SMALL PRINT: DEIRDRE BAKER
THE NEST Kenneth Oppel, illustrated by Jon Klassen (Harper Collins, 245 pages, $19.99, ages 10 and up)
Sibling jealousy? Obsessive compulsive disorder? Congenital heart defect? Find this and more in Oppel’s short suspense/horror novel, the creepy, chews-its-way-into-your-head tale of Steve, who is visited by an angel in his dreams. Or is it a wasp? That’s what Steve wonders about the creature who appears to him, promising to “fix” the “unfortunate mistakes” that plague his baby brother, and along with that, Steve’s own nervous problems. As he struggles with doubt and fear, a sinister hive threatens to take over baby, Steve and family. Oppel’s bland prose suits the nightmarish rationality of the queen wasp, whose calm, plausible reasoning intensifies suspense and horror. A waspish take on a theme treated in David Almond’s award-winning Skellig.
THE MARVELS Brian Selznick (Scholastic, 667 pages, $36.99, ages 10 and up)
Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret turned ideas of graphic novels, illustration and text upside down; in The Marvels he again surprises us, blending picture and text in a mind- and imagination-bending story of strangeness and, even more bizarrely, real life. The first half of the tale is told in pictures — a picture a page, relating the history of a London theatre family, the Marvels. But the Marvel story ends in 1900, a conflagration consuming its last descendant. So what does it have to do with the story in the words that follow? Joseph arrives at his uncle Albert’s house on a snowy night in London, 1990 — but Albert isn’t interested in having Joseph around. And his house is eccentric, furnished with dinner remains, muddy clothing and never consumed pots of tea that Joseph isn’t allowed to touch or tidy up. It takes Joseph’s illicit investigation into the Marvels to bring the two stories together and win over his uncle. Unpredictable, wonderfully strange and emotionally satisfying.
THE EMPEROR OF ANY PLACE Tim Wynne-Jones (Candlewick, 324 pages, $21.00, ages 12 and up)
Wynne-Jones merges a war story, ghost story and contemporary young-adult novel in this multi-layered, superbly written tale. Sixteen-year-old Evan is sad enough when his father dies, leaving him to be a lonely family of one. Then he begins to read a book he finds on his father’s desk, a double memoir, or journal, of two soldiers, one Japanese, one American, who were marooned on “Heart-shaped Island” in the Pacific in 1944-45. But before he can get deeply into the book, his estranged grandfather appears — a Second World War vet who aims to destroy the very book Evan is reading. Wynne-Jones plunges us into two worlds — Evan’s suburban Don Mills threatened by a hostile old man, and the island of the two soldiers, a Crusoe-like setting fantastically populated with ghosts — of family to come and of those who never came to be. Highly recommended.
THE LETTER FOR THE KING Tonke Dragt, translated by Laura Watkinson (David Fickling, 517 pages, $23.99, ages 10-14)
For those who like a more straightforward adventure story, here’s reissue of a Dutch classic first published in 1962. On the eve of being knighted, squire Tiuri abandons his mandatory all-night vigil to help a wounded knight. Before the knight dies, he lays a task on Tiuri — to deliver a letter to a distant king and to do it secretly. Tiuri’s journey is long and eventful, through forests, over mountains, across rivers — made even more difficult by its secrecy and Tiuri’s ignorance of the knight’s identity. But this journey is as much a formation of character as it is long treks and perilous encounters; Tiuri’s a thinking as well as an acting hero, whose judgment deepens and broadens through friendship and leadership. Compared to today’s high-speed fantasies, this moves sedately; but Dragt describes a journey of refreshing unpredictability and unusual wisdom.
Deirdre Baker teaches children’s literature at the University of Toronto.