The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest

There is something worse than finding that the book you’ve just finished reading has a sequel which you need to wait for. It could be that the author is dead, so is unable to write that sequel. Stieg Larsson is no longer alive, and I kept worrying as I raced through Luftslottet som sprängdes, that it would be too much in need of a sequel for me to be happy. Strictly speaking it doesn’t have to be continued, but you are left feeling that there is a continuation, which there is, as we know. Part of one, at least, and the question is how much of it exists.

Not that I’m sure it would satisfy to have half a book, or a short Stieg Larsson. And considering the mess his estate’s in, I doubt it can happen anytime soon. The more I read of book three, the more I was reminded of Stieg’s family. I’ll leave it to you to work out which characters reminded me of them.

The titles have had me thinking, too. Before reading Luftslottet som sprängdes I thought I knew what it meant. The same goes for the concept of kicking a hornets’ nest, but in both cases I’d say the meaning is almost the opposite of what I’d had in mind.

Where book two set Lisbeth Salander up with a worse mess than she’d been in before, the ‘concluding’ book sorts things out more than you are made to expect at first. It looks very, very grim to begin with. For me it was difficult to keep fact from fiction, as there is so much that belongs in real life, and I couldn’t quite draw a line anywhere. The prime minister is in there, and so is a named predecessor of his. Real life scandals and names are mixed with fiction.

If this had been a film and if Daughter had watched it, I know exactly how she would have screamed in delight through most of it. The last two thirds, anyway. It’s fun and it’s exciting. I did spend a little time wondering how much could be allowed to go wrong, and one of my suppositions only half happened. I just feel that a stage had been set, so maybe it’s for a later book.

The plot doesn’t do much to recommend the Swedish police or government or anything much. But when things look bleak, there are individuals with integrity dotted about here and there. Mikael Blomkvist is as capable and devious as before, and Lisbeth Salander, well, she is very much herself. There is a doctor who was based on one of Stieg’s friends, and he was written into the plot under his own name. Unfortunately he upset the Larsson family sufficiently to have his name written out again. Oh well, his acts speak louder than any name.

Stieg didn’t write in any great literary style, but it’s not necessary. The plot and the general excitement means that it’d be hard to come up with anything quite like it. It’s not just Lisbeth Salander who is on the autistic spectrum, I’d say. The neat and precise way the good characters plot the path to safety, suggests a fair amount of Aspie reasoning, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. I suspect that’s why it satisfies so much.

Al Capone Shines My Shoes

I wish. Or perhaps I don’t, now that I think about it. Having a world famous crook anywhere near my footwear may not be a good idea. Especially seeing as Al Capone is dead.

I came late to the first book, Al Capone Does My Shirts, but ever since I found that Gennifer Choldenko was writing a sequel, I have waited and waited. My wait is now over, and the book was more than worth waiting for.

Setting aside the autism angle yet again, which on its own is enough to please me, this is such a marvellous story! It’s deceptively simple, but as you begin reading you’re immediately sucked into the story about Moose and his family and friends and neighbours on Alcatraz. You’re there. I felt as if I lived in a flat on Alcatraz, next door to Moose. Except since I don’t play baseball I would be a disappointing friend.

We have been made to believe that Al Capone helped get Moose’s sister Natalie into a school where she would learn to be a little less autistic. And a favour requires another in return. The big question for Moose is what Capone will ask for.

Apart from Capone problems, Moose also has love problems, friend problems, baseball problems. But he deals with them all, though not necessarily in the best way. His friend Annie asks if, when he has children, they would all play baseball. ‘Why else would you have kids?’ Moose replies.

You can tell that Gennifer has worked on Alcatraz, because the attention to detail is outstanding. Nobody could come up with so many details without knowing the place inside out. I don’t want to suggest Gennifer is old enough to have lived in the 1930s, but she does have a knack for making you think she was there. It’s like the reader is watching an old film.

The cover is in the same vein as her earlier books, and looks good enough to eat. Blue Converses and ice cream colour lettering. Delicious. So I could possibly buy the book for its cover alone without even knowing what’s inside. Al Capone is. Inside.

An Aspie crime

I was contacted a while ago by Sue Birch, who has written a short children’s crime story called Dead Puzzling. It has an Asperger theme, so I was interested, and as I’m always keen to promote anything suitably Aspie, I said Sue could send me her book. It’s doubly worthy in that she donates half of the profits to the National Autistic Society.

Sue was wondering if the book would be right for children with Asperger Syndrome, which is actually harder to say than you’d think. I don’t know. Two years ago when I wrote about Aspie books I only thought of spreading the word to the neurotypicals in this world, but then I found that Aspies are, understandably, looking for fiction featuring people like themselves.

But short of testing any book on a large scale, I can’t say. It is good that there are books about Aspies. I think that older Aspies need books, but younger ones may well not. Sue reckons her story is suitable for ages eight to thirteen. I’d say more like seven to ten or eleven. It’s a young theme, albeit using slightly old language. It’s obviously set today, but has a flavour of the Blyton era.

Dead Puzzling has been self published, I think, and it could do with more editing, but the Aspie aspect (sorry!) may not always appeal to regular publishers. The story is partly about illegal immigrants, and this bit of it feels a little too politically incorrect for today’s readers.

There is a dead body in the cemetery, and three young children try to solve the murder. One of them has Asperger Syndrome, but seems not to know it (although he is miraculously diagnosed in the course of the book). He sees what his normal peers do not, so helps solve the mystery with his special ‘powers’. The Dad is also very Aspie, but that fact goes almost unmentioned. It’s fun to see though.

Looking After Louis

I wouldn’t have found this picture book about Louis, who is autistic, without the suggestion from Julia Jarman a few months ago. Lesley Ely and Polly Dunbar have come up with a simple story about a boy and his school, and it really praises the role of the classroom assistant, whose importance is so often overlooked.

Nothing much happens in the book, except we slowly see how Louis spends his time at school, and what he is good at. But it’s the help he receives, which matters most. The other children need to learn that Louis can’t or won’t do certain things, but he can do other stuff instead.

Might be a very useful book to read in pre-school groups or in primary schools where they have children on the autistic spectrum.

The TV Time Travellers

When will I learn to read descriptions of books properly? This new book about a television reality show by Pete Johnson, I took to mean ‘real’ time travelling. Maybe I was simply under the influence of magic, and the title is fairly suggestive.

What this book is, is a new look at ‘reality show-itis’, while also serving up 1940s war history, as well as life today for 13-year-olds. Five teenagers get the opportunity to take part in a three week evacuee experience, while being filmed almost round the clock.

There are the ‘normal’ children, trouble makers and jokers, and then there is the boy, Zac, who already lives with the war as his all-devouring hobby. Zac has recently lost his mother, and is very unhappy, and his father can’t cope with his own grief. Izzy and her mother are poor, and she hopes to win the prize, which is a holiday. The television people are using the experiment to return to old values, such as shouting at the children and caning them, as well as starving them on wartime type rations.

Things don’t go as expected, and the children learn something from their experience. Hopefully the adults also learn. This is the second book in a short time with a recently bereaved father and child, whose relationship falls to pieces. It’s good to see how resourceful children can be, when necessary. And you can learn to like someone who is your complete opposite.

Mystery Man

The PI in Mystery Man could be me, full of phobias and weird compulsions. A coward, with too much interest in memorising pointless number sequences. It’s almost as if Colin Bateman had met me. Come to think of it, he has. Only long enough for me to say ‘Hello, I’m the bookwitch. And I haven’t read any of your books. Can I take a photo of you?’.  Wonder if my social skills inspired him?

These days I generally come across Colin at Crime Always Pays, where we can both leave rude comments on whatever Declan Burke has blogged about. And let me make it clear that I will continue to talk about him as Colin. I know he only has Bateman on his books, but I never attended a private boys’ school, and I probably never will. So Colin it is.

Mystery Man runs the No Alibis crime bookshop in Belfast. No, he doesn’t. Not in real life. At least I don’t think so. The bookshop is real, but hopefully run by someone other than this sorry fiasco of an OCD hypochondriac. When the shop’s next door neighbour, the private eye Malcolm Carlyle, suddenly disappears, his customers come to Mystery Man with their mysteries. It’s leather trousers and graffiti and sticky-out ears and stuff like that, and Mystery Man enjoys solving these puzzles.

The Case of the Dancing Jews proves a little more interesting. A little more dangerous. He gets himself a sidekick. He gets a love life. His life is in danger. Corpses are everywhere, with and without air fresheners. It’s all to do with Auschwitz, and Mystery Man gets paranoid about Germans.

This is a very funny book, and I suspect the Resident IT Consultant would not like it at all. But I did. I still wonder what they put in the water over in Ireland. They are funnier, and weirder, but I don’t mind. Colin is already writing the sequel, and it was only as I began writing this that I realised I don’t actually know the name of Mystery Man. Lots of aliases in No Alibis. Clever. The ending is clever too, but I won’t tell.

The cover is exactly to the witch’s taste. Simple. And purple. They must have had me in mind after all.

Before they ‘poof’

Today’s book, Gone, by Michael Grant is the one I referred to in my post yesterday. It’s also the one that turned up in a comment a couple of weeks ago, when Lee said it was awful. Now, I don’t agree with that. Gone is a bit of a modern Lord of the Flies with some fantasy/horror thrown in, and it’s a fast-paced thriller, which isn’t trying to be great literature. Young readers will like it, and I’d hope that it will also make them think about what matters in life. Good and bad, who your friends are, cause and effect and all that.

It can be hard for us oldies to approve of a book where everyone over the age of fifteen ‘poofs’, ie disappears without a trace. One second they are there, and the next they are not. It may be almost OK for your teacher to poof, and the children quickly got used to their parents having poofed, but actually witnessing their friends poof the minute they turn fifteen, is scary.

So, fourteen-year-olds have to rule this new world, which is quite small. They have been sealed off inside a bubble of what used to be a part of California. It’s exciting, sometimes funny, and it makes for a good sample of modern life, with MacDonalds’ and what-have-you. There is also a young autistic child, who’s fairly well portrayed. The baddie of the story is called Caine, and his counterpart may not be called Abel, but he certainly is able. And male. This is James Bond heroics, but at least the heroine is allowed to be intelligent.

We don’t know why all the strange things that happen have happened. And – SPOILER alert  - we never find out. I don’t like giving things away, but I would have appreciated some early information about this being the first of – how many books?

One young amazon reviewer ‘really hopes there will be a sequel’! Of course there will be a sequel. There has to be. And – I should have done my homework – if you look on amazon the next book is out soon in America. I’ve not found much information about Michael Grant, except Egmont say he co-wrote Animorphs with his wife. He’s not down as an author of Animorphs on Wikipedia, but I did notice there are 58 books in the series…

Million$

Millions is a really good book. Just like the other two children’s novels by Frank Cottrell Boyce, this is the best one. Work that out if you can, because I certainly can’t. It’s very funny, and I loved it all, except possibly for the part near the middle where my anxiety levels rose in a worrying manner before levelling out again.

I also happen to believe that Frank is mistaken in believing that England has gone over to the Euro. Last time I looked in my wallet, we hadn’t. That’s one little discrepancy, but it might be there to help the plot along. Also suspect Frank hasn’t accurately measured the size of £229,370 in £10 notes. Good research would require him to take that amount out of his bank for the day and see what it looks like, before taking it back to the bank. I have very few professional qualifications, but money happens to be one of them. I can’t see that £229,370 in tenners will look very different from SEK2,2 million in 100 kronor notes. Move your commas and zeros about and you’ll soon see I’m right. And I do know what that amount of money looks like. It’s smaller and I’d say lighter than what Frank suggests.

Now that I’ve proved my own aspie traits, I’ll state that although Frank doesn’t ever suggest that his main characters in any of the three novels are aspies, they simply have to be. And they are very lovely.

Millions is about two little boys who find the above sum of money, a couple of weeks before the pound ceases to be legal tender. They can’t tell their Dad (their Mum is dead, as they so often point out), and they can’t spend the money fast enough. Apart from being a hilarious tale, this also illustrates to the reader that wealth is more of a problem than a blessing.

Ten-year-old Damian has a large network of Saints as friends, and his older brother Anthony knows about property. After reading this book, you will also be aware of the importance of digging wells. Which is A Good Thing, and it reminded me that Frank gives money to Water Aid.

I really tackled Millions this week because I happened to notice the film was going to be on television the other evening. I appear to have suffered a technical hitch video-wise, so will have to try and see it on iPlayer before it’s too late. Who’d have thought that just before midnight was reckoned to be a good time for a children’s film?

A new page

How long have I been promising you this page? Can’t be more than six months? So, at long last the Aspie books page has been assembled. Whether it will actually appear when I cut the satin ribbon, is another matter.

The idea is that any fiction which I feel is the slightest bit Asperger/Autism/ ADHD related can be listed here for reference. I’ve discovered that not all my blog posts have been tagged correctly, so can be hard to find, even for me. Hopefully I’ll also remember to add to the list as I go along and find new books.

The non-fiction list only covers what I own and/or have read, so isn’t terribly scientific at all. But it’s a start.

Right, let’s get the scissors…

Rules

I felt myself enveloped by a feeling of warmth and comfort as I started reading Cynthia Lord’s Rules. There’s something about American children’s books. The settings are often less ‘cynical’ than their British counterparts; they just are. There wasn’t any mention of apple pie, I think, but there was an apple pie kind of feel to Rules.

The other thing about Rules is how it arrived here. Mary Hoffman sent it on to me, when she’d finished with it, because she knows about me and autism books. That’s another instance of warmth, knowing that others know what I like.

And Rules is set on the Maine coast, which in itself is very satisfying. Don’t ask me why.

Anyway, on to the actual book, now. It’s about Catherine, 12, and her autistic brother David, aged 8. She feels he is a bit of a nuisance, but she’s got her list of rules for him, and on the whole I feel they function well together. But younger brothers can be an embarrassment whether or not they are autistic, and Catherine is wanting to become friends with the new girl who’s moved in next door.

On the friendship front she also gets to know Jason, whom she meets when David has his occupational therapy sessions. Catherine develops, but she also tries to compartmentalise her relationships, and gets into a pickle when they threaten to merge in real life.

As usual, the parents are little too unsupportive, but by the end of the book, they have all learnt something new. Any criticism I might have is more to do with the ‘plain sailing’ of getting diagnosed and receiving what seems like worthwhile treatment. Cynthia has an autistic son, so I assume much of the practical aspects come from experience.

Cynthia was awarded the Newbery Honor for Rules, which is good going for a first book. I’m looking forward to her second book.