Review: The Mysterious Benedict Society (Stewart)

(Do you have young readers in search of something news? Book Monkey Sydney, a fifth grader, reviews The Mysterious Benedict Society, the first book of a series that aims for young readers seeking interesting and challenging novels.)

 

“Although he was only eleven years old, he was quite used to figuring things out for himself.” This line hooked me into The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart. It reflects the main idea of the book, which is about four children who must solve a problem using their talents. 

The protagonists of the story are Reynie Muldoon, a really smart orphan who excels at solving riddles; George Washington, a runaway who goes by “Sticky” because everything he sees “sticks” in his head (wow!); Kate Wetherhall, a talented, athletic girl who carries a bucket full of useful tools (cool!) and whose mother died and father disappeared; and Constance Contraire, a stubborn two-year-old orphan (sound like anyone I know?). 

The antagonist of the story is Ledroptha Curtain, a dangerous inventor who founded the Learning Institute for the Very Enlightened (L.I.V.E.), which is the setting of the book, and who invented the “Whisperer.”Mr. Curtain and his invention are the obstacles that the children must overcome in the climax. The Whisperer is a high-tech gizmo that sends out messages through children that piggyback on TV, radio, and phone signals and then are transmitted to the masses that use those devices. Mr. Curtain’s intent is to use the messages to change peoples’ feeling towards certain issues.

The L.I.V.E. is a free boarding school where the lessons are not about math or reading, but about personal hygiene and the evils of government. If children excel in their classes, they might be promoted to the rank of “Messenger.” The Whisperer soothes the Messengers’ fears, as long as the Messengers send out messages. Mr. Curtain needs children to send his messages because they slip into people’s minds unnoticed, whereas, if he sent them, people would notice. 

   

The book starts out with Reynie, Sticky, Kate, and Constance separately responding to an advertisement in the paper offering children “special opportunities” if they pass four complicated tests. The tests were created by a Mr. Benedict, who needed four smart children to go to L.I.V.E. as his secret agents and stop Mr. Curtain from implementing his evil plan. Mr. Benedict is Mr. Curtain’s twin brother, but he is very kind. Mr. Benedict informs them about Mr. Curtain and the messages, but doesn’t know how they’re sent. Then he tells them that they are to go to L.I.V.E. to be his secret agents so they can find out how Mr. Curtain is sending the messages. 

 A few days after the children arrive at L.I.V.E, the conflict arises. The children realize Mr. Curtain has boosted the power of the messages so they can be transmitted directly to the masses without the need of electronic signals. Reynie and his friends realize they need to hurry up and become Messengers. This moves the story along in a good way because it helps the children speed up their mission and become Messengers. Once he becomes a Messenger, Reynie realizes why the Whisperer is so loved by the Messengers: it soothes all their fears and gives them an astonishing sense of well being. 

 The next day, the children realize that Mr. Curtain can now record Messenger sessions. This means that he can broadcast messages around the clock, even without someone in the Whisperer. Launching an investigation, they find Mr. Curtain’s secret office, and also find out that he plans to take over the world with his Whisperer. Typical evil-genius-takes-over-the-world-and-needs-to-be-stopped plot. 

The children hatch a plan to thwart Mr. Curtain, but things start to go awry. First, the boys become trapped in a room with Mr. Curtain. Sticky starts to resist the Whisperer but fails. Then, Reynie alerts the girls to their predicament by the children’s secret code, but some of Mr. Curtain’s henchmen overhear the message and catch up with the girls. During the fight that follows, Constance the toddler, whose strength is her stubbornness, slips into the Whisperer. She resists it so much the machine is baffled. The conflict is resolved when Mr. Benedict and his assistants arrive and rescue the children and disable the Whisperer. 

 The ending was awesome, but I can’t give it away, so read the book! Since this is part of a trilogy, we know the happiness will be short-lived. Whew. More danger coming!

 The theme of this book is friendship. The four children all showed love and friendship towards each other throughout the book. I learned that friends are family, even if you don’t share blood. I thoroughly enjoyed this book because of the intriguing characters, interesting plot, and fascinating setting. I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys seeing children fixing adult-created problems (and making them look dumb in the process!).

 Next up – I will tackle The Son of Neptune by Rick Riordan. 

SFM

Review: The Lonely Polygamist (Udall)

Find time to read The Lonely Polygamist, Brady Udall’s poignant, bittersweet, and at times laugh-out-loud funny novel about 45-year-old Golden Richard’s mid-life crisis and its effects on his unconventional family.  Although the book is about a polygamist family, it is not really about polygamy.  Rather it's a study of family dynamics and relationships, functional and otherwise, that unfold within a family that features a husband, four wives, and 28 children dispersed among three separate households. Golden, the hapless patriarch, is an accidental polygamist. As a young man, he departed his native Louisiana for southern Utah to reunite with the father who had abandoned Golden and the boy's mentally unbalanced mother years earlier. After a childhood marked by isolation and loneliness, he finds his father's involvement in a fundamentalist break-away Mormon clan a revelation, with its focus on family and community. He soon begins his own polygamous journey and takes over his father's construction company as a way to meet the economic demands of his rapidly growing family.  He also learns to navigate a carefully choreographed schedule designed to satisfy the emotional and physical demands of each of his wives and the fatherly attention each of his children yearn for.

When we meet Golden, his construction business is slumping while the fiscal and emotional demands back home are escalating.  His only construction job is building an addition to a Nevada brothel, PussyCat Manor, while telling his family and community back in Utah that he's building a senior citizen’s center. He is depressed following the accidental death of one of his children, a profoundly disabled girl to whom he had become closely attached. And he is increasingly infatuated with a mysterious woman who he soon discovers is the Guatemalan wife of Ted Leo, the bellicose and volatile PussyCat Manor proprietor. Golden, increasingly overwhelmed by the daily details of his life, withdraws from his family, feigning impotency to avoid intimacy with his wives, finding excuses to stay in his trailer at the job site in Nevada, avoiding kids by hiding in their backyard playhouse or sleeping in his pickup. 

While the story is primarily Golden’s, Udall intersperses the perspective of two other members of the family. Rusty, the 11-year-old misfit son from wife number three, commits desperate and increasingly outrageous stunts in an effort to stand out from the crowd of siblings who detest Rusty nearly as much as he detests them. Trish, the youngest and most attractive of Golden’s wives, finds Golden’s lack of interest and competition with the other wives to be exhausting and defeating.  Like Golden, the neglected Rusty and Trish discover that life amid the clatter and din of a sprawling polygamist family can be exceedingly lonely.

Udall weaves the disparate strands of his story into a climax that is tragic and tender, with moments of levity from a colorful cast of characters recognizable to anyone who has spent time in the American west. The Lonely Polygamist does not end in a happy heap of sunshine and rainbows. We all walk away a little sadder but a little wiser. Udall has written a graceful page-turner with fresh characters and an attention to detail reflecting the author’s knowledge of his subject. As a bit of an aside, the Udall name may sound familiar.  The author is the descendent of a prominent family of early Mormon settlers (and practicing polygamists before the practices was prohibited by the Mormon church). He’s a cousin to current U.S. Senators Mark Udall (D-N.M.) and Tom Udall (D-Colo.).

The idea of reading a novel about a polygamist family that fails to castigate the practice may be unappealing to some readers. Like my wife, who is a hard sell on this topic, particularly after reading critical, non-fiction, accounts of contemporary polygamy, including Jon Krakauer’s excellent but chilling Under the Banner of Heaven, and Carolyn Jessop's Escape, an inside account of a woman coerced into a polygamous marriage and her attempts to escape with her eight children. Yes, there is a sinister side to polygamy and there are sects ruled by disturbing and corrupt men.  But Udall recognizes that not every polygamous community is headed by a Warren Jeffs.  Udall's polygamists feature a mostly assimilated community of semi-ordinary people living an unordinary lifestyle. The wives in Udall's novel may not be liberated feminists, but neither are they helpless victims. You can read Udall's explanation of why write a novel feature sympathetic polygamists here, if you’re interested.

A final note: I have not watched the HBO television serious, Big Love, which ran from 2006-2011, but know that it covers territory similar to The Lonely Polygamist, published in 2010.  The similarities are apparently coincidental. Udall says he hasn’t seen the HBO show and the genesis of his novel was a magazine article about a polygamist sect he wrote for Esquire magazine in 1998, titled "The Lonely Polygamist."  Trivia bonus: The original title he pitched to the magazine was "Big Love."


RCM