for Jon but
also for other central characters. Inevitably, the book ends with Jon salvaging
some optimism from despair and looking ahead to “a future worth fighting for.”
This too is scarcely surprising, but young readers who have followed the
earlier books and wondered what happened to the characters in them will find The Shade of the Moon a satisfying
wrapup – although it must be said that there are enough loose ends for yet
another potential novel to be set in the same world.
The world of Disney’s The Never Girls is a much brighter and
more-pleasant one, even though it does have some moments of mostly mild
adventure to go with plenty of all-girl bonding. Pfeffer writes for preteens
and young teenagers; Kiki Thorpe writes for ages 6-10, although The Never Girls will likely be most
appealing toward the younger end of that age range. The third book, A Dandelion Wish, takes the story of
four normal girls who visit the fairy world a small step beyond the events of In a Blink and The Space Between. The girls get to Pixie Hollow in Never Land
through a broken slat in a backyard fence, and the fence has to stay broken for the magic to work. So the
question now is what happens when the fence is repaired – with one of the girls
on the Never Land side. Kate, Mia, Lainey and Gabby are not particularly
well-differentiated as characters – this is more a group adventure than a solo
experience or individual coming-of-age story – but they affirm again and again
that they are good friends and will look out for and help each other, and that
is really the message underlying the magic happenings here. The dangers in the
book are mostly mundane – going through the wrong board, dealing with a lawn
mower – and fairies and girls have similar concerns and worries: human Gabby
tells Iridessa that fairy magic will get them home, but the fairy unhappily
thinks, “If only I had the right magic to help us now.” But everything does turn out just fine, to the surprise
of no one – certainly not readers – and a timely end-of-book appearance by
Tinker Bell (this is a Disney book, after all) sets the stage for the grand
finale of the sequence, which is due in the fall and will be called From the Mist. It will surely be magical
enough for fans of the first three series entries.
No comments:
Post a Comment