(++++) DRESSED-UP SILLINESS

Fancy Nancy: Bonjour, Butterfly. By Jane O’Connor. Illustrated by Robin Preiss Glasser. HarperCollins. $16.99.

Fancy Nancy and the Boy from Paris; Fancy Nancy at the Museum. By Jane O’Connor. Cover illustrations by Robin Preiss Glasser. Interior illustrations by Ted Enik. HarperCollins, $16.99 (Paris); HarperTrophy, $3.99 (Museum).

      Let us elucidate: Nancy Clancy, known as Fancy Nancy, first debuted with her love of all things French and her adoration of larger-than-usual words in the eponymous Fancy Nancy, then proved herself equally enthralling in Fancy Nancy and the Posh Puppy. And now, behold! She reappears not only butterfly-bedecked but also enshrined in two I Can Read books designed for enterprising new readers. And she is trés charmant at all times.

      Fancy Nancy is a delightful character, wearing an unending succession of overdone outfits supplied by her indulgent parents, and having homespun adventures that she inevitably describes in bigger words than you will find in most books for ages 4-8. Bonjour, Butterfly continues the series at its consistently high level in a story about Nancy’s plans to attend her friend Bree’s butterfly-themed birthday party – plans that are disrupted because the family must instead go to Nancy’s grandparents’ party for their 50^th wedding anniversary. The fact that everything works out perfectly well for Nancy is to be expected and isn’t really the point. What is so much fun is watching Nancy overdo everything: she wants to attend Bree’s party dressed as an azure butterfly with iridescent wings (not merely a blue one with shiny wings). She pouts about missing the party by scowling, sulking and storming in a succession of outfits, including an all-black dress that clearly reflects her mood. But after traveling to where her grandparents live, she finds the perfectly ordinary motel “quite elegant” and turns the bathroom into a beauty spa by using the little bottles of bath gel, shampoo and cream (bedecking both herself and her doll, Marabelle). Nancy eventually admits she is “ecstatic to be here” and has “an extraordinary night,” after which she even gets a chance to see butterflies – at the local zoo. Nancy is so much fun because she is not only fancy but also resilient: bad moods just don’t stick to her. Jane O’Connor tells Nancy’s stories wonderfully, and Robin Preiss Glasser’s illustrations are absolute gems, getting Nancy’s personality (and her outfits) exactly right every time.

      It is a wonderful idea to use Fancy Nancy in the I Can Read series at Level 1, which is aimed at new readers. She is such a charming character that early readers will be eager to learn more about her adventures – and because she does use bigger-than-usual words, the Fancy Nancy books in this series help teach vocabulary as well as reading itself (each book lists “the fancy words” at the back, with their meanings). In the hardcover story of the boy from Paris, Nancy gets a new classmate who, she assumes, will be as sophisticated and generally wonderful as all things French must inevitably be. And the two do become friends – but because Nancy happened to be late (sorry, “tardy”) on the day the new boy arrived, she did not realize that he was not from that Paris after all (they stay friends anyway). In the paperback about the museum trip, a bumpy bus ride and a little too much lunch combine to make Nancy sick, so she has to get out of the bus – and ends up dirtying her fancy clothes. But her teacher comes up with a clever (and suitably fancy) solution, and Nancy joins everyone else in having a wonderful time. The Fancy Nancy stories are real winners – in whatever format this young mademoiselle deigns to grace.

(+++) A YEAR OF LIVING DIFFERENTLY

One Year to an Organized Life: From Your Closets to Your Finances, the Week-by-Week Guide to Getting Completely Organized for Good. By Regina Leeds. Da Capo. $16.95.

      If reading the lengthy title hasn’t worn you out, the sheer energy that permeates Rebecca Leeds’ get-organized book may. Leeds is so organized that she even organizes organization: she has broken down tasks into a full year of do-its, and takes readers week by week through highly targeted specifics. One gets the feeling that she could have broken things down to a day-by-day regimen if she had wanted to write a longer book.

      For people who have difficulty getting started at organizing, Leeds’ high level of enthusiasm may be off-putting. But if you’re really looking for a step-by-step guide to getting yourself, your house, your finances and other aspects of your life in order, Leeds can be a great tutor – if you have the patience to follow what she says, week after week and month after month. That’s a very big “if,” because people who are that willing to approach the task of organizing themselves systematically may not be tremendously disorganized in the first place. You have to be comfortable with the concept of being organized, and you have to be sufficiently organized to follow through on everything Leeds suggests, in order to get the full benefit of this book. For many chronically disorganized people, this will not be easy; it may be impossible.

      If you do decide to try things the Leeds way, you’ll find here a well-laid-out set of prescriptions on handling what must seem like the overwhelming task of putting things (and your life) in order. The book opens, sensibly enough, with January, subtitled “Understanding Time Management; Working on the Kitchen.” Here is where Leeds introduces her “habit of the month,” explaining that it takes 21 consecutive days for a new behavior to become ingrained, and offering readers choices of new (good) habits to pick up. Then she gets into week-by-week activities. Week Four of January, for example, is “Whip Your Kitchen into Shape,” which means sorting tools and gadgets, dividing the kitchen into activity zones, figuring out how to use counter space, and more. Leeds estimates that this will take five to seven hours – not a lot of time to spend in a full week, but (and this is a flaw in Leeds’ approach) an apparently long time that may well make people throw up their hands and say they just don’t have that much time to spare or to spend. In fact, the “time required” element of the book is one of its least useful features, since Leeds often says the time varies or will depend on exactly what a person wants or needs to do.

      Leeds gets considerable credit, on the other hand, for coming up with such headings as “Kitchen Black Holes” and showing what to do with the junk drawer, under-the-sink space and more. And her end-of-each-month summaries, showing what you have accomplished if you have followed her approach each week, then adding an affirmation and sometimes a “Bonus Tip,” will be real pick-me-ups for people with the dedication to stick with this program. The real difficulty with One Year to an Organized Life, though, is in what happens if you “fall off the wagon.” What if you are sick for several days, take a week’s vacation, need to care for an ill child or parent, or have some other reason for being unable to follow the program? Then the careful layout of Leeds’ book becomes a disadvantage, making you feel you have “fallen behind” in your organizing – which may lead to giving up the whole process as beyond you. Leeds’ entry in the get-organized book field is attractive for its specificity and guidance, but will only be appropriate for people who remain physically disorganized but are already mentally organized enough to follow the plan – and make adjustments as needed when life’s inevitable unexpected events occur.

(+++) BEING NOTICED (OR NOT)

How Not to Be Popular. By Jennifer Ziegler. Delacorte Press. $15.99.

The Opposite of Invisible. By Liz Gallagher. Wendy Lamb Books. $15.99.

      Take a staple of chick lit for teenagers – popularity and all its pluses and minuses – and play a few games with it, and you have How Not to Be Popular. Jennifer Ziegler's book is all about Maggie Dempsey, whose parents never lost the wanderlust of their hippie days and insist on uprooting themselves (and Maggie) every year or so to go to a new part of the country. Enough, thinks Maggie. She lost good friends when they moved after her freshman year in high school. She lost girlfriends and a boyfriend, Trevor, by moving after sophomore year. And now there’s another move, to Austin, Texas, and Maggie is not going to get involved, not going to make friends or be friends, not going to get tied down to anyone in a community where she is merely a transient. And of course, things don’t go at all the way Maggie plans. She tries to say and do the wrong things at the wrong times, but one of the local misfits becomes her friend anyway. And as for that left-behind boyfriend over whom Maggie still pines – well, she finds herself with feelings for someone in Austin, too…someone quite unexpected. “When did my life get so odd?” wonders Maggie. But of course it gets odd only in (ultimately) good ways. “I’m not supposed to be having fun,” says Maggie as she looks for “cringeworthy” subjects to discuss on a date with her unlikely crush. Each chapter in the book begins with a “Tip” in which Maggie suggests ways to avoid getting involved with anyone, such as, “If you find yourself accidentally out on a date, sabotage it with all your might.” The tips don’t work, but it’s enjoyable watching them fail. What is less enjoyable is the portrayal of Maggie’s thoroughly one-dimensional parents, who call her “Sugar,” “Shug,” “Butterfly,” “Doodle” and “Honeybee,” watch for the color of her aura, and suggest she have a colonic when she is emotionally distraught. Of course, the parents decide they will actually stay in Austin, but by that time Maggie has messed everything up. The book moves to a hopeful if thoroughly predictable ending, but Dempsey deserves credit for getting it there via some interesting byways.

      The Opposite of Invisible, Liz Gallagher’s first novel, is more conventional in its straightforward consideration of popularity and coming-of-age issues. It’s set in Seattle and is all about Alice, an aspiring artist who hangs out with her also-an-aspiring-artist best friend, a boy named Jewel. The two of them are a unit, happily invisible to all the individuals and groups around them. But then Alice finds a really great dress for the Halloween dance, and her secret crush, Simon, suddenly takes a real interest in her – while Jewel starts seeing her in a new and different light. After this development (clothes make the girl? Well, maybe), the rest of the book is about Alice’s attempts to differentiate love from a crush, and to figure out where she fits in socially now that she is no longer “invisible” to other people or to herself. Being aimed at ages 14 and up, The Opposite of Invisible contains a bit of sexual exploration, as when Alice walks home with Simon and says, “I let him feel me up under the tree,” and the two later go farther but not too far. The book’s focus, though, is emotional rather than physical connection – and that, unfortunately, makes the outcome obvious from the start. Although well enough written, The Opposite of Invisible is ultimately too pat to stand out from the many other books exploring similar-time-of-life themes.

(+++) TORN FAMILIES

Now You See Him. By Eli Gottlieb. Morrow. $22.95.

Baby Jack. By Frank Schaeffer. Carroll & Graf/Da Capo. $15.

      An old TV series called Naked City always began with an announcer intoning, portentously, “There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This is one of them.” The idea was that the show stripped away the veneer of civilized behavior that usually conceals the inner workings of individuals and families, revealing the raw truth beneath – a modern update of what novelists have done for centuries and, on the basis of these two books and many others, still do.

      Now You See Him is about two failed relationships and their interconnection. The more dramatic of the two is between writer Rob Castor and his girlfriend, Kate, also a writer. The story of these two is familiar in many ways – early success for Rob followed by obscurity, while Kate’s reputation grows until Rob finds it intolerable. What is dramatic is the action Rob takes: cold-bloodedly killing Kate and then returning to his home town to commit suicide. This is not an entirely believable scenario, even within the bounds of fiction: an execution-style killing followed by fleeing home to kill oneself there rather than on the scene? Eli Gottlieb is a good enough stylist to pull readers along despite this and other plot holes, but not good enough to conceal the fact that the emotional intensity of the Rob-Kate relationship seems plastered on rather than integral to the characters. The marriage of the book’s narrator, Nick Framingham, and his wife, Lucy, is better crafted. Theirs is a fairly traditional 10-year-long arrangement, held together as much by their children as by a continuing adult connection. The marriage, Nick writes, “has been a steady falling away from a dream of undivided light.” In childhood, Rob was Nick’s best friend, and Nick drifts farther from his adult self and from Lucy as he tries to fathom what went wrong in the Rob-Kate relationship. He resumes a prior relationship with Rob’s sister, Belinda, as he pieces together details of Rob’s life that will eventually lead to a surprise revelation (perhaps not much of a surprise to readers, though). Although Now You See Him is well written, it has only a minimal amount to offer beyond style: Nick is never really an engaging character, and although the ending (in which his marriage is irretrievably broken – a revelation that is not a spoiler, since it is obvious where things are going from about page 6) tries for pathos, it is hard to escape the notion that Nick had it coming; that he brought it all on himself.

      In a sense, Jack Ogden brought it all on himself, too. In Baby Jack, he is the youngest child of an acclaimed painter, Todd Ogden, and the two have always been very close. Or so Todd thought until Jack decided to join the Marines instead of going to college. Todd, not understanding why Jack is doing this, is furious, and rejects both Jack and Jack’s girlfriend, Jessica. Then, two weeks after deployment, Jack is killed in action – leaving behind a grieving family that still cannot figure out the reasons behind his sacrifice, and a girlfriend carrying his unborn child. That child is the Baby Jack of the title, through whom Frank Schaeffer weaves an effective narrative while also straining credulity almost to the breaking point, if not beyond. Schaeffer has dead Jack inhabiting his baby son’s body: “Baby Jack is on his changing table. Jessica is talking to us. My son is so beautiful. I wish I could hold him. …I wish I could just once see him catch sight of me.” This supernatural twist to a story of the families left behind when someone in the military dies gives the all-too-real tale of sacrifice and wrenched lives a surreal glaze. The back-and-forth pace of the narration adds to it, as we flash back to Jack’s basic training, read his letters and those of the grief-stricken Todd, then encounter Jessica trying to deal with being a single mother living with her parents. Schaeffer makes the book fuller rather than choppier with this technique, also expanding Jack’s story to take in the 30-year marriage of Todd and Sarah, which only seems successful. There is, in truth, a little too much to take in here, as Baby Jack constantly pushes the reader to refocus, to empathize deeply with one character, then the next, then the next. The result is a powerful but emotionally draining book whose final affirmation of family love – whatever that means to different family members – ties things up satisfactorily, if a little too neatly.

(++) LESS-THAN-LITHE LEHÁR

Lehár: Wiener Frauen—Highlights; Overtures to “Der Göttergatte” and “Wo die Lerche singt.” Soloists, NDR Rundfunkchor and NDR Rundfunkorchester conducted by Helmuth Froschauer (Wiener Frauen); NDR Rundfunkorchester conducted by Curt Cremer (Overtures). CPO. $16.99.

      This CD of early, little-known music by Franz Lehár ought to be cause for celebration among operetta lovers. But the recording is so inelegantly presented and, in part, so ineptly sung that it is a major disappointment – the least satisfactory of CPO’s many Lehár releases to date. Wiener Frauen (1902) was Lehár’s first operetta and the last gasp of a Vienna-centered style that was already moribund by the time Johann Strauss Jr. died in 1899. Lehár’s Der Rastelbinder, on which he worked at the same time as Wiener Frauen, was to usher in a new form of operetta and allow Lehár a long and successful career.

      The composer’s first effort already shows some characteristics familiar to Lehár lovers, including meltingly beautiful tunes and a yearning solo violin. And the overture to Wiener Frauen is fascinating, being interrupted midway through a cantilena passage by piano chords, after which the pianist (Elsbieta Kalvelage in this recording) offers a cadenza and then the title waltz, before the orchestra returns to round out the overture. Lehár’s creativity is already in flower here – more than in most of the vocal numbers.

      But there are some vocal gems, according to contemporary critics and those who studied the score after it was rediscovered in 2001 (the work had gone unplayed since a 1930 performance for Lehár’s 60^th birthday). And here is one way this CPO recording fails badly: it doesn’t include much of the best music. The title song was well regarded; it is not on this CD. There was a much-praised terzett for three female characters – you won’t hear it here. The female lead’s most effective piece was a “Marriage Education” duet with her mother – not offered on this CD. What we do get is thin gruel indeed. One famous piece – called the “Nechledil March” after one character even though it is (confusingly) sung by a different one – does appear, but most of the other vocal excerpts are forgettable. This is partly because of Lehár but also partly because of the singers: sopranos Anke Hoffmann and Anneli Pfeffer do creditable jobs, but among the three tenors, only Boris Leisenheimer (as Brandl) and Peter Minich (who gets a single solo in the Nechledil role) handle their parts respectably. Thomas Dewald, who sings Philippe in two solos and two duets, is often actually unpleasant to listen to, especially in his lower register, where his voice is always on the verge of getting away from him and his vibrato is perpetually strained. It is hard to understand why Helmuth Froschauer, a fine conductor, accepted this.

      Adding insult to injury is the lack of any explanation (in German or English) of just what the excerpts are about and where they fall in the plot (and the words are not provided, so listeners cannot figure things out for themselves). In fact, the booklet notes do not even present an easy-to-follow plot summary – an unconscionable omission. (For the record: Claire once loved her piano teacher, Brandl, because of a waltz song he sang. But he left for America and she is now to marry Philippe – until, on her wedding night, she hears the song again and Brandl reappears. After much confusion, Claire and Philippe are indeed united, and Brandl ends up with Jeanette, Claire’s chambermaid. How hard was that?)

      The Wiener Frauen excerpts run only 45 minutes – there was plenty of space on the CD to include more of the work’s well-thought-of pieces – and are followed by overtures to two other little-known Lehár works. These are analog recordings (although not identified as such) of respectable performances of the overtures to Der Göttergatte (1904) and Wo die Lerche singt (1918). The former is brief, the latter more lengthy, and while each contains some charming tunes, neither is outstanding in its own right. CPO can do much better with Lehár than it has here – hopefully it will be back on track with its next release of his music.

(++++) ACTION! HUMOR! ADVENTURE!

Lulu Atlantis and the Quest for True Blue Love. By Patricia Martin. Illustrated by Marc Boutavant. Schwartz & Wade. $15.99.

Charlie Small #1: Gorilla City. By Charlie Small. David Fickling Books. $5.99.

      Here are a couple of delightful fantasy adventures for preteens, one oriented more toward girls and the other more toward boys, and both thoroughly charming. Lulu Atlantis and the Quest for True Blue Love has all the potential for sappiness, but Patricia Martin manages to avoid it almost all the way to the end. Even better: she turns a typical family-upset story into a wonderful tale of eccentricity, peculiar human and nonhuman (and real and imaginary) characters, and adventures that only seem scary until one real-world one that provides a climax and teaches an important lesson. The book starts when Lulu’s mother brings home a new baby, Sam, and starts giving 100% of her attention to him, leaving 0% for Lulu. Lulu can’t turn to her father, who is off on his latest quest to save some endangered species or other. Lulu has no one to care about her but Harry, the imaginary top-hatted spider who is her best friend. So the two of them run off, as Martin creates an ever-slightly-skewed world in which the phrase “please understand” appears again and again: “Please understand, the Umbrella Tree was not a tree as most people would imagine a tree to be.” “Please understand, Farmer Wallenhaupt’s Frog Pond was not a pond as most people would imagine a pond to be.” “Please understand, the balloons of the Extraordinary All-American Hot-Air Balloon Festival were not your ordinary run-of-the-mill red and yellow and green and orange and purple party balloons…” And so on – many things in Lulu’s world are not quite as other, less-imaginative people would expect them to be. And what a world Lulu inhabits: gangster bakers, an under-the-bed monster, a friendly clematis vine, a skunk that Lulu befriends after helping him get a yogurt container off his head, and more. Lulu’s running-away adventure is only the first of four parts of Lulu Atlantis and the Quest for True Blue Love, by the end of which Lulu is very happy indeed with her baby brother and has found the true blue love that was there all along. Okay, that part of the book does have a high sappiness quotient, from an adult standpoint; but by the time kids get to it, they will be so enchanted by Lulu’s world – which also features wonderful chapter-opening illustrations by Marc Boutavant – that they probably won’t even notice any treacle.

      The new Charlie Small series is adventure of a different kind. It is ostensibly a series of doodle-and-stain-filled journals “found washed up on the banks of the river Wyre, at Skippool in Lancashire, England,” detailing the “amazing, astonishing, incredible and true adventures” of an eight-year-old boy who has a 400-year-long adventure. Suspend disbelief quickly here – the silliness of the whole idea helps – and you can take a dangerous (but not too dangerous) journey with Charlie to Gorilla City, encountering along the way An Enormous Crocodile! A Patented Steam Powered Rhinoceros! An Electric-Blue Spider! A Huge Poisonous Snake! A Trufflegrumper that “smells like a pile of rotting cabbage leaves, only worse!” And more (much more). Charlie has his hands full everywhere he goes, including in Gorilla City, where he has to overcome Thrak (“a big, bone-headed silverback gorilla with huge muscles and a brain the size of a pea”) in order to be crowned king of the gorillas and eventually find his way out of the jungle (hopefully in time for tea)…except that he ends up in “a den of terrible bloodthirsty renegade pirates” who are not quite what you might expect. But all that will be part of the second journal, to be called The Perfumed Pirates of Perfidy. Plenty of time for that later. Gorilla City is quite enough of a roller-coaster ride for now.

(++++) WINTERS AND WARRIORS

Miki Falls 4: Winter. By Mark Crilley. HarperTeen. $7.99.

Warriors: Power of Three—Book Two: Dark River. By Erin Hunter. HarperCollins. $16.99.

      One series end and one series continuation – both sequences are somewhat uneven, but both have many points of drama and excitement that should appeal to preteen and young teenage readers. Miki Falls: Winter concludes Mark Crilley’s manga-influenced four-seasonal-book love story whose underlying absurd premise (there exist quasi-celestial beings who manage and nurture the finite amount of human love in the world) has steadily become less important as the tale has seemed more and more a Romeo-and-Juliet story of the love between Miki and Hiro. The supernatural elements return strongly in Winter, after being largely absent in Autumn, and indeed they are necessary to bring the work to a satisfactory conclusion – and a happy one (this is no Romeo-and-Juliet tragedy). What is really interesting in considering all four books is how much Crilley, who has never before done a love story and whose work (such as the Akiko books) is usually aimed at younger readers than is Miki Falls, has himself grown as a storyteller and artist while creating the series. Crilley himself is aware of at least some of this – he explains in an appendix to Winter about the many things that changed as he worked on the books. Readers are likely to notice a burgeoning attention to detail in the art as the series progresses, and an increasing sense that Miki and Hiro are real people with real problems (despite the supernatural overlay of the story). In fact, Miki and Hiro have developed so much solidity that when some characters from early in the story are reintroduced in Winter, they seem rather flat and one-dimensional. Not so the art here, which practically bursts off the page as Crilley shows himself impatient with anything approximating the panel-by-panel progress of comic books and many graphic novels. Nearly the only rectangular panels are the full-page ones – everything else is cut and chopped and angled so as to emphasize aspects of the story and close in cinematically, when appropriate, on characters’ actions and expressions. The overall Miki Falls series deserves a (+++) rating, being a bit choppy early on and somewhat inconsistent – but Winter is a (++++) book…and of course makes sense only in the context of the three parts that have come before.

      Speaking of parts: Erin Hunter’s Warriors saga seems to have an unlimited number of them. Indeed, there are now multiple Warriors sagas, which explore different aspects of the lives of the cat clans that Hunter uses as stand-ins for noble human warriors in fantasy epics. The cats’ interlocking stories can be confusing and difficult to follow, and their grandiosity sometimes gets out of hand now that Hunter has so well established her franchise; but even if Dark River, the second book in the new Warriors: Power of Three series, is a (+++) novel, it will be devoured eagerly by established fans of the cats’ tales. It will not, however, mean much to anyone who might come for the first time to the Warriors world, since the backstory here is complex – and Hunter gives little time to it as she rushes ahead with the new tale. Power of Three refers to three young cats who, according to a prophecy, hold the future fate of the clans in their hands…err, paws. Dark River follows the maturation and development of powers of the three: Hollypaw, who learns about the warrior code as she tries to prevent a battle among ThunderClan, RiverClan and WindClan; Jaypaw, who – as the medicine-cat apprentice – has strange powers that are just coming out, and who learns a secret that could raise ThunderClan at the expense of the other clans; and Lionpaw, a warrior-in-training with outstanding strength and energy, but perhaps not wisdom, at least when it comes to romance. Hunter’s usual themes of friendship, power and betrayal are present throughout, and existing fans of the Warriors stories will certainly enjoy this latest variation on the theme – although the book is unlikely to pull new readers into these tales.

(++++) THE TENDRILS OF DARKNESS

Darkside, Book I. By Tom Becker. Orchard Books/Scholastic. $16.99.

The Midnight Library, Volume VIII: The Deadly Catch. By Damien Graves. Scholastic. $5.99.

      There have been many tales of the dark side of life, of places where evil runs rampant, where everyday lives are as steeped in depravity as more-familiar everyday lives are filled with pleasantries. The whole idea of darkness existing alongside the good is as familiar as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But if split personalities are nothing new, Tom Becker’s Darkside is nevertheless a book that feels new, because it is about the split personality of a city, not a person. “Many years ago, during the reign of that hag Victoria, the authorities decided to clean up the streets [of London],” one character explains. “Their gleaming city was too good for the likes of us. So they rounded up our grandparents – all the freaks, lowlifes, and criminals they could find – and herded them into this one area. We’re their descendants. Everyone in Darkside has evil in their veins – some just have more than others.” Now that’s a neat setup – but the book would not work if it focused only on Darkside and those who live there. Becker knows enough about plotting to create a young hero with whom readers can identify – his name is Jonathan Starling – and give him a mysterious connection to Darkside that has placed him in great danger, forcing him to find his way to this evil place in order to unravel the twisted skein of his own identity and family background. This is scarcely a new plot device, but Becker handles it well and parcels out the revelations skillfully. Darkside doesn’t appear on maps and is outside the consciousness of everyday “Lightside” Londoners, but there is more to it than that: “To come to Darkside you’ve got to think differently. There’s so much evil in the air that you’ve got to open your mind to it all, or it’ll drive you insane.” Easier said than done for decidedly non-evil Jonathan – who, it soon turns out, is being sought by one of the most evil Darksiders of all, a man with the singularly appropriate name of Vendetta. In a neat twist, Vendetta hires a foul and much-feared detective to find Jonathan – but that detective has actually become Jonathan’s protector. And there are additional twists throughout the book, both in Darkside and in Lightside (after Jonathan gets back in a mundane but surprising way). Becker ends the book satisfactorily, too, not forcing readers to wait for the coming sequel, Lifeblood, to get answers to a number of questions. But readers will want that sequel by the time they go through all the excitement of this initial story.

      The Midnight Library is now in its eighth volume, offering far more formulaic horror than Darkside provides. These are reliable, mildly spooky books written under the pseudonym Damien Graves by a number of authors. In the case of The Deadly Catch, which gets a (+++) rating, the stories are by Allan Frewin Jones, who has contributed to this series before and handles its basics well. The title story here is about two boys who go kayaking, get into mysterious trouble involving something in the water, think they have been rescued by a passing boat, but find out otherwise. “The Trap” is a rather silly piece about what would happen if mice became intelligent, banded together and turned the tables on humans – nothing that hasn’t been done many times before. “Sticks and Stones” has been done before, too: girl buys something in a mysterious store that has disappeared when she goes back; that something (lip gloss, in this case) turns out to have magical powers; but the powers involve hurting people; and eventually they are turned on the girl herself. As always in The Midnight Library, it is not enough to be a basically good kid – something bad’s gonna get ya anyway. That’s the main chill factor in The Deadly Catch and its predecessors. It’s not much, but young readers looking for a touch of a scare that arrives quickly and can easily be forgotten will find this latest book as effective as the earlier ones.

(+++) SPEAKING FREELY

Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment. By Anthony Lewis. Basic Books. $25.

      Now that we are well into presidential-campaign silly season, with candidates making promises they know they cannot keep and making statements whose only intent is to sway whatever audience the statements are addressed to, it seems a good time to consider the whole issue of free speech in the United States. That is what longtime New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis has done in Freedom for the Thought That We Hate. Lewis goes back to the adoption of the First Amendment, the guarantor of free speech, in 1791, and points out that the Supreme Court did not really begin to enforce free-speech rights until 1919 – since which time the pendulum has swung back and forth toward more or fewer restrictions on what may be said, when, where, and by whom.

      Lewis makes an interesting point for constitutional scholars: he argues that judges led the way toward greater free-speech rights, simultaneously guiding the public and responding to the tenor of their times. Lewis particularly lauds Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Justice Louis D. Brandeis, whose views on free speech – often expressed in dissents – helped pave the way for a more expansive view of free-speech rights in the United States than in nations to which the U.S. is otherwise close, such as Great Britain and Canada.

      Lewis has some strong words for his fellow journalists, especially those who have tended over the years to get too cozy with the powerful: “The American press has been given extraordinary freedom by the Supreme Court’s interpretations of the First Amendment. In return, it owes society courage. It must resist the lure of obeisance to power. …Only then can [reporters and editors] perform the press’s patriotic function of holding government to account.”

      All this is extremely high-minded and of great concern to press barons, journalists, scholars of constitutional law, and others of like mind and like intellect. But Lewis does a poorer job of showing why people who live in less rarefied strata of society should care about constitutional freedom of speech. The ways in which most people’s everyday lives are affected may be free-speech matters to opinion makers but “who cares?” moments to others, as Lewis seems intermittently to be aware: “The Federal Communications Commission stuck doggedly to its role as nanny, imposing heavy fines on broadcasters who televised the 2004 Superbowl game in which Janet Jackson, in a halftime show, unexpectedly exposed a breast. But most Americans probably couldn’t care less.” So what should most Americans care about when it comes to this basic constitutional issue?

      This is the question that Lewis does not answer, or even pose. He writes effectively and stylishly for a jury of his peers, admonishing some and praising others, comparing U.S. free speech to versions of the same right elsewhere, parsing legal case after legal case for the nuggets of wisdom – or piles of foolishness – to be found therein. Lewis proclaims as self-evidently true that “citizens in a free society must have courage – the courage to hear not only unwelcome political speech but [also] novel and shocking ideas in science and the arts.” This is a noble aim that will no doubt lead Lewis’ fellow opinion-shapers to nod their heads in sage agreement. But someone other than Lewis will have to make the connection between these lofty ideals and the everyday lives of ill-informed and unconcerned people who, on Election Day, get exactly the same number of votes per person as do Lewis and the intelligentsia.

(+++) WHAT OIL THE FUSS IS ABOUT

Oil! By Upton Sinclair. Penguin. $15.

      Penguin has reissued Upton Sinclair’s sprawling 80-year-old muckraking book about the California oil industry as a 550-page paperback for the good and sufficient reason that the well-reviewed film There Will Be Blood was based on part of the book – so maybe fans of the movie will want to know more. If they do, they will find themselves by turns enthralled and appalled both by Sinclair’s subject matter and by his writing style and political convictions.

      Sinclair is best known for The Jungle, a dreary and unendingly bleak exposé of the meatpacking industry whose publication led to substantial reforms. It is an important book, but far from an easy one to read: Sinclair is given to repetition upon repetition, to black-and-white painting of the evils of capitalism and the marvels of socialism, and to a style that can charitably be described as heavy-handed. On all those bases, Oil! (whose original subtitle was used as the name of the new movie) is identifiably Sinclair’s – but it is in some ways an easier book to read, and it is certainly a richer experience (after you slog all the way through it) than the film.

      The story was loosely inspired by the 1923 Teapot Dome scandal that occurred during Warren Harding’s administration and was revealed only after Harding’s death: corrupt officials close to Harding were profiting hugely by selling off government oil reserves in Wyoming. Sinclair sets his story in California, where Harding died, and focuses it on Daniel Plainview and his son, John, known as Bunny (a nickname that is probably intended to be symbolic but that tends just to seem silly). Daniel buys land near the California-Mexico border to take advantage of the migration patterns of the time, but after his death, Bunny strikes oil on the land, and Big Oil (as it existed at the time) finds out and starts buying up everything nearby. Bunny cannot be bought off by Big Oil, and this creates predictable problems. In addition, there is the separate but related story of the region’s growing population and its fascination with religious revivalism in the person of a preacher named Eli Sunday, to whom Bunny becomes close.

      This bare outline shows only a little of the rich tapestry that, in the hands of a more skillful stylist, could have resulted in a fast-paced and utterly fascinating period piece (Nathanael West would have handled the story superbly and in much less space). But Sinclair is interested first and foremost in exposing the evils of capitalism, so his characters tend to be types and his sentences go on and on and on; as a result, even when he deals with issues that continue to resonate today, he does so in dated and dull prose: “Bunny went back to Southern Pacific, and just as he was finishing his year’s work, the convention of the Republican party met in Chicago, a thousand delegates and as many alternates, and as many newspaper correspondents and special writers, to tell the world about this mighty historic event.” Sinclair has a good ear for Jazz Age slang, and his descriptions of some of the workings of the early movie industry are historically interesting and occasionally amusing, as when he imagines a tabloid headline reading, “Star Races Nude Oil Red!” But the dialogue is hopelessly dated: “’It was a reaction from her life with her husband; he was a profligate, and so she’s a miser.’” And although readers will certainly care about Bunny and certainly come to despise the forces arrayed against him, the manipulative nature of Sinclair’s narrative in the service of his political views ends up making Oil! seem less a novel than a very lengthy tract. Still, there are pockets of excitement here, and plots and subplots far beyond what was (or could be) shown on a movie screen in a limited time frame. So this new edition of Oil! does have the potential to fascinate some moviegoers – although it is unlikely to result in their developing substantial enthusiasm for Sinclair’s work in general.

(++++) LESSER GEMS, BUT THEY SPARKLE

Sibelius: Scènes historiques I and II; King Christian II Suite. New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pietari Inkinen. Naxos. $8.99.

Anderson: Orchestral Music, Volume 1—Bugler’s Holiday; Blue Tango; The First Day of Spring; Belle of the Ball; Governor Bradford March; Clarinet Candy; The Captains and the Kings; The Golden Years; Chicken Reel; Fiddle-Faddle; The Classical Jukebox; China Doll; Balladette; Arietta; Piano Concerto in C Major. BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by Leonard Slatkin; Jeffrey Biegel, piano. Naxos. $8.99.

      There may be no great music on either of these CDs, but there is plenty of very good music, including much that is infrequently heard and that provides new insight into two very different composers. The Sibelius disc showcases the two three-movement suites called Scènes historiques, based on music Sibelius had written in 1899. The first suite was published in 1911 and the second just a year later, but there is quite a contrast between them. The 1899 music was written specifically for political reasons after a clampdown on press freedoms by Russia, which at the time controlled Finland. The final piece written by Sibelius for this purpose – and not part of either suite – was none other than Finlandia. The first of the suites features mostly traditional rhythms and harmonies and a generally upbeat, assertive manner. The second suite develops the 1899 material quite differently and sounds more “Sibelian.” Its first movement features horns heard as if through mist; its second uses muted and divided violas; and its third opens with a pizzicato section that is reminiscent of his symphonies. The suites are very well played by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra under Pietari Inkinen: the ensemble lacks the complete cohesion of the very best orchestras, but its sections are well balanced and its members play with strength and sensitivity. They do a find job with the King Christian II Suite, too. This work dates to 1898 and is based on incidental music for a play about a Scandinavian king who loves a Dutch commoner; the woman is poisoned by an unsuccessful suitor, and the king exacts a bloody revenge. The five-movement suite is mostly tender until the concluding movement. Its first two movements are an extended Nocturne – a love scene – and an Elégie for strings alone. The third and fourth movements are played at moderate tempos, and it is only in the finale, representing the king’s rage, that the music becomes speedy and hectic. None of these works is among Sibelius’ best, but all contain glimmers of his unique handling of orchestral forces and his skillful tone painting – and all are worth hearing.

      In contrast to the serious Sibelius, Leroy Anderson is forever identified as a composer of light music – and so, in the main, he was. But the first CD in a new Naxos series of all Anderson’s orchestral music contains a surprise: a full-scale piano concerto, written in 1953, that is skillfully crafted and filled with the tunefulness that marks Anderson’s briefer pieces. The work is not an unqualified success, but its finale is delightful, featuring an unmistakably Andersonian second theme that bubbles with good will. Jeffrey Biegel plays the concerto with verve and apparent ease, and the BBC Concert Orchestra under Leonard Slatkin provides first-rate accompaniment – and seems to have as much fun with the concerto as with the shorter pieces that make up the remainder of the disc. There are some surprises among those brief works: in addition to the highly familiar ones, such as Bugler’s Holiday and Fiddle Faddle, there are some sendups (Chicken Reel, The Classical Jukebox), a previously unrecorded work (Governor Bradford March, which sounds more like Sousa than Anderson), and a few less-known pieces that are more introspective than most Anderson miniatures (such as Balladette and Arietta). Most Anderson works run four minutes or less – he wrote them to fit on a single side of a 78-rpm record or, later, a 45-rpm vinyl single – but they often perk through multiple moods in their short running time, almost like miniature tone poems; and, although scarcely masterpieces, they retain a considerable amount of charm.

(++++) ADVENTURES BEYOND THE COMICS

Bone, Book Seven: Ghost Circles. By Jeff Smith. Graphix/Scholastic. $19.99 (hardcover); $9.99 (paperback).

Ordinary Basil: Attack of the Volcano Monkeys. By Wiley Miller. Blue Sky Press/Scholastic. $14.99.

      There have been very few comic-book-based works that genuinely deserve to be called epic. The 10-book Bone saga is one of them, and among the very best. Although the original black-and-white comic-book version is still available, the new Graphix/Scholastic books are better, thanks in large part to the coloring of Steve Hamaker, who by Book Seven is contributing nearly as much to the atmosphere of dread and fear as does Jeff Smith’s own art. This is the darkest Bone book yet, as the story turns into a harrowing tale of war and an attempt by two groups of refugees to reach some haven of safety – however temporary it may prove to be – despite the incipient rise of the Lord of the Locusts. Ghost Circles is a story of hardship, of hairbreadth escapes, and of considerable danger, as the human characters – notably Princess Thorn, Gran’ma Ben and Lucius – are portrayed more craggily and with more deeply etched lines and expressions of weariness than ever before. The book’s title refers to mysterious pockets of nothingness that swallow up and destroy living beings and can be negotiated only with the aid of a sort of second sight that Thorn possesses. The passages in which Thorn and Fone Bone must deliberately enter a ghost circle to seek food are genuinely scary – and so are the dramatic scenes of widespread devastation, of the chaos of war, and of an attempt to cross a bridge over a forbidden dragon realm. There is very little “comic” in this book, although pockets of lightness remain, such as the temporary transformation of Fone Bone and his cousins, Phoney and Smiley, into characters from Moby-Dick, and Thorn’s amusement when Fone Bone (who harbors an unrequited love for her) inadvertently calls her “my girl” at a moment of high tension. Interestingly, the visual distinction between the solid white, puffy Bones and the carefully drawn humans with whom they interact has by now become quite irrelevant; even a sort of interspecies romance seems barely plausible. Most of what happens in Ghost Circles, though, is quite grim, with the forces of darkness visibly rising as the remnants of humanity (including the Bones, despite their not appearing human) flee powers too strong for direct confrontation. Rarely has a work born as a comic book emerged with this much power and intensity.

      The second Ordinary Basil book by Wiley Miller, creator of the wonderful Non Sequitur comic strip, functions at a far less intense level – by design. Attack of the Volcano Monkeys is intended as a children’s book, following the pattern of the kids’ books by Berkeley Breathed, whose Bloom County and subsequent strips tackle very adult issues but whose children’s books are altogether milder. But this is not to say that Attack of the Volcano Monkeys is placid – quite the opposite. It is a better book than its predecessor, The Extraordinary Adventures of Ordinary Basil, to which it is a sequel. Its superiority rests in Miller’s willingness to let Basil develop some self-confidence and more of a personality than in the earlier book, in which he was barely more than insipid. Now he participates fully in a truly extraordinary adventure that involves a moving island (driven by machinery), super-intelligent monkeys split into factions, giant owls, and the reappearance of the evil Von Röttweil – who turns out to have created the island and smart monkeys as an experiment that even he admits has failed. Tranquilizer darts (“the tips are rubbed on the back of a Hallucifrog,” one character helpfully explains), a flute that can open chains, and the timely appearance of Beatrice – faithful pterodactyl mount of Basil’s super-smart friend, Louise – are but some of the elements in this fast-paced book, which also features more interesting drawings than the earlier one: monkeys escaping a cage and climbing a rope, Basil steering a strange metal ship while towing the unconscious Von Röttweil in a rowboat, monkeys helping the island’s caretaker operate machinery, and many more. There are more Basil books to come, too: Miller recently presented parts of a new one in his vertical-format Sunday comic strips, and the text of Attack of the Volcano Monkeys makes it clear that Basil, unknown to himself, is an important connection between the world of 19^th-century Earth and that of the skybuilt city of Helios. There is more mystery, more wonder and more Basil ahead. Count on it – and look forward to it.

(++++) PRINCESSES OLD AND NEW

The Silk Princess. By Charles Santore. Random House. $17.99.

Princess Baby. By Karen Katz. Schwartz & Wade. $14.99.

      The only thing puzzling about The Silk Princess is its age target of 3-7. Charles Santore’s book is too sophisticated for most children in that age range (certainly at the lower end of it), and his gorgeous illustrations may not be fully appreciated by kids under the 8-12 age range. This is a dreamlike story about a crucial occurrence in ancient China: the discovery of silk, one of the great secrets that China withheld from the rest of the world for millennia. Santore explains the tale’s origins in an Author’s Note at the end of the book, but kids (and parents) won’t need to read the explanation to be enchanted by the story. It involves Emperor Huang-Ti, Empress Lei-Tsu and their daughter, Hsi-Ling Chi, “whom he [the emperor] hardly noticed.” Hsi-Ling Chi, however, does notice things – specifically a cream-colored cocoon that falls into her mother’s teacup one day and then starts to unravel. Fascinated by the object, Hsi-Ling Chi ties the thread to her waist and takes a walk to see how far it will go. The result is a journey outside the palace, across a bridge guarded by a dragon, and into the Holy Mountains, where the princess meets a man with a loom who knows her name and has been waiting for her. The story follows the pattern of many myths – did it really happen to the princess, or did she dream it all? Either way, the adventure leads to the discovery of silk, which makes such fine clothing that the emperor notices his daughter at last. What readers will notice long before the end is the extraordinarily beautiful detail of Santore’s illustrations, which are very heavily influenced by Chinese art. The characters’ oversize heads, the poses of their bodies, the way Hsi-Ling Chi points with her right hand while holding flowers in her left as a butterfly hovers nearby, the looming exterior palace walls whose tops soar off the page, the mist-shrouded path to the bridge, the fine detail of every scale on the orange-eyed dragon – these and many more pleasures are there to be seen, as Santore weaves a tale of wonder as surely as the master weaver of Hsi-Ling Chi’s adventure weaves garments. This is a beautiful book to look at as well as a charming one to read.

      Princess Baby is charming, too, but in a different way. Intended for very young children, ages 1-5, it is the cute and simple story of a baby who objects to being called by all the usual endearments that adults use when addressing her. She is not a buttercup, cupcake or little lamb, she says, and Karen Katz’s adorable illustrations of these and other things that she is not are irresistible. The baby insists that people call her by her “real” name – which is, of course, Princess Baby. Decked out in sparkly gold crown and shoes, wearing a fancy dress and a cape, Princess Baby needs to “make sure that everyone in my kingdom is happy” by giving bottles to all her dolls and stuffed animals; and all is well until her parents come to her room and start calling her the wrong things: Creamsicle, Peanut, Missy Muffin. “Please call me by my real name!” says Princess Baby – and when her parents do just that, everything ends happily. This is the first book of a planned series, which has the potential to offer heaping helpings of cuteness if Katz continues it as she has begun it.

(++++) THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING GEEKY

Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them. By David Anderegg, Ph.D. Tarcher/Penguin. $24.95.

      By the time the movie Revenge of the Nerds came along in, fittingly, 1984, nerds were more than 160 years overdue for some sort of vengeance. Psychology professor and private psychotherapist David Anderegg shows how Washington Irving’s 1820 tale, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” first created for Americans the notion of a bookish, intelligent but socially inept character who is frightened out of his wits and overcome by a decidedly thick bully. Indeed, 35 years before Revenge of the Nerds, Ichabod Crane was terrified and chased out of town by Brom Bones very effectively in a Disney animated feature called The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, which undoubtedly seemed harmless to adults in 1949 but which surely had a chilling effect on budding young booklovers.

      This sort of thing helps explain why Anderegg suggests, quite seriously, that Irving’s story should not be taught until college – it could do too much damage to younger, more impressionable students.

      This is an arguable point – Irving’s style alone takes some of the edge off the story for modern readers – but it is certainly true that nerds have not gotten much respect for a very long time (the three film sequels to Revenge of the Nerds and the TV version notwithstanding). Nerd attacks – psychologically, perhaps often resulting from nerd envy – stem from a deep-seated anti-intellectualism in American life, and unfortunately have even been fueled by some people smart enough to have known better: Anderegg points out that Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1837 speech, “The American Scholar,” was an academic affirmation of the notion that the value of Americans lies in being people of action, not thoughtfulness.

      This prejudice – and it is most decidedly a prejudice – persists today, and causes severe emotional trouble for some young people, including the ones Anderegg has seen in his private practice in Massachusetts. Kids as young as age five or six can be excluded from the “in” crowd by virtue of their interests (math, technology), appearance (eyeglasses alone may be enough), and failure to do what everyone else does (team sports, for example). The ostracism can be traumatic for sensitive children – and it has troubling societal implications as well as personal ones. Anderegg suggests that the 19^th-century stereotype of nerds as inferior to brawny men of action, which could actually have made a certain kind of sense during the days of Manifest Destiny and the push westward, persists today from a feeling of discomfiture. It is true that big-time sports figures who are known for brawn but decidedly not for brains make lots of money – the National Football League fields 22 millionaires at every game – but the power in society has moved decidedly in the direction of nerds, most notably in the person of Bill Gates, the world’s richest man. Thus, the disdain for nerdiness – specifically, for immersion in math, science, technology and other “unsexy” subjects – has significant negative consequences for U.S. society. After all, we now live in a world where knowledge really is power, and if companies cannot get the brain power they need within the United States, they will find it elsewhere. Anderegg’s note that U.S colleges graduated more sports-exercise majors in 2004 than electrical engineers is sobering.

      What can be done? It’s not enough to delay teaching “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” In fact, dislike of nerds now seems to be only part of the deep anti-intellectual strain in the United States, where a vast number of people – perhaps half the population – believes humans were created fewer than 10,000 years ago and evolution is bunk. Anderegg has no simple solutions, which means (in practical terms) that he has none at all. “Changing popular culture is not easy. It requires, first, a recognition on the part of a majority of people that the popular culture needs to be changed.” This is the culture that currently vilifies nerds and, indeed, is often contemptuous of education in general (kids who focus on books are labeled “uncool” at exactly the ages when being cool is the most important thing in life). Anderegg eventually says that change needs to begin at home, and offers some modest ways in which it can. They are good ideas, but they are not enough. Anti-intellectualism, of which anti-nerd sentiment is an element, is alive and well in the U.S. today. The ultimate revenge of at least some nerds may have to involve taking their brains and skills somewhere else.

(+++) HISTORICAL COMING-OF-AGE TALES

Gemma Doyle Trilogy #3: The Sweet Far Thing. By Libba Bray. Delacorte Press. $17.99.

Hattie Big Sky. By Kirby Larson. Delacorte Press. $8.99.

      Books can be predictable award winners, predictable candidates for best-seller lists, and can nevertheless be, at bottom, predictable – as these two are. This is not to take away from their emotional impact or their finely wrought descriptions of time and place – Libba Bray’s of an alternative Victorian England, Kirby Larson’s of Montana during World War I. Readers looking for emotions pushed hither and thither, perhaps even a good cry, will find that both these books deliver on that promise. But readers seeking something more out-of-the-ordinary than the umpteenth coming-of-age story about a strong young woman confronting hardships aplenty may find themselves somewhat disappointed by both books, their sales and awards notwithstanding.

      The Sweet Far Thing is a long, long read, at 75 chapters and more than 800 pages, as Bray interweaves all the tales she has told in A Great and Terrible Beauty and Rebel Angels into this finale of her trilogy. The first book began in 1895, with 16-year-old Gemma Dole shipped away from the life she has known in India to Spence Academy, a very proper and very old-fashioned boarding school in England where secrets seem to lie within every room. Gemma, already distressed by the recurring visions she has – which keep coming true – is further disconcerted to find she has been followed by a mysterious young Indian man whose motives are unknown. In the second book, more is learned about Kartik, and Gemma is fast friends with Ann and Felicity, and the beauties and dangers of the magical place known as the realms begin to become clearer. And now, in the trilogy’s lengthy and often meandering conclusion, everything points toward the girls’ debut season in London, and change is coming to the realms as well. Gemma has bound powerful magic to herself, and become enmeshed in an intense struggle between the Order (the group to which her mother once belonged) and the Rakshana. While Gemma’s friends focus on more mundane matters – Felicity must behave herself or lose her inheritance, while Ann may have to give up her dream of a life on the stage – Gemma herself must unravel darker mysteries. Many involve Pippa, the three girls’ friend, whom they meet again in the realms but who may face great danger – or be a great danger. But even more mysteries involve Gemma herself, who (in true coming-of-age style) must figure out where she stands, who she is, and what sort of person (mundane and magical) she will become. The wrapup of the trilogy is wholly satisfactory, both in magic and in the everyday world, and fans of the first two novels will surely be just as enraptured by the third…for all that tales of this type have been so frequently told and retold.

      Hattie Big Sky wears its Newbery Honor medal proudly on the cover of the new paperback edition, and tells its real-world story briskly, in under 300 pages. Based largely on Larson’s own family history, it is an affecting tale of hardship and a 16-year-old girl’s attempt to build a solid homesteading life in Montana – partly with the help of German immigrants who are increasingly reviled as the “War to End War” drags on. The book is partly an epistolary novel, with Hattie exchanging letters with her friend Charlie, who is on the front lines in France. Indeed, Hattie is quite a writer, although she never finished high school: she creates a newspaper column about the homesteading life as she struggles to “prove up” her late uncle’s claim so she will finally have a place she can really call home. Hattie’s trials and tribulations are mostly predictable and worryingly familiar – rich rancher trying to push her out, disadvantages because of her age and gender, all sorts of weather trouble, and the deadly flu epidemic of 1918 are all in the book, presented in spare and forthright prose that never quite conceals the feeling of having read of just these perils (or ones very like them) many times before. Hattie’s pluck and optimism are not enough to overcome all her problems, but she – of course – comes of age, realizes what she has won despite a number of losses, and heads at the end toward what seems sure to be a better tomorrow. Sensitive and caring, Hattie Big Sky is the sort of book that is sure-fire for school reading lists (with classroom discussion easily started by the questions and author interview at the end of the paperback). Yet the more books readers age 12 and up have already read, the more likely it is that they will have encountered heroines very like Hattie – and Gemma – quite a few times already.

(+++) SEX: GOOD OR EVIL?

Sexy in 6: Sculpt Your Body with the 6 Minute Quick-Blast Workout. By Tracey Mallett. Da Capo. $26.

Good Sex Illustrated. By Tony Duvert. Translated by Bruce Benderson. Semiotext(e). $14.95.

      Now here’s a shocker of a revelation: sex still sells! And apparently it sells whether you’re enthusiastically endorsing it (Tracey Mallett) or equally enthusiastically condemning it (Tony Duvert).

      Actually, the biggest problem with Mallett’s book – the latest of innumerable exercise-and-diet tomes by people who look far, far better than their readers ever will, largely because it is their full-time job to exercise and look great – is that there is not enough sex in it. Mallett, a Pilates instructor, sports nutritionist, personal trainer, fitness instructor, TV fitness guru and featured fitness expert in many magazines and on the Web, looks absolutely fantastic in a clean-cut, wholesome way; the fact that her entire career is built on looking the way she does helps explain how she has time to develop the appearance that she shows off on the book’s cover and within its pages. But the “sexy” part of the book doesn’t show up until Chapter 9, which is nearly 200 pages in, and lasts only a few pages (a truly sex-focused exercise book, if done with the same winsome charm and slight hint of naughtiness that Mallett offers, really would be something different in this overcrowded field). So yes, there are illustrated “Solo Sexercises” here, plus unillustrated “Partner Sexercises” (“my husband’s a little camera shy, and in this case, so am I”). And Mallett includes some research on the health benefits of sex, plus a testimonial from a member of “Team Mallett” (ordinary people who follow the author’s approach) that leads Mallett herself to write, in the breathless style she employs throughout the book, “Robin is hot, hot, hot! When I saw her final picture I nearly fell off my chair – I was so amazed at how fabulous she looked.” But when you get right down to it – and “it” is exercise, not sex – Mallett’s exercise recommendations are nothing special. The best things about her book are, first, those testimonials from real-world people to whose bodies readers may actually be able to relate (as they cannot possibly relate to Mallett’s); and, second, the copious illustrations throughout the book showing exactly what the various exercises look like and just how, in simple terms, to do them. Mallett’s focus is the word “quick,” as in “Quick Upper-Body Blast” and “Quick Abs Blast,” which means she deemphasizes the fact that an individual set of exercises may be fast, but weight loss and body toning require doing a large number of routines over a long period of time. There is nothing wrong with any of this – anything that gets people motivated to move and work out is a good thing, and this book’s willingness to show photos (although not exercise photos) of women with less-than-perfect bodies is a point in its favor. If the bonus DVD, recipes, motivation journal and even the too-cute title encourage more people to get moving, then brava to Mallett. But readers should not expect to end up looking like her – not in six minutes, not in six years, and in most cases, not ever.

      Sex is not celebrated but bemoaned in the strange, even peculiar Good Sex Illustrated, a new edition of a 1973 rant against bourgeois sex education. The book, in approach and in its very existence, is quintessentially French, written by a gay Frenchman who strongly advocates the unpoliced and uninhibited exploration of sexuality by children. Duvert spends more than 200 pages attacking a now-30+-year-old family-oriented sex-education manual for daring to promote sex in the context of male-female relationships and the breeding of children. Talking of “the profound cruelty of medical reasoning” and denigrating orgasm as the tool of a “voracious profit machine,” Duvert – as translated by Bruce Benderson – finds nothing to admire in sex education that occurs in a heterosexual context and promotes what Americans would call “family values.” Indeed, one of the very few things Duvert does consider praiseworthy is the recent Danish decision (recent when the book was written) to lower the age of consent to 14 – something that the author hoped would be the harbinger of a sexually liberating trend (it wasn’t). The prose here is almost laughably overheated, even in translation, as when Duvert attacks a photo of an older man and young boy “because it personifies Evil, Sex and the Other. I’d believed that this trinity of a god-demon was dead – but yet again, what the priests have abandoned, medicine hangs on to.” This book gets no more than a (++) rating, and gets even that only because it is such a curiosity that it is worthwhile to study by those seeking to understand the gulf that exists between some elements of French society and some of American; between some elements of gay society and some of heterosexual life; and between some writers who are determined to proclaim themselves avant-garde with “look at me!” fervor – and those who prefer to be rational.

(++++) PIANOS, LOUD AND CLEAR

Stravinsky: Piano Music—Piano-Rag-Music (1919); Circus Polka (1941-2); Piano Sonata (1924); Serenade in A (1925); Tango (1940); Four Etudes, Op. 7 (1908); Scherzo (1902); Piano Sonata in F sharp minor (1903-4). Victor Sangiorgio, piano. Naxos. $8.99.

Tchaikovsky: Ballet Suites for Piano Four Hands—The Sleeping Beauty; Swan Lake; The Nutcracker. Aurora Duo: Julia Severus and Alina Luschtschizkaja, piano. Naxos. $8.99.

      The new Naxos CD of Stravinsky’s piano music – actually a re-release of a Collins Classics CD from 1993 – provides a fine opportunity to survey the composer’s output for the instrument on which he worked incessantly while composing his orchestral works. The piano was crucial to Stravinsky’s compositional method, but he did not write much solo music for it; and there is little of the stylistic development in the solo piano works that is evident in his works for orchestra. Perhaps for this reason, Stravinsky’s piano music is not played very frequently – but Victor Sangiorgio does play it often (it is one of his specialties), and he has clearly mastered its tremendous complexities, which include pure virtuosity, frequent rhythmic changes, and the two hands playing in different (and changing) meters for long stretches of notes. Because Sangiorgio has such a good technique for this music, he makes it easy to focus on what Stravinsky had to say rather than on how he said it. And if it turns out that Stravinsky had less to say in these works than in ones for larger forces, it is nevertheless quite interesting to hear this less-known side of the composer. The best way to present this CD would have been chronologically, making it easy (without shuffling the tracks) to hear what development there was in the music. Unfortunately, the random arrangement of the pieces reflects no apparent rationale, and leads to a CD that concludes with one of Stravinsky’s weakest works, the large-scale, four-movement Piano Sonata of 1903-4, whose outer movements are bombastic and derivative (although its inner ones show some cleverness and charm). The latest work here, Circus Polka, would have made a fine encore: commissioned by Barnum and Bailey, and including a brief and wholly unexpected touch of the Radetzky March, it is a delightful trifle. Piano-Rag-Music is a trifle, too, but an interesting one for the way it deconstructs ragtime rather than participating in it; while the 1940 Tango is moody rather than dancelike. The 1924 Piano Sonata has much cleaner and clearer lines than the earlier one and even includes a two-part invention. The Serenade of 1925 is not so much in A as around A, and each of its four movements was written to fit on a 78-rpm record – a restriction that did not hamper Stravinsky’s creativity at all. The Four Etudes are mostly reminiscent of Scriabin and Rachmaninoff, but the fourth perks along in a more purely Stravinskian manner. The earliest work here, the Scherzo of 1902, sounds a bit like Tchaikovsky – and in fact, many of these piano pieces sound like or deliberately pay tribute to works by other composers. Stravinsky was not a great solo-piano composer, but the unusual and interesting nature of these pieces, and Sangiorgio’s excellent playing of them, certainly earn the CD its (++++) rating.

      The Tchaikovsky CD is harder to rate. For sheer pianism, for beauty of tone and agility of finger work, Julia Severus and Alina Luschtschizkaja definitely deserve (++++). But it is difficult to give the music more than a (+++) rating. Because Tchaikovsky’s three ballets are now so well known, it is impossible not to hear the lush melodies, the gorgeous strings, the warm winds and brass, while listening to these four-hand transcriptions – which, as a result, sound like pale imitations of the real thing. This is not altogether fair – reductions like these were commonly made to bring music into the home in pre-electronic days, and Tchaikovsky himself especially wanted the Swan Lake transcription made in order to prevent the ballet from falling into obscurity after its disastrous debut. Still, listening to this CD will likely tempt people familiar with the ballets to get out an orchestral recording of them or their suites instead. Those looking for something offbeat in their Tchaikovsky won’t go wrong with this CD, though. The Swan Lake transcription is by pianist Edouard Langer, a colleague of Tchaikovsky, and that of The Nutcracker is by Stepan Esipoff. The genesis of the Sleeping Beauty transcription is the most interesting: Tchaikovsky had it done by Rachmaninoff, who was 18 at the time, at the recommendation of pianist Alexander Ziloti, who also had a hand in the work; and then Tchaikovsky himself made final revisions. Whatever their purview, the three suites all lie well on the piano and all faithfully reproduce many of the loveliest pieces from the ballets. But that does not stop them from sounding like rather pallid reductions of brightly colored originals.