(++++) SACD SYMPHONIES

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 1; The Snow Maiden—excerpts. Gürzenich-Orchester Köln conducted by Dmitrij Kitajenko. Oehms. $19.99 (SACD).

Mahler: Symphony No. 1. Gürzenich-Orchester Köln conducted by Markus Stenz. Oehms. $19.99 (SACD).

Schubert: Symphonies Nos. 6 and 8 (“Unfinished”). Royal Flemish Philharmonic conducted by Philippe Herreweghe. PentaTone. $19.99 (SACD).

Bruckner: Symphony No. 3. Orchestre de la Suisse Romande conducted by Marek Janowski. PentaTone. $19.99 (SACD).

      The Super Audio CD (SACD) has not supplanted the standard CD, as it was intended to do when Philips and Sony created it in 1999.  Its super-high audio quality is unquestioned, its ability to produce an excellent surround-sound experience is unexcelled, and the way it can hold more music than a standard CD’s 80 minutes is undoubted.  But the medium has never fully caught on, partly because early versions were not backwards compatible with existing CD players and partly because most music sold today simply does not require the audiophile level that SACDs provide.  Especially in light of the fact that physical music storage is itself becoming a niche product as listeners gravitate to MP3 units and other portable players, the SACD has become a niche within a niche – its superiority certain but its value to the majority of listeners questionable.  For classical music, though, the modern SACD, which is also playable on standard CD players, can provide an audio experience that is noticeably better than that of a standard recording, as release after release confirms.  Two new Gürzenich-Orchester Köln SACDs from Oehms are excellent cases in point.  Neither takes advantage of the SACD’s vast storage capacity – the Tchaikovsky disc contains just 61 minutes of music, the Mahler disc only 53.  But both do some things far better than ordinary CDs can.  The clearest difference lies, surprisingly, in silence.  It is absolute in both recordings, so that when, for example, the third-movement funeral march in the Mahler fades away to nothing before the attacca finale explodes with vehemence, the sound is enough to make a listener jump – no matter how many times he or she has heard this work before.  All loud and emphatic passages are well served: for example, the very end of the Tchaikovsky symphony, which is one of the strongest affirmations of G major in the symphonic canon, rings forth with unequalled brilliance and intensity, while the ebullient Dance of the Skomorokhi from the incidental music to The Snow Maiden achieves near-frenetic levels of intensity that are abetted by the superior quality of the sound.

      The quality ratings of the SACDs, though, ultimately depend on the interpretations of the music, with the sound being important but not in itself a sufficient reason to select one performance over another.  Dmitrij Kitajenko’s Tchaikovsky disc, the fourth in his cycle of these symphonies after Nos. 5 and 6 and the Manfred, is a (++++) recording, well-paced and beautifully played, thankfully missing the excesses that often creep into readings of this symphony, such as many conductors’ unjustifiable ritard at the end of the introduction to the finale, just before the up-tempo main section begins.  Kitajenko takes this movement, and indeed the whole symphony, as written, allowing its lovely melodies plenty of time to flow and taking the second movement as a true Adagio cantabile, giving listeners an expansive portrayal of a vast Russian landscape.  This is a glowing performance, with the excerpts from The Snow Maiden providing a pleasant complement to the symphony and a chance to hear parts of one of Tchaikovsky’s less-known works.

      The Markus Stenz Mahler First does not come off quite as well and gets a (+++) rating.  Oehms has already released Stenz’s readings of Symphonies Nos. 2-5 and Des Knaben Wunderhorn, and all have had much to recommend them.  This time, though, Stenz tinkers too much, slowing down before climaxes to try to make them more effective (especially in the first and fourth movements) and succeeding only in making the music seem draggy and overdone.  Mahler has packed quite enough drama into this symphony on his own – attempts to add more invariably fall short.  The orchestra plays just as well for Stenz as for Kitajenko – it is an absolutely top-notch ensemble – and there are many felicitous touches in Stenz’s performance, such as the lovely flow of the main section of the first movement and the understated irony of the third.  But the overall performance would have been better if Stenz had stuck to Mahler’s intentions throughout, not just must of the time.

      Oehms is not the only label with a strong commitment to SACDs – PentaTone is another.  Indeed, this is a label that has made excellence in sound one  of its hallmarks in all recordings.  And much of the time, the sonic focus pays excellent dividends, as in the latest Philippe Herreweghe recording of Schubert symphonies.  This is a (++++) release both because of the fine sound and because of the sensitive, nuanced interpretations of the symphonies.  Herreweghe refuses to treat No. 6, often called the “Little C Major” in contrast to No. 9, as a “little” work in any sense.  He gives it a strong, full reading that is especially effective in the first three movements, including a well-paced and rather broad-scale Andante.  The finale, whose basic theme is on the trivial side, also comes off quite well here, with more seriousness than usual and a pacing that does not drag.  Herreweghe is equally sensitive in the “Unfinished,” which is actually only one among quite a few symphonies that Schubert started but did not complete.  The numbering on this release is odd: this symphony is called No. 7, but in fact there exists a No. 7 that Schubert finished in short score but did not fully orchestrate – although it deserves to be heard more often than it is, since it actually looks ahead in several respects to No. 9.  In any case, however it is numbered, the B minor “Unfinished” is a remarkable work, its second movement sounding much like a continuation of the argument of the first by other means – although at a remarkably similar tempo.  Herreweghe’s view of the first movement is a big one: he lets the music breathe and expand, then creates a somewhat stronger-than-usual contrast with the second movement that helps give it an individual character.  This is a thoughtful performance and a very well-played one, and the SACD sound allows every nuance of the orchestration to come through clearly.

      Marek Janowski’s Bruckner Third is also very well played (although the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande is not quite at the top level of European ensembles), and the SACD sound is ideal for Bruckner, allowing the greatest possible contrast between his silences, pauses and extremely soft sections, on the one hand, and his grand and intense climaxes, on the other.  This is nevertheless a (+++) recording, not because of performance quality but because it uses the 1889 Nowak edition of the score, which is not the most desirable to hear because the finale is so significantly truncated.  Like the Oehms SACDs, the ones from PentaTone make no attempt to fill the discs to anything near capacity: Herreweghe’s Schubert release runs just 57 minutes, Janowski’s Bruckner Third only 53.  But what matters in choosing a Bruckner Third to conduct is not the symphony’s overall length – at least not in the 21^st century, when audiences are accustomed to longer and thornier pieces than were listeners in the 19^th century.  What counts is picking a version that holds together effectively and on the scale that Bruckner himself, when not under pressure from well-meaning outsiders, seemed to want.  That argues strongly for the original 1873 version or the ones from 1877 or 1878.  For listeners not particularly familiar with Bruckner, though, the Janowski SACD will be more than adequate, being well paced, well played and very well recorded.  The very expansive treatment of the first movement is a highlight that, unfortunately, makes the short finale (not much more than half the length of the opening movement) seem like more of an afterthought.  SACD sound is so good that it can make the difference when choosing one of two equally fine recordings, but in the case of the Bruckner Third, a well-recorded CD using a better variant of the symphony remains preferable to an excellently recorded one using the 1889 version.

(++++) CATS, DOGS AND OTHERS

Cat Tale. By Michael Hall. Greenwillow/HarperCollins. $16.99.

Dogs and Cats. By Steve Jenkins. Sandpiper. $7.99.

Absolutely Lucy 5: Lucy’s Tricks and Treats. By Ilene Cooper. Random House. $4.99.

Magic Tree House #48: A Perfect Time for Pandas. By Mary Pope Osborne. Illustrated by Sal Murdocca. Random House. $12.99.

Magic Tree House Fact Tracker (#26): Pandas and Other Endangered Species. By Mary Pope Osborne and Natalie Pope Boyce. Illustrated by Sal Murdocca. Random House. $5.99.

Penny and Her Doll. By Kevin Henkes. Greenwillow/HarperCollins. $12.99.

      Animal books, fictional and factual, are a sure-fire way to reach out to young readers – but different types of them are attractive in very different ways.  Michael Hall’s Cat Tale is all about convoluted word play in the service of an amusing story, accompanied by digitally combined acrylic painted textures and paper cutouts that give the delightful illustrations a very unusual look.  The plot – or rather the concept – is set up on the title page: “From word to word/ they find their way,/ Lillian, Tilly, and William J.”  And they’re off!  The cats pack kitty chews, then choose a spot, then spot some ewes, then use a box…and so on.  These are not tongue-twisters in the style of Dr. Seuss’s Fox in Socks – they are connection games in which sound-alike words are used as transitions between scenes, again and again, always with amusing results.  The three cats “flee a steer” on one page and, to make their getaway, “steer a plane” on the next, then “plane a board” and then “board a train,” and so forth.  But Michael Hall is smart enough not to have this unbroken string of connectivity go on throughout the book.  In the funniest part of Cat Tale, he starts mixing the words up so they don’t quite connect.  The cats “shoo a truly naughty gnu,” but then “they knew a rock could squash a berry” doesn’t seem right (“No. No. No.” writes Hall), and other alternatives are even worse, as the cats try to use a squash to bury a rock, use their paws to rock a “squashberry,” and the absurdity mounts – “they’ve lost their way.”  But thanks to the words tale and tail, everything eventually connects again and the books ends just where it began, in delight.

      The real-world delights of both cats and dogs are the subject of Steve Jenkins’ very clever Dogs and Cats, whose torn-paper collage illustrations are distant cousins of those in Cat Tale.  The purpose here is quite different, though, and the cleverness is of a different sort.  This is an upside-down-turn-around book, called DOGS and Cats when held one way and Dogs and CATS when flipped around and read the other way – meeting in the middle with a picture of a dog and cat together on an oval rug.  The balancing act between dogs and cats is carried through in the snippets of factual information in the book: there are “Amazing Cat Facts” and “Amazing Dog Facts,” explanations of how long cats live and how long dogs live, two answers to the question of whether dogs or cats are smarter, and two sets of “I wonder” pages, answering questions ranging from whether cats can see in the dark to why dogs roll in manure.  To make sure readers keep the cat-dog connection in mind at all times, the dog pages contain small cat illustrations with comparative comments (“some of a cat’s senses are even sharper than a dog’s”) – and the cat pages have small dog illustrations with comments, too (“a dog ‘sees’ the world through its nose”).  The facts are easy to grasp and often fascinating, from information on what wild creatures our animal companions are related to, to pages labeled “What’s so special about a cat?” and “What’s so special about a dog?” that will help young cat lovers and young dog lovers alike learn some of the things that make their animal friends so interesting and attractive to have around the house.

      Back on the fictional side, the (+++) Absolutely Lucy series is an easy-to-read dog-focused sequence about a beagle puppy and her boy, Bobby.  The fifth book, Lucy’s Tricks and Treats, contains a mild mystery with a Halloween focus, involving a standoffish new boy at school named Jack and a series of things that seem to keep disappearing from the classroom – including, at one point, Lucy’s Halloween costume, which is supposed to be a “treat” for her.  As for the disappearances – are they seasonal “tricks” or something more sinister?  Ilene Cooper’s book is far too good-natured for there to be anything the slightest bit dark or troubling going on, and Lucy herself manages to do some detective work that makes everything come out just fine at the end – complete with an explanation of why Jack (who of course is really a nice guy) had seemed, for a time, to be unfriendly.  Dog-loving kids ages 6-9 will enjoy the warmth of this story and the straightforward way its events unfold.

      Things are always more convoluted in Mary Pope Osborne’s Magic Tree House books for ages 7-12, and the 48^th in the long-running series is no exception.  No house pets here – A Perfect Time for Pandas, which gets a (+++) rating, uses the usual silly setup: Jack and Annie are looking for a certain food, described in a mysterious poem, to save Penny, Merlin’s penguin.  This becomes an excuse to have the siblings travel to a panda reserve in southeast China.  Expecting things to go fairly easily for a change, they are soon disabused of that notion when they find themselves in the middle of an earthquake.  Nothing inherently special there – Jack and Annie made it through the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 in another book – but the quake leaves the siblings unable to get back to the reserve until they make use of a magic potion, after which they do get back and can help in a panda rescue and, not coincidentally, figure out what food they need to bring back to Camelot (it has, of course, something to do with pandas), allowing them to complete this particular quest by saving Penny at last.  The book ends with Jack and Annie talking about how pandas are only one of the many deserving endangered species worldwide (“there are millions of things to protect,” says Annie).  And that provides a jumping-off point for the factual accompaniment to this fictional adventure: Pandas and Other Endangered Species, called a Fact Tracker (these used to be called research guides).  Here Mary Pope Osborne and her sister, Natalie Pope Boyce, offer basic information on a variety of endangered species, from hooded seals to giant salamanders to Asian elephants.  There are photos of naturalists and scientists interacting with endangered animals, drawings of snow leopards and sea otters, information on the value of unattractive-to-humans animals such as the California condor, a list of Internet resources, even a short discussion of the film King Kong and the way it made people think gorillas are fierce.  The (+++) book is not particularly informative in itself, but readers who get interested in pandas because of Jack and Annie’s fictional adventure may find this factual companion a good bridge between the unreal Magic Tree House world and other, more-thorough studies of animals facing possible extinction.

      One animal that is certainly not endangered is the mouse – it is doing quite well both in real life and in children’s books.  Penny, in Kevin Henkes’ Penny and Her Doll, is a typical example of a cute fictional mouse.  In this (+++) followup to Penny and Her Song, the little mouse gets a new doll as a gift from her grandmother, and immediately falls in love with her and takes her everywhere.  Penny is a gray mouse; the doll is a white one in a pink outfit, with a pink bow between her ears.  But what name should Penny give to her wonderful new doll?  That is the plot, such as it is, of the book.  Penny worries that she will not come up with a suitable name, her parents assure her that she will, and then she does, and everyone is happy.  There is not much to this book and not supposed to be: it is a short, sweet, easy-to-read story for little girls who may not be mice, like Penny, but who most likely have special dolls that they love just as much as Penny loves hers.

(++++) GOOD SPORTS AND BAD

A Passion for Victory: The Story of the Olympics in Ancient and Early Modern Times. By Benson Bobrick. Knopf. $19.99.

The Last Boys Picked: Helping Boys Who Don’t Play Sports Survive Bullies and Boyhood. By Janet Sasson Edgette, Psy.D., with Beth Margolis Rupp, M.A. Berkley. $15.

      The adulation, even adoration, of sports figures often seems to know no bounds.  They are paid tremendous sums of money to entertain and amaze spectators with their athletic prowess, and they are showcased worldwide as representing the absolute best that their countries have to offer the world.  This is nowhere truer than in the Olympics, in which nations spend billions of dollars to give athletes brand-new venues in which to perform, with dramatic opening and closing ceremonies and weeks of confusion and interruption of everyday life for nonparticipants.  Declining to be overwhelmed by the Olympics seems faintly unsavory and, for people in the host country, even unpatriotic.  The modern Olympics are extraordinarily commercial productions, with companies bidding huge amounts of money to be named official suppliers of everything from foods to condoms and with host countries avidly policing Olympic areas to be sure that only the much-hyped “official” products are used, with others excluded altogether from the Olympic Village.

      It was not always so.  For many years, the Olympics really did celebrate athleticism, and to the extent that there were non-athletic matters involved, those were military rather than commercial.  The original Olympics, as Benson Bobrick explains in A Passion for Victory, began in 776 B.C.E. and lasted until the Roman Emperor Theodosius I abolished them in 394 C.E.  Extremely violent in their earliest years – an event called the pankration was a no-holds-barred fight that ended with one opponent unconscious or dead – the Olympics originally were individual competitions, not team or national ones, and participants either won or lost; there were no awards for second or third place.  During Roman times, the politically ascendant Christians hated the Olympics, not because of the violence but because the games were deeply intertwined with worship of pagan gods; this is why the games were eventually banned.  As Bobrick points out, the memory of the Olympics endured through the Dark Ages of Christian domination – the Byzantine Empire even tried to revive them.  But it was not until 1896 that the first modern Olympic Games were held, with many events differing from the ancient ones and some with similar concepts being handled differently.  Bobrick’s explanation of these early modern Olympics, accompanied by fascinating period photos, is a high point of his book, which goes on to discuss the first female Olympic champion (Charlotte Cooper, 1900), the first black South Africans to compete (1904), and many other notable “firsts.”  Bobrick carries the story of the Olympics only as far as the notorious 1936 games, held in Berlin under the aegis of Adolf Hitler.  He includes many fascinating bits of information, such as the fact that those Olympics were opened with “an Olympic hymn, reluctantly written by the German composer Richard Strauss (who hated sports),” and that while Hitler acknowledged the triumph of black superstar Jesse Owens, President Franklin D. Roosevelt did not.  Bobrick’s book stops well before the Olympics became the multinational commercial extravaganza that they are today, but it shows the many and varied religious, political and other decidedly non-athletic influences that shaped the Olympics both in ancient times and in their modern reincarnation.

      And what about people who aren’t interested in the Olympics or in sports in general?  Marginalized during Olympic festivities, they face an even worse fate if it is clear from early in life that they are simply not athletic.  Bullied, outcast, leaned on by their own families as well as school officials and classmates, these non-athletes face condemnation and ostracism at every level, often with nowhere to turn but further inward.  The Last Boys Picked is about them.  Parenting and mental-health specialists Janet Sasson Edgette and Beth Margolis Rupp explain about the United States, in particular, being “a nation of extroverts living in a culture steeped in overstimulation,” which makes life extremely difficult for boys who are introverted and, by nature, not “team players.”  Pressure to “function outside their comfort zone only makes introverts anxious and uncomfortable,” the authors write.  “And shouldn’t it?  If they were ever to have thrived as extroverts, they would have done so long ago.”  Introverts are motivated not by accomplishing goals – the foundation of all sports competition – but by being appreciated for who and what they are.  And this is exactly what society denies them by trying to push them into sports.  The “relationship between sports status and power” in schools is deep-seated and extensive, Edgette and Rupp write, and certainly readers familiar with the horrendous Penn State child-abuse case (which revolved around the university’s famous, previously sacrosanct football program) will scarcely be surprised.  Edgette and Rupp are parents of six boys between them, and have seen in their own families the deleterious effects of a sports focus on boys who do not have the talent, ability or interest in competitive games.  They urge parents to be aware of the extent to which non-athletes will “fake it” by finding ways to get along in school, barely.  “Parents tend not to scratch a surface that looks good enough,” they write, and that can lead to being blindsided when serious problems seem to emerge suddenly.  They offer a number of suggestions for parental observation and conversation, getting into specific circumstances such as boys who withdraw from activities, ones who clown around to conceal their true feelings, ones who “overcompensate by showing off how smart they are,” and others.  Their chapter on “The Dangers of Romanticized Masculinity” is particularly valuable, although the one they call “We Need a Different Type of Warrior” is on the naïve side.  Although flawed, The Last Boys Picked is a very valuable resource for parents of boys who are simply not interested in sports.  The “Family Matters” chapter, packed with possible scenarios and suggestions for ways to handle them, will be a wake-up call for parents willing to listen.  How willing will they be, in a sports-obsessed society that tends to equate athletics with “manliness” and consider it “right” for all boys?  Unfortunately, that is a question that neither Edgette and Rupp, nor anyone else, can answer definitively.

(+++) ADVENTURES OUT AND ABOUT

Racing the Moon. By Alan Armstrong. Illustrated by Tim Jessell. Random House. $16.99.

Laugh with the Moon. By Shana Burg. Delacorte Press. $16.99.

The Ghost of Graylock. By Dan Poblocki. Scholastic. $16.99.

      These books for preteens and young teenagers take adventure in a variety of directions.  Alan Armstrong’s Racing the Moon takes it into history, and then pretty much all over the place.  Set in 1947 and ostensibly the story of 11-year-old Alexis (Alex) Hart, the book focuses more on her older brother, Chuck, and on the budding U.S. space program right after World War II.  The tides of history run deeper than the late 1940s: the young protagonists befriend an Army scientist named Captain Ebbs who tells them that she is descended from Captain John Smith of Pocahontas fame.  The three – Alex, Chuck and Captain Ebbs – meet Wernher von Braun, the Nazi scientist who created the deadly V2 rocket for Hitler’s regime, then defected and became instrumental in the early United States space race.  So there are multiple threads here: postwar space-program issues (Captain Ebbs, an interesting character who is not very well treated by Chuck, is working to develop food for future astronauts), the history of Captain John Smith, the background of Wernher von Braun (touched upon rather lightly), and through it all, the adventures of Alex and Chuck.  This is a lot to pack into a book, and it does not all fit together seamlessly.  The book’s climax is a top-secret rocket launch, under von Braun’s auspices, which Chuck and Alex get to witness after rather preposterously breaking into a military installation.  Everything ends well, especially for Chuck, with the far-fetched nature of the whole book perhaps being more palatable to young readers because the events in it happened such a long, long time ago, by their standards.

      The moon is quite different – well, it’s the same moon, but in a very different context – in Shana Burg’s Laugh with the Moon.  Here the adventure takes readers to Africa.  This is a coming-of-age tale about 13-year-old Clare Silver, whose mother has recently died and whose father has spirited her away to Malawi for six months – not so she can heal but so he can do healing: he is a doctor who has worked in Malawi before.  Clare is determined to give her father the silent treatment for the entire six months, and is dismayed by pretty much everything, from learning a new language at Mzanga Full Primary School to being surrounded by insects and roosters.  What is going to happen here is obvious: Clare will find out that others have lost even more than she has; she will come to appreciate the culture of a land very different from hers; she will be reconciled with her father; she will have startling, sometimes slightly amusing encounters with African wildlife; and she will have done more than six months of growing up by the end of the trip.  Burg hits all those plot points, and because she has actually been to Malawi, she hits them in a context that she portrays well and with obvious sympathy and concern.  Clare is an attractive character if not a very individuated one: she is loving and in pain, intelligent but stubborn, artistic and proud.  She learns just how much she has to offer others, and how much more there is to life than what she has gone through already.  These are very common lessons in books for this age level, but if there is little significant freshness to the plot here, there is a good deal that is unusual in the locale – making the book more interesting than many others that proceed along similar lines.

      The setting is an ordinary American town called Hedston in The Ghost of Graylock, but what is intended to be exotic in Dan Poblocki’s ghost story is the setting within that setting.  Brother and sister Neil and Bree Cady, staying with their aunts for the summer, soon learn about the shuttered psychiatric hospital called Graylock (a typically ominous fictional name that real-world hospital administrators would avoid like the plague).  Intended as a place of healing, Graylock somehow “went bad,” according to townspeople, and several young patients died under mysterious circumstances.  Now the place is closed and abandoned, and said to be haunted by the ghost of a murderous nurse.  So of course it simply must be explored – by Neil, Bree and their new friends, Wesley and Eric.  All the usual trappings of a ghost story are here: ominous dreams, unexpected camera images, mistaken identity, scary appearance of bits of the lake weed in which the drowned children were found long ago, discovery of unexpected relationships, and so forth.  Many of the scenes are 100% typical for this sort of book: “There was a flash of light, a crash of thunder, and the room went suddenly dark.  They both screamed, then moved so quickly toward each other on the couch that they nearly bumped heads.”  Slick steps, damp stone walls, a scary basement – all the typical elements of ghostly tales are here in profusion.  And of course there really is a ghost, although not the one the townspeople have led Neil and Bree to expect.  But there is also a very-much-alive bad guy, and it is only after the siblings have dealt with both that they can at last relax and Neil can finally sleep peacefully.  The Ghost of Graylock is not particularly original, but Poblocki paces it well, with enough shivery anticipation to keep young ghost-story lovers involved and worried about what will happen next.  And he does pull together all the elements of the narrative at the end for a satisfying conclusion.  This is not a very distinctive book, but it is a solid genre entry that will satisfy readers looking for a modest portion of thrills and chills.

(++) TRYING TOO HARD

The Shape of the Final Dog. By Hampton Fancher. Blue Rider Press. $25.95.

      There is a time-honored tradition of starting stories in the middle of things.  Hampton Fancher’s first short-story collection starts things in the middle, ends them somewhere else in the middle, and spends most of the middle of things in the middle.  It is a muddle of middles – middlingly well written but not, all in all, conclusive on any level.

      Fancher, the original screenwriter of the film Blade Runner 30 years ago, has one story here with a touch of Blade Runner sensibility: the title piece, offered last in the book.  It is one of the most effective stories here, with some sense of character and some interestingly twisty events.  But a reader who goes through the book from start to finish must wade through a lot of lesser material to get to the good stuff.

      There is, for example, Rat Hall Jack, which is about a man living in a falling-down house where there are snakes in the walls; Jack’s relationship with a woman named Stewart includes lines such as, “He lips her lips above and below” and “Jack doesn’t like the likely, the probable; only the impossible could be perfect.”  Eventually, not much happens.

      A fair amount does happen in the paired-but-separated stories, The Black Weasel and The Black Weasel, II, which involve a failed New York City bartender returning to his home in the Deep South, accompanied by a mute black man whom he has seen repeatedly and with whom he has connected by chance – and who has an unexplainable amount of cash, no shoes, and no concerns about being turned into a “Wild Man” (using tar and cast-off hair) for a tumbledown carnival, but who may be (or may have been) more than he seems to be.  The working-out of all this is about as incoherent as it sounds: Fancher seems to equate post-modernist sensibility with an unwillingness to make definitive statements about pretty much anything.

      The descriptions of the stories make them sound more interesting than they are.  Teeth is a short-short about a Spanish woman whose stomach had vestigial teeth in it – a congenital condition – and about a man who thinks she is Arab.  Nothing happens.  Cargot is about a failed actor reincarnated as a garden snail, predictably naming himself “S. Cargot,” and apparently telling the story after he has died a second time.  Concorde is about a man trying, and failing, to pick up a girl, and having a series of uninteresting thoughts about ways to do so.  The intriguingly titled The Climacteric of Zackary Ray (Fancher is better at titles than stories), another sort-of-about-an-actor tale, includes a couple of sentences that stand for pretty much this entire collection’s would-be-absurdist attitude: “A jug of apple juice he never drank triggered a trip he had no reason to take and he winds up with a turtle.  Anything could happen, things added up.”  But for all Fancher’s wordplay and his hints that things could add up, they rarely do add up.  All the confusion of narrative tenses, connection of unrelated images and series of happenings that add up to not much come across as self-indulgent, self-important stylistic tics that draw attention to themselves but do not, in the final analysis, add up to compelling narratives, interesting characters, or stories that seem to have much to say beyond “look how clever I am.”

(++++) RECONSIDERATIONS

Kabalevsky: Piano Concertos Nos. 1-4; Fantasy in F Minor after Schubert D940; Rhapsody on the Theme of the Song “School Years.” Michael Korstick, piano; NDR Radiophilharmonie Hanover conducted by Alun Francis. CPO. $33.99 (2 CDs).

Wolf-Ferrari: Concertinos for Oboe, Cor Anglais and Bassoon. Andrea Tenaglia, oboe; William Moriconi, cor anglais; Giuseppe Ciabocchi, bassoon; Orchestra Sinfonica di Roma conducted by Francesco La Vecchia. Naxos. $9.99.

Bizet: Orchestral Music—complete. Orquestra Filarmonica de México and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Enrique Bátiz. Brilliant Classics. $16.99 (3 CDs).

      These recordings offer fascinating chances to reappraise composers who, for political or musical reasons, are not usually seen in the lights highlighted here.  The political reasons apply to Dmitri Kabalevsky, the politically adept Soviet-era composer who managed to make peace with the vicious and stifling bureaucracy of Stalin’s dictatorship and to thrive in a system that caused tremendous hardship to Shostakovich, Prokofiev and many others – and brought death to some.  Kabalevsky cooperated fully with the “Socialist Realism” school of musical thought, in which works had to be readily accessible to all and supportive of Soviet ideals; he also headed or worked within various committees of apparatchiks that set policy and doled out punishments to the best writers, composers and other artists of the time.  For all these reasons, Kabalevsky’s own music has long been dismissed out of hand as propagandistic and superficial – including by many people who have never heard it.  This makes about as much sense as dismissing Wagner and Bruckner because the Nazis revered them; in fact, some people do just that.  But Kabalevsky’s ostracism hits somewhat closer to home, since his was not a towering genius and it is therefore fairly simple to relegate him to the realm of the second-rate Communist Party hack.  The truth, though, as shown in CPO’s excellent survey of his works for piano and orchestra, is far more nuanced and complicated.  Certainly Kabalevsky’s music is approachable, at times even naïve, in ways that make it less thorny and intense than the works of other Soviet-era composers; but these piano-and-orchestra works are scarcely without merit, and if simply heard on their own, stripped of historical and political associations – something that is easier to do 20-plus years after the disintegration of the Soviet Union – the pieces show excellent craftsmanship and a sturdy and altogether pleasant sensibility.  They are not great works, perhaps not even near-great, but they have much to recommend them and would, if programmed more often in concert, provide a pleasant alternative to the now-overplayed piano concertos of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff and others.

     Kabalevsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, his longest, is a large-scale Romantic-style work that very clearly recalls Rimsky-Korsakov, Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev – in fact, Prokofiev’s Concerto No. 3 is the model for Kabalevsky’s middle, theme-and-variations movement, and Prokofiev’s Concerto No. 2 is something of a blueprint for Kabalevsky’s finale.  But the piano writing – Kabalevsky was a fine pianist – is attractively virtuosic, and if the overall effect of this work, which was first heard in 1931 with the composer at the piano, is of a throwback, it is a very well-made look in a rear-view mirror, filled with felicitous touches and fine piano writing.  Concerto No. 2, finished in 1935 and first played in 1936, continues to echo Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev, but less strongly.  It has an especially complex and intriguingly constructed slow movement, which echoes both Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich but places Kabalevsky’s personal stamp on the material to which he refers.  Concerto No. 3, written in 1952 for young performers and dedicated “To Soviet Youth,” features memorable tunes, a finale with folklike elements, and considerable charm.  Concerto No. 4, composed in 1977-78 and first played in 1979, is also a “youth concerto,” but a very compressed one, its three movements lasting less than 13 minutes and featuring strong contrasts between lyricism and rather raucous dancelike tunes.  The Rhapsody on the Theme of the Song “School Years” shows Kabalevsky at his most Soviet: written in 1964, it provides well-crafted variations on a propaganda song that Kabalevsky had written in 1957 and that was very well-known in its time.  Despite the genesis of the tune, the variations are very well-crafted, including a siciliano, march, waltz and, near the end, some distinctively jazzy passages.  Also played here, in its world première recording, is a genuine oddity that shows both Kabalevsky’s compositional skill and the reason he was renowned for pedagogy.  The Fantasy in F Minor after Schubert D940 is largely a transcription, but where Kabalevsky chooses to change Schubert’s work, he does so to make it brighter, more optimistic and much less fragile: the Scherzo, for instance, is sturdy rather than, as in Schubert, subtle.  In this 1961 work, Kabalevsky makes some tempo changes and many alterations of emphasis, but – interestingly – leaves the resigned-sounding ending alone, although its pessimism is now at odds with what has come before rather than springing from it.  The erroneous timings in the CD booklet make it seem that Kabalevsky somehow lengthened the piece tremendously, to nearly 25 minutes; but in fact it runs fewer than 18 – the timings given for all three movements are, for some reason, way off.  Not especially notable on its own, this “rethinking” will be fascinating to anyone who knows Schubert’s original and wants to hear how Kabalevsky filtered it through Soviet sensibility of the mid-20^th century.

     Reconsiderations of Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari and Georges Bizet involve musical forms rather than political issues.  Both composers are known for their operas – Wolf-Ferrari mainly for his notorious The Jewels of the Madonna and lighthearted The Secret of Susanna, Bizet of course for Carmen but also for Les Pécheurs de perles and La jolie fille de Perth.  Both composers wrote a number of operas that are rarely if ever heard: Wolf-Ferrari completed 13 in all, Bizet nine.  Neither composer is thought of as frequently working in purely instrumental forms.  But late in life, Wolf-Ferrari became focused on instrumental music and composed some very worthy pieces, including three wind concertinos.  All get very fine performances on a new Naxos CD; and all have a similar enough sound so that the Wolf-Ferrari style comes through clearly.  The oboe concertino, called Idillio, is in fact idyllic.  It is essentially a three-movement pastoral work, setting the soloist against an ensemble of strings and two horns; in fact, its brief Scherzo is reminiscent of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.  Even the slow movement is more dreamy than profound, somewhat melancholic but never depressive, and whatever clouds it brings are dispelled in the bright and lively finale. The work dates to 1932; a year later came what Wolf-Ferrari called a Suite-concertino for bassoon and the same small orchestra, once again offering a dreamlike and lyrical scenario throughout, withholding the comic and playful sound usually associated with the bassoon until the finale rondo.  And then in 1947, the year before his death, Wolf-Ferrari wrote a third concertino, this time featuring the cor anglais.  This work has some intriguing structural elements – for example, there is little dialogue between soloist and orchestra in the first movement but a great deal of it in the second, and Wolf-Ferrari’s operatic verismo roots show through in the third, which is marked Canzone.  Somewhat more intense than the other concertinos, the one for cor anglais nevertheless ends in a similarly upbeat way with a humorous rondo – although this one does have some dramatic elements as well.  The three pieces, taken together in this very well-played recording, show a side of Wolf-Ferrari that will expand the musical horizons of listeners who know him only through opera.

      Bizet’s non-operatic music, unlike Wolf-Ferrari’s, is mainly tied into his dramatic works.  Bizet did write two symphonies, the youthful and ever-fresh Symphony in C and a later, rather more ponderous and foursquare one called Roma.  Hearing the contrast between the two as played by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Enrique Bátiz is an interesting experience: here is a situation in which Bizet’s later work did not improve on his earlier one – the opposite of the case with Carmen, which was his final opera and which stands far above his others.  The rest of Bizet’s orchestral music is offered by Brilliant Classics in performances by Bátiz with Orquestra Filarmonica de México.  There are only two Bizet orchestral works, other than the symphonies, that are not tied to the stage: the charming Jeux d’enfants, five short movements that the composer orchestrated from a 12-piece piano suite, and the tub-thumping Patrie Overture, written only a year before Carmen but without any of the opera’s subtlety.  Of the remaining Bizet orchestral works, the two well-known L’Arlésienne suites are taken from music for a play; the two even-better-known Carmen suites are of course from the opera; and then there are the prelude to Les Pécheurs de perles and a suite from La jolie fille de Perth.  That is all – music of variable quality and varying levels of interest, not all of it compiled by Bizet (the second L’Arlésienne suite was put together by the composer’s friend, Ernest Guiraud, after Bizet’s death).  Most of the music is tuneful, and even in the less-successful works, such as Roma, there are attractive elements.  But this collection makes it clear that even if Wolf-Ferrari’s skills and interests went beyond opera, Bizet’s basically did not: however you consider or reconsider him, he was, like his contemporary Offenbach, a stage composer above all.

(+++) MIDDLE OF THE MUSICAL ROAD

Schumann: Symphonies Nos. 1 and 2. Seattle Symphony conducted by Gerard Schwarz. Naxos. $9.99.

Schumann: Symphonies Nos. 3 and 4. Seattle Symphony conducted by Gerard Schwarz. Naxos. $9.99.

                                                                  

Schumann: Piano Concerto; Manfred Overture; Overture, Scherzo and Finale. Bella Davidovich, piano; Seattle Symphony conducted by Gerard Schwarz. Naxos. $9.99.

      Some conductors are particularly distinguished for their commitment to less-often-heard music, such as 20^th- and 21^st-century works, but seem somewhat out of their element in more-traditional repertoire.  Marin Alsop is one who comes immediately to mind; a great deal of the time, Gerard Schwarz is another.  The three Naxos re-releases of Schumann performances that originally appeared on the Delos label show Schwarz managing his Seattle Symphony well but not bringing any particular interpretative fire or originality to the works themselves.

      In Schumann’s Symphony No. 1 (“Spring”), recorded in 1988, the first movement features some attractive instrumental details but imprecise handling of tempo: Schwarz speeds things up from time to time for no good reason.  The second movement, taken rather slowly, showcases strong strings.  In the third, Schwarz has the players lean into the music with a strong legato line that makes this into a more-serious and rather downbeat scherzo rather than a bright one.  And the tempo of the finale, like that of the first movement, is slippery.  In Symphony No. 2, a 1989 performance, the first movement is nicely paced and builds well, but the tempo bobbles a bit in the scherzo, and the lovely third movement comes across as pleasant but scarcely profound.  The finale is simply ordinary, well played but undistinguished.  The final chord, which sounds rather half-hearted and is certainly not emphatic, seems to represent the interpretation as a whole.

     Symphony No. 3 (“Rhenish”) was recorded in 1990.  The first movement starts very well indeed, but it seems to run out of steam about one-quarter of the way in, almost going into stasis.  And the brass performance is odd: the horns are excellent, but the trumpets are dull-sounding by comparison.  The horns are good again in the second movement, but the music plods, slowing again and again, repeatedly losing rhythmic vitality.  The third and fourth movements have pleasant ebb and flow but are nothing special, and the finale has a pronounced legato feel even in places where it should have greater bounce.  There is also a strange, four-minute timing error here: the finale is four minutes shorter than the CD indicates, and the total CD time is also overstated by the same four minutes – an odd error.  Schwarz’s best performance in the symphonies is of No. 4, recorded in 1992.  The first movement builds particularly well, although the strong chords are rather mild and muted, and the second and third movements, while scarcely revelatory and tending to drift at times, move ahead nicely.  The finale has a particularly bright start, and the horns, here as elsewhere, are a big plus.  As a whole, this is a middle-of-the-road Schumann symphony cycle that takes no big chances and offers no major revelations.  It is perfectly adequate but scarcely inspired or inspiring.

      The 1990 recording of the Piano Concerto with Bella Davidovich is a broad one – rather too broad – with a fine pianist whose brightness seems sometimes at odds with Schwarz’s more desultory approach.  The first movement starts too slowly, but soon speeds up; as a whole, it meanders, never catching interpretative fire.  The second movement is effectively gentle, with lovely work by the winds.  The third movement also flows gently, but here that approach is less appropriate: there is little dramatic or exciting here, and the overall effect is of a work that meanders rather than building.  The Manfred Overture, recorded in 1991, although well played, is also lacking in intensity – it tends to flag from a dramatic standpoint.  The Overture, Scherzo and Finale, from 1989, opens with an earnest movement whose coda is particularly good, but then lapses into a moderately paced middle movement that sounds flabby.  The finale starts well but, as in several other instances on these CDs, Schwarz soon slows down, then picks up the pace again, leading to an overall feeling of disconnectedness.  As a whole, these three Schumann discs are unexceptional and unexceptionable: their flaws are minor and frequent rather than major and occasional, but their overall effect is of prosaic run-throughs of the music rather than strong, committed and caring performances.

(++++) CELEBRATIONS

The Man from the Land of Fandango. By Margaret Mahy. Illustrated by Polly Dunbar. Clarion. $16.99.

Rocket Writes a Story. By Tad Hills. Schwartz & Wade. $17.99.

      Round-faced, round-bellied, big-headed and permeated with unending silliness, the Man from the Land of Fandango “is given to dancing and dreams,” and “juggles with jelly and jam in a jar,” and “dances on ceilings and walls,” and is in every way a delightful series of non sequiturs and amusements.  Margaret Mahy’s The Man from the Land of Fandango is pure entertainment – its whole reason for being is to celebrate how joyous it can be to be a child in the 4-8 age range, experiencing life and all things wonderful and ridiculous and magnificent and utterly without meaning except for a sort of delicious bounciness.  Polly Dunbar’s illustrations capture the text perfectly and enhance it tremendously, making The Man from the Land of Fandango into a combination circus-zoo-carnival slice of absurdity.  The little boy and girl who make a poster that magically springs to life find the man appearing as a bird, bell and beach ball, dancing with a bear and a bison, and introducing the kids to a land where “baboons on bassoons make a musical sound.”  The images are completely ridiculous and so laced with charm – the characters’ smiles are just precious – that adults will be as eager to visit the Land of Fandango as will their kids, journeying to a place where kangaroos hop happily “and the dinosaurs join in the din.”  The book makes not one iota of sense, and is not intended to: it is simply a frolicsome journey through the ebullient wonderfulness of life, and is a superb introduction to the “friendly fandandical way,” which families will not only enjoy again and again but also, hopefully, try to bring into their everyday, real-world lives.  Even a touch of the fandandical will brighten the gloomiest day.

      Things are pretty bright and upbeat in Rocket Writes a Story, too, but Tad Hills’ followup to How Rocket Learned to Read has a more serious purpose.  This is a celebration of books, showing Rocket and his teacher, the little yellow bird, enjoying reading together, with Rocket deciding that a new book smells “like a place he’d never been to, like a friend he’d never met.”  That is a lovely image, and it begins a thoroughly wonderful “word search” in which Rocket and the bird find all sorts of interesting words, writing them down, drawing pictures of some of them (nest, worm, cloud) but not of others (down, over, of).  Puppy and bird cover a whole tree with their words, and then Rocket decides to use the words to write a story – but cannot think of what to write about.  “One of the hardest parts of writing is coming up with a good story,” the bird tells him, suggesting that Rocket write about something that happened to him, or something he really likes, or something exciting.  And Rocket roams around, looking at things and sniffing things and thinking, and finally decides what to write about: an owl who lives in a fresh-smelling pine tree.  Rocket, it turns out, is quite a creative type, wagging his tail while writing, growling when he can’t decide what to write, occasionally drawing pictures, sometimes taking “a walk in the meadow to look for inspiration” – doing, in fact, just the sorts of things that human writers (perhaps including Hills himself) do, although considerably more cutely.  Rocket keeps reading bits of his evolving story to the owl, and the owl, initially reluctant to come down from his nest high in the tree, slowly gets more and more interested and moves closer to the ground, branch by branch, eventually ending up right next to Rocket, listening to the story, enjoying it thoroughly and even collaborating on the ending.  Rocket Writes a Story is a charming fable in which the realities of writing mix beautifully with musings on the power of words and storytelling, all in a context simple enough for kids ages 4-8 to understand, enjoy and – wouldn’t this be wonderful? – use as the basis for writing stories of their own.

(+++) THE EXCITEMENT CONTINUES

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 15^th 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.

(+++) WELCOME ABOARD

A Boy and a Bear in a Boat. By Dave Shelton. David Fickling Books. $16.99.

Summer at Forsaken Lake. By Michael D. Bell. Knopf. $16.99.

Heart of Stone: A Verity Gallant Tale. By M.L. Welsh. David Fickling Books. $16.99.

      Avast and ahoy – there’s adventure beckoning from the waves!  The type of adventure varies – just choose one.  A Boy and a Bear in a Boat is an offbeat, entertaining little fairy tale of the title characters’ journey aboard the Harriet, a rowboat that encounters some mighty strange circumstances.  There is no particular explanation of what the bear is doing there; the boy simply shows up and asks the bear to row him “just over to the other side,” and the bear agrees.  But then, as the boy sleeps, the Harriet encounters “unforeseeable anomalies.”  So this trip, to wherever it may be, is clearly going to take a while.  The boy and the bear eat some food – the bear is partial to a sandwich of anchovy, banana and custard – and the journey resumes.  The boy and bear play word games, and the boy finds a comic written in an indecipherable language (Dave Shelton provides two pages of it for readers to see), and the bear plays the ukulele, and the boy, who has been sure that the bear knows what he is doing, begins to have his doubts as the journey goes on and on.  The boy and bear look at a map, which is entirely blue, and the bear points to where they are (which is in the middle of nowhere), and the boy sends a message in a bottle, and event piles on event in a charmingly offbeat and rather peculiar way.  "A lot of time passed very slowly,” Shelton writes at one point, referring to time spent fishing although it could just as easily be said of the journey itself.  The boy and bear make not much progress, or not noticeable progress anyway, but this book is all about the little things they deal with aboard their boat – well, and some big things, too, such as the 19-eyed sea monster the bear hooks at one point, which is eventually defeated when it eats The Very Last Sandwich that the boy and bear have been avoiding because it has been getting stranger and stranger.  The book is strange, too, filled with word play, as when the boy complains about the bear nearly getting them killed and the bear responds, “There’s nothing wrong with nearly getting killed. Actually getting killed: now that would be annoying. But nearly getting killed is fine.”  Eventually the boy and bear get there, or somewhere, and then somewhere else, and by the end of the book it is obvious – if it has not been all along – that this story is all about the journey, not the destination.  With fascinating illustrations and an unusual underlying philosophical tone, A Boy and a Bear in a Boat will be too offbeat for many young readers, but those seeking something beyond the straightforward will find it here.

      Summer at Forsaken Lake is a much more ordinary narrative – a tale of a family summer in Ohio and the sailing that 12-year-old Nicholas does aboard his uncle’s boat, the Goblin.  Nicholas and his 10-year-old twin sisters, Hayley and Hetty, their Uncle Nick, and their uncle’s dog, Pistol, are nicely developed characters, if not particularly deep ones.  Nicholas befriends a girl named Charlie; later, he and his sisters find a hidden compartment in the tower room where Nicholas sleeps – and in the compartment are an old reel of film, a notebook labeled “The Seaweed Strangler” and a love letter written to their father long ago by someone named Franny.  A summer mystery!  Just what the kids need!  And so, in addition to sailing, swimming, bike riding, baseball, camping out, seeing shooting stars, and just generally enjoying the warm and lazy days, Nicholas learns bits about life.  For example, Charlie discusses her family situation, saying that her father is “The Ostrich King of Trumbull County, Ohio.  He got remarried last year to this woman named Linda.  She’s all right, I guess – she has two kids.  My dad is…well, the way Mom puts it, he’s kind of a dreamer. …[B]ut calling him a dreamer is sugarcoating the truth.  He’s always looking for some crazy way to get rich without really having to work.”  The solution of the decades-old mystery turns out to exonerate Nicholas’ father of an accusation – or maybe not; things are a touch complicated – and everyone reveals some long-buried secrets about the family that turn out, once revealed, not to be such big deals after all.  In fact, nothing in Summer at Forsaken Lake is much of a big deal except for the boats – the Goblin and others that appear and disappear in the course of the book – and the overall feeling of warmth pervading the rather slight story from start to finish.

      Heart of Stone is a meatier book, but in a different genre.  A followup to M.L. Welsh’s first book, Mistress of the Storm, it is again about the harbor town of Wellow and the four Keepers of the Elements – witch sisters who control earth, fire, water and wind.  Peculiar white sand comes to Wellow and starts causing odd shifts in the land, as if the town is somehow slipping away, and Verity Gallant takes it upon herself to figure out, with some help from her friends, what is happening to the town and why.  Using clues from ancient books, Verity uncovers a plan by the Earth Witch to eliminate all the world’s happiness, in revenge for being robbed of her true love long ago.  The concept is rather silly, although not much more so than the plots of other supernaturally oriented novels for young readers, and the ships here – the Storm, the Poor Honesty – have names designed to resonate within the plot, as do many of the characters, from Verity herself to Abednego, Daniel Twogood and others.  Welsh tries to keep everything atmospheric, but tends to be rather obvious about it: “The day was as bleak as their mood.  A sunless sky hung over them.”  “Above the cliffs and climbing houses, the velvet sky seemed to have grown larger: it looked in danger of swallowing the world.”  And of course, at the book’s climax, the dialogue is just what would be expected: “How dare you speak to me in such a way.” “All shall know our pain.”  “It is time to deal with you.”  Eventually the evil that led to the Earth Witch’s determination is discovered and unmasked, and the witch reverses her pledge to “destroy all the happy stories,” allowing this one to end positively, if unsurprisingly.  Better as a companion to Welsh’s earlier volume than as a standalone novel, Heart of Stone will primarily be of interest to readers who enjoyed meeting Verity in Mistress of the Storm and want to join her on a further, closely related adventure.