Nuts to You. By Lynne Rae
Perkins. Greenwillow/HarperCollins. $16.99.
The Scavengers. By Michael
Perry. Harper. $16.99.
The Mortality Doctrine #2: The
Rule of Thoughts. By James Dashner. Delacorte Press. $18.99.
Animal-based fantasies are
as old as Aesop and, in more-modern novels, as elaborate as Watership Down. And they remain ways for
authors to explore human concerns while also inventing societies sharing some
human foibles while avoiding others – and creating some of their own. It should
not be surprising that there is something squirrelly about the society invented
by Lynne Rae Perkins in Nuts to You,
since it is a society of, well, squirrels. Or not exactly a society, but certainly a story about squirrels. And what a story
it is! It almost does not matter what happens in the tale, because Perkins’
writing is so entertaining that it scarcely matters what she is writing about. Early in the book, for example, a
squirrel named Jed is seized by a hawk and tries to escape using “the ancient
squirrel defensive martial art of Hai Tchree, not well known because it doesn’t
work most of the time.” It does work for Jed, though, and he slips through the
hawk’s talons like water – or, as a footnote tells us, “thick water. Or perhaps
like a non-Newtonian fluid. Look it up on YouTube.” There are other squirrels
here, too, such as TsTs, pronounced “by making two tongue clicks, very close
together. It is currently the most frequently given girl squirrel name, the
‘Emma’ of squirrel names. If you sit and watch squirrels, you will no doubt
hear it.” And so we meet various squirrels, various non-squirrels such as
screech owls and humans, various squirrels who talk with vaguely Cockney
accents, and – well, the whole story is about squirrel problems and issues,
involving humans and non-humans, and about tree cutting for power lines and how
that displaces squirrels and other animals and about how screech owls speak
fluent cliché: “It is what it is. …Move on. Get a grip. Deal with it.” The book
is a quest story – nothing unusual there in a fantasy – but also a story about
what it must feel like to be a squirrel trying to avoid foxes and bobcats while
learning how to stay away from humans except sometimes to get food from them.
It is a story in which readers learn that disasters can “throw us together with
those who are our adversaries. Who play for a different team. For a short time,
a common enemy dissolves our differences and makes us realize what we share.
Until someone gets hungry.” Eventually some of the squirrels get other
squirrels to do the right thing, which involves moving lots of nuts, because
squirrel nature involves enjoying games and stories, so coming up with the right stories and games can get things
going the right way. And if that sounds confusing, just wait until you read Nuts to You and find out what happens.
Do not forget to read all the way through the five epilogues.
Human dystopias are not much
like squirrel dystopias, although calling Nuts
to You a dystopic novel would be stretching things. Not so giving that
designation to The Scavengers and The Rule of Thoughts, which don the
dystopic mantle immediately and wrap it carefully around their entire stories. However,
The Scavengers is different from most
dystopias because of its hearty helping of humor – which, it must be said,
makes it difficult to be sure whether to laugh or gasp at some of what happens.
This is a fairly standard post-apocalyptic tale in which electricity has ceased
to power anything, the weather has gone wild, food is scarce, and most people
live in Bubble Cities – but not Maggie and her family, who live OutBubble
despite the many risks posed by daily survival needs and by the zombie-like
GreyDevils. Maggie decides she needs a better, stronger name, so she determines
to call herself Ford Falcon – a choice that adults who know cars will surely
find laughable, although it may pass muster with younger readers. The
adventures are not, in the beginning, all that scary, such as an encounter with
the GreyDevils, which “are most dangerous when they start running in packs.
Although GreyDevils aren’t really healthy enough to run. Shuffling in packs, I guess. And they’re not so bright, what with
their brains all cheese-holed by chemical smoke and PartsWash…” Yes, there is a
typical-for-the-genre invented vocabulary here, with weapons such as the Tooth
Club, Spit Stick, Whomper-Zooka and flingshot. There is a fighting rooster
named Hatchet, and there are people named Toad and Dookie and Tilapia Tom, and
dangerous creatures called solar bears. “Whatever sort of world you live in, it
will get boring if you live there long enough,” Maggie/Ford opines, but of
course Michael Perry wants to be sure that this world does not get boring, so he trots out all sorts of characters and
creatures while producing a typical plot in which Maggie/Ford must rescue her
family after everyone mysteriously disappears. Eventually her father turns up,
explaining that he must turn himself in to the Bubble Authorities because he
possesses a Great Secret (you can hear the capital letters even though they are
not shown), and giving himself up is the only way to get the authorities to
free Maggie/Ford’s mother. Maggie/Ford’s quest – yes, this too is a quest tale
– takes up the second half of the book, which is complete with bad guys called
Fat Man and Lettuce Face and that most evil thing of all, a corporation in
partnership with the government. Bit of a letdown and non-surprise, that, but
even if The Scavengers contains
numerous unsurprising elements, even if it teeters at times between cliché and
overdone amusement, it has enough pacing and plot cleverness to pull readers along to the end.
There is no end, yet, to The Rule of Thoughts, because this is the
second book of a mundane James Dashner trilogy called The Mortality Doctrine. Dashner’s work follows predictable
patterns: teenagers, chosen by authorities for never-explained reasons to do
something extremely complex, find themselves confronting more-difficult choices
and problems than they ever expected, all of which they overcome thanks to a
series of coincidences and overt plot manipulations. In The Eye of Minds, the first book of the trilogy, Michael, Sarah and Bryson agree for no good reason to go on a
life-threatening mission (for free, yet), when asked to do so by VirtNet
Security (VNS). What the three poorly imagined and not-very-interesting
protagonists do is “code” (never explained) in a world containing such stuff as
The Chair, The Path, The Sleep,
The Wake and The Coffin. The central
character, Michael, is a standard-issue rich boy who doesn’t care about much of
anything until he gets involved in saving the world. When he eventually does appear
to save it, by completing The Path, he finds out – and here comes The Rule of Thoughts – that all he has
really done is bring the Master Plan called the Mortality Doctrine one step
closer to realization. This evil plan, perpetrated by cyber-terrorist Kaine, is
a kind of virtual Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
designed to implant sentient computer programs called Tangents in human bodies.
Kaine is doing this because, being a Tangent himself (itself?), Kaine is, well,
the evil mastermind here, and this is what evil masterminds do. Michael, Sarah
and Bryson, who are scarcely first-rank intellects, try to figure out what is
going on, with Bryson saying, “‘Maybe [Kaine] wants all the humans to start a
big war and kill themselves.’ ‘That doesn’t make an ounce of sense,’ Michael
countered. ‘What’s the point of the Mortality Doctrine if he wants to wipe out
humans? Doesn’t he want to be a
human?’ It was Bryson’s turn to shrug. ‘I guess that’s the question of the
year.’” Or the question of this (++) book, anyway. Sarah follows it up by
commenting, “‘We all need to chill and rest today,’ she said. ‘Get some sleep
tonight. Because tomorrow we have a very big day.’” There are many such big
days, actually, but the characters are so wooden, the author’s self-indulgence
in the plot so obvious, that when Dashner writes at one point, “Michael felt
like an idiot,” readers may well echo, “So do I.” There is, however, a sequel
to this sequel still to come, and it too will undoubtedly contain chapters
broken into subchapters for no discernible reason, and comments like this from
Bryson: “‘I can’t wait for this to be over.’” He is not the only one.
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