PIRATES, PETS AND MURDER
Sherie Posesorski reviews three new novels dealing with hardships, blessings and the power of perseverance for the young adult readers on your Christmas gift list.
What feels like a curse turns out to be a blessing in thrift shop clothing in Linda Bailey’s latest middle grade novel Seven Dead Pirates.
Lewis Dearborn is too stoic for more than twinges of selfpity at being, while not cursed, not blessed either by his parents, who, though deeply loving, are ancient enough to be his grandparents.
They hover like drones, tracking his every movement for possible danger. Babied at home, the friendless Lewis is bullied at school.
His only true companion, his daring great-granddad, recently died. His bequest — a decaying seaside mansion his will stipulates the Dearborns must live in for six months before owning it — feels like a curse to Lewis’s mother.
That pales beside Lewis’s inheritance — seven dead pirate ghosts, two centuries deceased, (granddad’s companions since he was boy sharing his tower bedroom) and the fulfilling of his granddad’s promise to lead them back to their pirate ship, the Maria Louisa, housed in a nearby museum, so they can set sail for Libertalia, a heavenly haven for pirates.
Vancouver author Linda Bailey is a prolific children’s author, best known for two middle grade series — the Stevie Diamond detective series and a time travel series called The Good Times Travel Agency. In those, Bailey has proven herself to be as agile with inventively employing genre tropes as she is developing plots to showcase her central protagonist’s realistic development.
In Seven Dead Pirates, the anchor of reality in this marvel of an imaginative garden is the sensitively rendered “real toad” (in Marianne Moore’s oftquoted poetic phrase), 11-yearold Lewis.
As in many a classic adventure story, Lewis begins as the most reluctant of heroes and the quest thrust upon him seems to him beyond his capabilities and character. Lewis is “terminally shy,” unable to speak at school. Yet his inner voice — revealed in his narration — displays how verbally adept he is. He has a melancholy wit, a macabre eye for absurdity and deft descriptive powers.
The story of how Lewis develops his heroic mojo through his relationship with the pirate ghosts is fluidly written and is as intricately and subtly crafted — its actions and themes — as the ship in the bottle Lewis is given by his granddad.
Lewis discovers he has much in common with the ghostly crew. He feels caged by his fears and, to his surprise, the pirates, too, have grown agoraphobic over the centuries, terrified of the modern world, especially of cars.
Leading a crew of pirates who materialize when emotional, appearing as their captain describes himself, having “lost my best bits over the years, and I ain’t so pretty now,” will inevitably draw hysterical attention and probably the police, Lewis acknowledges. At first, he thinks he can pass them off as tourists and buys clothes for them at a thrift shop. This scheme backfires when the pirates are attracted to the gaudiest items and resemble, to Lewis’s despair, “biker clowns.”
The pirates’ dialect is a delicious treat, as are the pirates themselves. Lewis’s friendship with them opens him to friendship with real people like Abbie, a classmate, whose boldness and confidence inspires him. He is both bold and confident in the epic battle scene between the good ghost pirates and the still-bloodthirsty ghoulish pirates led by Captain Dire, who threw them overboard and laid claim to the Maria Louisa.
In Bailey’s rousing and reflective pirate yarn, Lewis surprises himself by becoming the kind of courageous boy his great-granddad admired, and leader the pirates required.
What seems like a gift begins to feel like a curse in Joan Betty Stuchner’s first chapter book in the Bagels trilogy, Bagels Come Home.
Josh Bernstein’s dog ownership dreams are sparked by watching that motherlode of dog fantasies — Lassie — in the classic Lassie Come Home. The dog he and his family choose at a shelter, though, is no Lassie. Bagels (so named in the misguided belief the dog will fit harmoniously with the other pets in the Bernstein home menu — Cream Cheese the cat and Lox the goldfish) is “a mix of sheltie, whippet and Jack Russell” — a whirligig of the high- strung traits of the species combined. (Stuchner said she based Bagels on her mother-in-law’s sheltie whom she described “not only an escape artist, but totally uncontrollable, disobedient.”) What attracted the family to the dog — his Cirque du Soleil backflips and hyper exuberance — is a recipe for unremitting chaos.
Stuchner made the familiar bad dog standard feel fresh through the neat plot twists and the very likable narrator, eight-year-old Josh, who tells the story with droll understatement and sly punchlines.
So what seems like a curse in dog form saves the day, not quite Lassie-style, and shines a spotlight on the creativity and star quality of Bagels. Stuchner further capitalized on those qualities in the two sequels written and edited while she was ill with pancreatic cancer, which she died of in 2014. Bagels the Brave was published posthumously last spring. Bagels on Board will be released this fall.
Stuchner, who was born in England and moved to Vancouver in the 1960s, affectionately spoofed the conventions of monster-in-the-woods horror in the second book and the spy thriller in Bagels on Board. As in the previous books, the last book with its sitcom mode sequences is fast-paced, gracefully written and animated with amusing details and incidents.
The family’s favourite breakfast bagel topping is baked beans (it’s Bagels’ favourite as well, followed by turkey sausages and underwear). The mom’s contest entry expressing the family’s love of baked beans wins them a year’s supply and a cruise from the beans manufacturer.
Bagels is left behind. To fill the time previously devoted to keeping up with Bagel’s mishaps, the bored Josh plays spy on board, calling himself 009 after his hero James Bond.
When he isn’t trailing two suspicious men he nicknames Blondie and Trenchcoat, who are trailing a woman with red hair and attire the colour of the beans’ tomato sauce, he is trailing the suspicious disappearance at every meal of turkey sausages from the buffet table.
That mystery solves itself when Bagels appears. Finding ways of keeping the irrepressible Bagels hidden is almost as hard as figuring out what the “spies” are spying on. Bagels, once again, saves the day by comically stymieing the men, who truly are spies, in their scheme of industrial espionage.
Young readers will find much delight in sharing Bagels’ escapades in these enjoyable stories.
Isaveth Breck wishes she was blessed with talent, wanting “so badly to succeed at something, whether that means becoming a famous writer or merely a good spell-baker.”
Gifted she needs to be — and ably demonstrates she is — in Stratford fantasy writer R. J. Anderson’s A Pocket Full of Murder. The plot of Anderson’s new middle grade novel blends the elements of fantasy, Victorian melodrama, political parable and Golden Age detective fiction.
It is set in an urban dystopia called Tarreton, built out of Anderson’s research of life in Toronto during the Great Depression. Tarreton brings to mind Dickens’s and H.G. Wells’s evocations of stratified London.
Like most common folk, Isaveth and her family live in dire poverty. Her father Urias, a skilled stonemason, has been out of work for a year. Her mother died and her 16-year-old sister Annagail works in a shirt factory to support the family — one of the few jobs available because the family is of the Moshite faith, a sect shunned by the majority members of the establishment Unifying church.
Wealthy autocratic nobles rule the city, banning dissension. The currency of the city is magic; the city is running on spell power. Through the alchemy of crystal and precious metals termed sagery, the nobles generate ample heat and light to live on. At first resistant to the common folk’s access to magic, they grudgingly have allowed them to create their own generic versions through the use of herbs and minerals.
Desperate for the basics of life — food, heat, light — 12-year-old Isaveth decides to try her hand at spell-baking and selling the common magic tablets on the street. She turns out to be good at it, as good as she is writing fan fiction for her favourite radio play about the criminal cases solved by famous Lady Justice, Auradia Champion. Both those gifts are essential when her father is framed for the murder of college governor Master Orien.
The ungainly melding of various genre elements alongside the excess of expository setup of character, world and plot get the novel to a lumbering start. The fantasy component is sketchily outlined, which in many fantasies is a springboard for readers’ imaginative participation, but here, baffles.
Isaveth’s narration doesn’t have a distinctive verbal cast, leaving her, like many a victimized heroine in melodrama, to be principally defined by her circumstances, encountering one adversity after another. She and her family are serious-minded and virtuous, lacking shading and complexity. You admire Isaveth’s heart and boldness, but wish she and her family were created with the ambiguity, complexity and liveliness of the street boy Quiz, who offers to help her prove her father’s innocence by finding the true culprit.
Quiz is a human light and heat spell-maker who enters the story by dashing into Isaveth on the street. He is as much a mystery to her as the mystery itself.
He is bright, educated and amazingly knowledgeable about the intricate workings of the hierarchy of the city. Despite her concerns about his motives, she trusts him, won over by his wit, charm, ingeniousness and bravery.
When they join together to investigate, the novel’s elements coalesce and the pace quickens. Their detective work is suspenseful and sobering, uncovering a political conspiracy that profoundly affects the daily existence of the common folk — their livelihoods, their rights.
The ending is a bit of a letdown — the conspiracy is revealed in a burst of talky revelations by the perpetrator — and seemingly with no consequences, other than leaving enough unresolved for the sequel.