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readallthenewberys2012-08-02 01:38 am
justice_turtle) wrote in readallthenewberys2012-08-02 01:38 am
Newbery Honor: The Great Quest (Charles Boardman Hawes)
Standard disclaimer: opinions are mine, books aren't, Newberys belong to the ALA.
...I'm going to put the full title of this book under the cut, because it's one of those that pulls a Moll Flanders and tells you half the story in the subtitle. ;-) The short title is The Great Quest by Charles Boardman Hawes. It isn't on Gutenberg, so if you want to read it you'll have to find it yourself. I don't yet know if that's worth doing.
* "The Great Quest: A romance of 1826, wherein are recorded the experiences of Josiah Woods of Topham, and of those others with whom he sailed for Cuba and the Gulf of Guinea". The frontispiece looks quite fascinating - swordfighting in a ship's fo'c's'le, which may have been done far too many times since Robert Louis Stevenson published Kidnapped but it's still fun.
* Okay, this is set in New England, I think; the first-person narrator, presumably our Josiah Woods, is talking about Yankees and Boston in an American way. I'd assumed it was British-set, for some reason. The language is doing well at the sort of Defoe-Stevenson pastiche we're apparently looking at here.
* "Few country people then were - or now are - so shameless as to lie in bed at six o'clock of a summer morning." Good save, sir. Very well played, explaining past customs in first person without breaking character.
* Our hero goes off on an errand, notices the town is unusually quiet, and now there is apparently a con-man (I'm deducing from hints vouchsafed) who's come back to town after twenty years and nobody knows if it's actually him, so the villagers are hovering round the blacksmith's shop gossiping and speculating. Our young hero doesn't know the guy.
* And we have an untrustworthy dark-eyed ominous stranger, i.e. the con man. I should keep a list. This one's in flash clothing, and has a big nose and bushy brows. :P Good grief. His name's Neil Gleazen, for reference. ...is that supposed to be a Jewish surname derived from Gleason? I can't tell. If he turns out to be an actual Jew I shall scream.
* Our Josiah works in his uncle's store with two other clerks. He overheard a mention of his uncle's name in the gossip at the blacksmith's forge, but nobody would tell him anything. Now the flash stranger Neil Gleazen has gone into Uncle Seth's shop.
* Neil's full name is Cornelius Gleazen. He's a boyhood friend of Uncle Seth's. He wants money, or at least he's talking about it. Uncle Seth is going on about being an honest man. I can't tell if Neil is actually trying to blackmail him over something the author doesn't want to tell us about, or whether the author merely wants us to think that's what's going on. O_O At any rate, Uncle Seth is scared.
* Break to describe the village. Josiah - I'm still assuming that's who the narrator is; the closest we've gotten to a direct address is the blacksmith calling him "Joe" - is describing himself as "a dreamy lad, who knew books better than men". :P I'm not looking forward to a whole book narrated by one of those obnoxious head-in-the-clouds nerds who drive so many adventure plots by walking into something they ought not and calling it a virtue that they weren't canny enough to see trouble coming. David Balfour was annoying enough (yes, there will be many references to Kidnapped in this liveblog; it's on Gutenberg *hint hint* if you've never read it), but Alan Breck Stewart saved the book for me. There's a reason I haven't re-read "Catriona" in years but I own a pocket copy of "Kidnapped". ;P If we don't have an Alan Breck parallel, this'll be a long book.
* Josiah's an orphan. I still don't know how old he is. I'm going to assume he's nineteen until further notice, because Uncle Seth is described much more kindly than David Balfour's Uncle Ebenezer but they are superficially similar character types, and Davie's nineteen. XD Josiah doesn't read like he isn't nineteen so far, if that makes any sense.
* Okay, now Josiah's been sent away while Cornelius and Uncle Seth talk. And Cornelius comes back every day, Josiah never learning any more except that Neil has some very strong hold over Seth and can boss him around like nobody's business. Also the small town, being a small town, is gossiping all the gossip and being rude to Cornelius in the street, and generally playing Power Of Public Opinion to the best of its ability. I'm prejudiced in Neil's favor just for that. ;P Public opinion as the rod of justice ANNOYS ME. *this is a G-rated blog, for language if not for themes*
* There are rumors that Cornelius murdered one Eli Norton twenty years ago, and was followed out of town by law officers, long since dead. Josiah describes them as having "run Gleazen out of town", but I'm not sure the first connotations of that word are meant, since he also says they were "hot on his trail".
* Cornelius was apparently a wild youth in his 1806 way: henhouse raids, drunken revels, burglary, rumored arson. But everyone including Uncle Seth is now being all "omg he might've actually reformed, I don't believe it". *grumpy grump grump* This is going to be a long book. I'm only on page seventeen. O_O
* Okay, pretty much everyone except the blacksmith and the minister believe in Cornelius's demonstrated reformation, including Josiah, whose narration's become a lot more kindly toward him. But Uncle Seth is extremely nervous about him for Mysterious Reasons. Also, Josiah quotes a very peculiar line from the first day's blackmail-ish dialogue - "You and I have robbed too many churches together when we were boys" for Uncle Seth to refuse Neil a hearing - and speculates that this is the source of Seth's odd behavior.
* Neil claims to be friends with the Dictator of Venezuela, one General Paez (I don't know if he's real); Josiah throws in a narratorial "I have wondered since". Certainly the annoying habit of Victorian and pre-Victorian writers of ham-handedly pointing out the Important Stuff in a flashbacky way is in full force here.
* Now the doctor and the minister claim to think Neil's okay, but Josiah both thinks that Neil is laughing up his sleeve at them and after their visit catches the doctor and minister "talking in undertones and smiling significantly"? I'm too confused for this book. :P Foreshadowing is one thing, but these shadows are so thick I can't even follow the plot anymore.
* ONWARD. Because I am stubborn. But I'm calling my halfway rule: if nothing happens by page 180 (there are 360 pages, handy) to persuade me to spend any more time on this book, I'm making a "couldn't finish" tag.
* Next up, Josiah's off on another errand, at night this time, and takes a shortcut across a field. He sees a light in an old barn, goes to investigate in case of fire because it's a dry summer, sees four men playing cards in secret, cannot identify any of them, and falls off a wall. Give us some solid info already, O writer! I'm tired of waiting. Drawing out the hints and giggles for this long is not intriguing, it's boring.
* Descriptions of the two other clerks. Arnold Lamont is a mysterious Frenchman who claims "fortunes of war" for his unexplained cropping-up around 1814 or 1816 and will explain no more; Sim Muzzy (that's his name, I'm not amused) is "a well-meaning, simple fellow", which I suspect is code for "mentally not up to snuff". Seriously, Muzzy. Black mark, sir. Sim is also "petulant, talkative", and a terrible chess player.
* Reference to Sim's "poor wits" confirms he's mentally challenged. Detailed description of his "biting his lip and puzzling this way and that and working his fingers" when distressed. Oy. I am not at all comfortable with this book.
* Cornelius turns up sweaty and possibly winded or possibly it's just Josiah's imagination. Could he have been one of the men at the secret card game? (Why on earth does it matter if he was, you utter load of snotty Puritan nosey-parkers?) End chapter.
* Neil now begins to hand out all sorts of trinkets and gewgaws to the kidlets, having acted arrogant and snotty till the Arbiters of Taste approved of him, and now becoming sweet and nice. I go a step further and postulate that the author probably thinks he's giving us information but doesn't realize that nobody in this book is at all convincing or makes any sense. They're little cardboard puppets who dance as they are told to by the Plot.
* I'm going to start skimming and making notes less often. :P I'm still only on page 27, and I want to get through this thing. I am not enjoying it.
* Josiah is in his early twenties.
* Cornelius brings out fencing-gear for the young men of the town, proposes to hold a fencing school, and singles out Josiah (called "Joe Woods" here) as having the making of a swordsman, presumably before he's ever seen the lad fence. "It never occurred to me that Cornelius Gleazen could have had a motive that did not appear on the surface for so choosing my name from all the rest," narrator!Josiah remarks, and I HEADDESK FOREVER. At least make up your mind whether you're suspicious of the man or not, Josiah! If you're going to observe him suspiciously in your own character, be consistently suspicious. If you're only going to suspect him in hindsight, keep on with the Little Did I Know shtick. But make up your mind!
* "in spite of my youth I instinctively felt that only by suffering could a man [Arnold Lamont] win his way to such kindly, quiet dignity." Good grief. You mean people besides Anne of Green Gables actually go on that way? (Plot recap: Neil's fencing school is a thing. Josiah caught Arnold snickering at it one day, and thought Josiah himself was the one being laughed at. Obvsly it's Neil really, but anyway. Somehow the topic came up in the middle of a quarrel over whether Josiah is interested in the ladies / going to get married someday, which quarrel is hinting awkwardly that Arnold has lost his wife in the war and doesn't want to talk about it. Also Josiah stops for a digression about how he's going to fall in love soon and he and Arnold are going to go on far adventures together. GET ON WITH IT ALREADY. I don't even care if you fall in love horribly sappily as long as something happens that isn't hints and hyper-dense foreshadowings!
* "Perhaps, had we been keener, we should have suspected that something was wrong, simply because no one - except a few stupid persons like the blacksmith - had a word to say against Neil Gleazen. You would at least have expected his old cronies to resent his leaving them for more respectable company. But not even from them did there come a whisper of suspicion or complaint." Good grief, man. Stop trying to write a novel and go ghostwrite for Steven Moffat; the number of timeline tenses you're trying to juggle here, with all the flashbacks and flash-soons and if-onlys, thoroughly justifies it. Also the fail matches up well. ;P I think the only lady we've had a glimpse of so far was the mincing flirt who started the quarrel between Josiah and Arnold up there.
* Now Uncle Seth has broached the topic of going away to adventure for rich stakes, still in terms that wouldn't make any sense if I hadn't read the subtitle, but at least it's a sign of maybe getting an A-plot sometime this century. ;-) Also, Cornelius is all of the respected and they're talking about him going to Congress, and not lightly either.
* Mmmkay, Cornelius wants Uncle Seth's money to buy a ship, I assume for the aforemooted adventure to Cuba and Guinea. The map in the front of the book (I had to check about Guinea) seems to indicate they'll also wind up in Montevideo afterward, and I note rather suspiciously that there's no sign of a return route. Hm.
* Oh lord. Cuba? Guinea? 1826? Tell me Cornelius isn't fitting out a slaver. I don't think I can take this man's attempts at writing about the slave trade. And I have another book by him on my list - "The Dark Frigate", which may well be about either a slaver or pirates or both, if this one is not.
* Now Uncle Seth is calling someone's mortgage and threatening to foreclose, in order to raise more money for the venture (I assume). The guy who holds the mortgage is OF COURSE portrayed as this totally stand-up guy who's just had a run of specified bad luck - horse broke its leg and he had to shoot it, he's been so sick his crops failed, AND he's "good for the money and he pays his interest on the day it's due". Gordon Bennett. Sorry, I'm in a mood, but all this care to specify that X, Y, or Z person who lacks money is quite definitely A Good Person Anyway They Were Just Unfortunate gets on my nerves. It's the natural progression of the Land Of Opportunity flipside where anyone poor or downtrodden had to be lazy and undeserving unless it's specifically specified they were not.
...look at me, I'm so mad I can write a phrase like "specifically specified" and not even change it. ;P I've just dealt with that "but it's a GOOD poor person! not like alla THEM poor people! I can help it without implying I should help ALL the peoples!" far too much IRL.
* Mmmkay, so Josiah goes to call the mortgage because Seth sent him to and Josiah thinks it'll be easier on the mortgagee (why I do not know; no one in this story has any rational motivations beyond the thinnest tissue-paper excuses for advancing The Plot), and then a storm hits and Josiah has to stay overnight and sees the mortgagee, whose name is Abraham Guptil, sneak off over the field in the morning on an unknown errand. I'm so tired of documenting foreshadows.
* Anyway, and now Josiah has promised to see Mr Guptil and his wife and kid safely settled with another home and job, and has no idea how he's going to do that. ANNOYING IDIOT JOSIAH.
* I do hope I don't have a straight-up good/bad/good/bad counterchange throughout the list. That would be too weird. *counts up* At least it can only last till 1936, because otherwise I'd have to declare The Good Master a bad book. (Please, please don't let that happen on re-reading... :P)
* Oh, good grief. Now Arnold has agreed to fence with Josiah, has revealed himself to be an excellent fencer - much better than Josiah - and now Josiah Is Struck By The Realization that Ahnold (I have to get my laughs somewhere) is No Mere Shopkeeper's Clerk. If this really is one of the best books of the year, I pity the year. ;P
* Uncle Seth announces "I've bought a ship and we're all going to Africa." Who "all" may be is not yet specified. Gee whillikers, I am starting to think longingly of some of the books I've read from this list that I didn't even like the first time around, because I'm pretty sure they're going to be more readable than this one. I'm only 45 pages in! Out of 360! :P And I can't skim because of all the snickerdoodle foreshadowing.
(Um. That was me not swearing. I really need to get better at it. *g*)
* Wait, Neil's now been run out of town THIRTY years before? Seriously, get a better editor. If ten years have just now gone by... I thought it was one winter. Maybe a year at most. I hope that's a typo. :P
* And then Cornelius walks by the store In A Scornfully Triumphant Way, in the dark, not knowing that Josiah is watching him. And this is the end of Part One. THIS IS A TERRIBLY BADLY WRITTEN BOOK. WHY, O NEWBERY COMMITTEE, WHY.
* ...I just peeked at the end of the book. Josiah's going to come back from Africa (via South America) with not only a wife but, I quote, "the black Fantee, Paul, who remained the most faithful of servants". I have ceased to care at all about this book. :P What on earth is a Fantee, anyway? Is it a name for a tribe of black people, like Hottentot? I've only heard of "going fantée", small f, as a synonym for going native, and I always thought it was connected to India in some way. *googles* Okay, it was a colonial-era country in Africa, somewhere in the area of modern-day Togo. (Heehee, I love linking people to the CIA World Factbook when it's apropos. It feels so... spyish. XD)
I am still committed to the idea of doing this book justice, but the practicality has me wondering. :P
* Face, meet palm. This book's Wiki entry gives me the very important bit of information I did not have before: that there were 212 votes cast for the first Newbery, that the winner of that year took 163 of them, and that The Great Quest came in second with TWENTY-TWO. Meaning the others had even less. My guess is that this year, at least, the whole shortlist was given runner-up status (as it was then called), and thus titled Honor Books when the name was converted even though half of them are undeserving the honor. (If you ask me, three of the six shouldn't even have been on the shortlist. o_O)
* According to The Newbery and Caldecott Medals: A Guide to the Medal and Honor Books (linked off Wiki), all the books which received any votes in the first Newbery were included on the list. "Great Quest" took 22, "Cedric" took 7, "Old Tobacco Shop" took 5, "Golden Fleece" took 4, and "Windy Hill" took 2.
* Okay, new solution. I'm keeping the 50% rule for hopeless cases, but before that recourse, there is Speed Liveblogging. I keep trying to liveblog in a great deal of detail because I'm worried I won't do justice (what justice there is) to the book otherwise, but - from here till the end of the book, new rule. As long as I give at least one sentence per chapter of remarks, plus quote anything especially hilarible, I'm good. It's better than not finishing at all. ;P
* By the math I'm only an eighth of the way through. OKAY THEN. Also, there will be unexpected slave-trading, I found a spoiler. Oy VEY.
* This thing sounds like the young Anne of Green Gables wrote it. Seriously, it's full of presentiments and "instinctively felt" and all the rest. Although, whatever else you can say about Anne, I think she'd have put ladies in! :D
* Young Josiah is a major jerk to Sim Muzzy of the terrible name. I do not like Mr Charles Boardman Hawes, though I am somewhat mollified toward him by learning that he died at age 34 without getting the news that he'd won a Newbery Medal (not for this object - for his OTHER entry on the list, "The Dark Frigate").
* Ahnold is being foreshadowy and mysterious and solemn and wise. o_O Seriously, terrible writer, how did the Newbery nominators like this stuff.
* Josiah tells in a very clumsy way how his attitudes toward Neil, Seth, Sim, and Ahnold show basically how young and snotty and naive he was... and then adds, "Although I have betrayed my vanity in a none too flattering light, it would be unjust, I truly think, not to add, at the risk of seeming to contradict myself, that I was instinctively kind-hearted, and that I did not lack for courage." Which is so hilarible that I begin to wonder: is Mr Hawes really a bad writer, or is JOSIAH just such a terrible writer and Mr Hawes makes the mistake - or the artistic choice - of staying too closely in his voice? I don't know.
* Okay, they're under the impression they're going to fetch a treasure of gold hidden on the coast of Guinea. All of them: Neil, Seth, Josiah, Sim, Ahnold, plus the foreclosed mortgagee Abraham Guptil, who I assume is going to leave his wife and child behind? :P They'll stop in Cuba first to add some more men to their crew.
* Golly mackerel, and now Abe Guptil has signed for the voyage without even knowing about the gold? Just leaves his wife and kid at her dad's place, and signs on, because he doesn't have his farm anymore. I mean, I suppose it's possible, but... if it were me, just knowing about voyage-wages, I'd either stay home and be a hired man on a farm, or sign on a ship not manned entirely by weirdos. (No offence to Sim; I'm assuming Abe will think of him as a poor hapless weirdo to snicker at behind his back, like Josiah asserts the rest of them do. And I think the others are weirdos. *g*)
* And once Uncle Seth's shop is sold, Neil goes out and gets drunk with his old rowdies, who are apparently the people he was playing cards with in the abandoned barn, before. Because *omg* it's Too Late for Seth to back out of whatever! Nobody argues with this - when Seth runs off to try and fetch Neil back "before it's too late", Ahnold takes charge and makes everybody pack their stuff into the wagon so they can sneak out of town before daybreak. :P None of these people have any sense, I assert; none. It isn't just Josiah being a sap makes the writing seem bad, it's bad all through.
* So then Neil murders one of his old drinking buddies and sets the barn on fire, and the fire starts spreading through the dry fields, but apparently no one's worrying about that because they're too busy trying to get Neil back to the town and fetch his stuff out of the inn, and he winds up ripping up the innkeeper's shoulder with a handy corkscrew. Chunks and spurting are involved. Ew. I'm pretty sure I've read an excerpt from "Dark Frigate", Mr Hawes's other book on the list, that always made me wince with its graphic descriptions of battles. (Unless I have yet again confused it with "Kidnapped". At least in this book, he has the Robert Louis Stevenson voice going on like nobody's business, except without the fun turns of phrase. "I saw one man go down like a pair of breeks" - that's a Stevenson sentence I have to consciously not plagiarize every time I want to write someone getting hit over the head. Yes, this is why I have never yet published a story where anyone gets hit over the head. Trufax.)
* Anyway. THEY'RE OFF. Running from the law with a murderer, whyyyyyyy? *headshake* Seriously. Stick around and say "we were duped" and get the man hanged. Have some sense already.
* They keep talking about thirty years. Could an editor really miss that? Was it actually supposed to be ten years Cornelius hung around and nothing much changed?
* There is so much potential in this book for Josiah/Ahnold slash, if only the writing wasn't so terribly bad that it doesn't actually work. Seriously, they're sharing a cabin on the ship now, and there keep being all sorts of meaning looks and shoulder-patting and who knows what all. It's so sappy, though.
* The captain of the ship, whom Josiah "likes at once" in the way that tells you he's a Good Person and you're supposed to like him too on no evidence given, has just resigned in Cuba because Neil is a jerk. Also I think the captain has an idea that there's going to be slave-trading and doesn't want to be involved? The foreshadowing is so BAD, I can't tell what it's aiming at, and not just on a Josiah level. There's definitely an actual authorial level of bad writing going on here.
* The use of italics in this book is terrible. Also, apparently the new captain is going to be a sort of Spanish Sydney Greenstreet type, a Cuba-Mafia friend of Neil's who somehow doesn't mind leaving home to captain a slaver himself. Despite being, you know, built like Sydney Greenstreet and with a similar mild manner. O_O
* Oh, Gordon Bennett. '"A man," Arnold had said, "does not tell all that he knows." There was no doubt in my mind that Arnold was a man in every sense of the word.' ...I'll just be over here trying to figure out when I got slash goggles, thank you very. ;P
* So Arnold's been bribing the cabin boy to report to him - and states with assurance that "he does not dare lie to me", in a terribly Sherlock Holmes offhand tone - and apparently knows ALL THE THINGS. He's turning out a bit of a deus ex machina, here, with his mysteriousness and nick-of-time-ness.
* I'm a third of the way through the book.
* Spanish Sydney Greenstreet here is going to be the mate, not the captain, because of reasons. His name is Molly Matterson, so I guess he isn't actually Spanish? Just dark-skinned and speaks Spanish fluently in "a low, effeminate voice". Could be part-Spanish, I guess (I mean, I write about a part-Spanish guy named Mortimer, who am I to talk?). I just have no confidence in this book to do anything well. The n-bombs are flying thick and fast, from the villains; good guys use "negroes", small N, but mostly discuss "the slave trade" more in the abstract.
* Oh, good grief. I flipped ahead to two random points; on one, I found our Josiah remarking "I cared little enough for the mere fate of [our cabin boy, who has probably been taken by cannibals]", and on the other a line ("I had never been so Joe'd in all my life before"; compare with "I had never been so be-Davided since I came on board") that makes me absolutely certain Mr Hawes had been at the Stevenson more than was good for him. I really don't want to just rip this book apart verbally and tack up the pieces next to the relevant bits of Stevensonian art, but it'd be so much easier than going on trying to take it seriously as a good book in its own right.
* ...and one more random point brings up "We were six white men, two of us wounded, three of us arrant desperadoes, but all of us at least white of skin, surrounded by a black horde"...
...I can't handle this book anymore. I'm skipping. I've given it enough of a fair chance to make a judgment, in my own opinion. IT STEEEEEEEEENKS. 120 pages is a fair chance, right? Can I make it the 100-page rule instead of the 50% rule, now I'm out of Gutenberg books and the rest will be dead-tree versions? I'm going to, I think.
...I'm going to put the full title of this book under the cut, because it's one of those that pulls a Moll Flanders and tells you half the story in the subtitle. ;-) The short title is The Great Quest by Charles Boardman Hawes. It isn't on Gutenberg, so if you want to read it you'll have to find it yourself. I don't yet know if that's worth doing.
* "The Great Quest: A romance of 1826, wherein are recorded the experiences of Josiah Woods of Topham, and of those others with whom he sailed for Cuba and the Gulf of Guinea". The frontispiece looks quite fascinating - swordfighting in a ship's fo'c's'le, which may have been done far too many times since Robert Louis Stevenson published Kidnapped but it's still fun.
* Okay, this is set in New England, I think; the first-person narrator, presumably our Josiah Woods, is talking about Yankees and Boston in an American way. I'd assumed it was British-set, for some reason. The language is doing well at the sort of Defoe-Stevenson pastiche we're apparently looking at here.
* "Few country people then were - or now are - so shameless as to lie in bed at six o'clock of a summer morning." Good save, sir. Very well played, explaining past customs in first person without breaking character.
* Our hero goes off on an errand, notices the town is unusually quiet, and now there is apparently a con-man (I'm deducing from hints vouchsafed) who's come back to town after twenty years and nobody knows if it's actually him, so the villagers are hovering round the blacksmith's shop gossiping and speculating. Our young hero doesn't know the guy.
* And we have an untrustworthy dark-eyed ominous stranger, i.e. the con man. I should keep a list. This one's in flash clothing, and has a big nose and bushy brows. :P Good grief. His name's Neil Gleazen, for reference. ...is that supposed to be a Jewish surname derived from Gleason? I can't tell. If he turns out to be an actual Jew I shall scream.
* Our Josiah works in his uncle's store with two other clerks. He overheard a mention of his uncle's name in the gossip at the blacksmith's forge, but nobody would tell him anything. Now the flash stranger Neil Gleazen has gone into Uncle Seth's shop.
* Neil's full name is Cornelius Gleazen. He's a boyhood friend of Uncle Seth's. He wants money, or at least he's talking about it. Uncle Seth is going on about being an honest man. I can't tell if Neil is actually trying to blackmail him over something the author doesn't want to tell us about, or whether the author merely wants us to think that's what's going on. O_O At any rate, Uncle Seth is scared.
* Break to describe the village. Josiah - I'm still assuming that's who the narrator is; the closest we've gotten to a direct address is the blacksmith calling him "Joe" - is describing himself as "a dreamy lad, who knew books better than men". :P I'm not looking forward to a whole book narrated by one of those obnoxious head-in-the-clouds nerds who drive so many adventure plots by walking into something they ought not and calling it a virtue that they weren't canny enough to see trouble coming. David Balfour was annoying enough (yes, there will be many references to Kidnapped in this liveblog; it's on Gutenberg *hint hint* if you've never read it), but Alan Breck Stewart saved the book for me. There's a reason I haven't re-read "Catriona" in years but I own a pocket copy of "Kidnapped". ;P If we don't have an Alan Breck parallel, this'll be a long book.
* Josiah's an orphan. I still don't know how old he is. I'm going to assume he's nineteen until further notice, because Uncle Seth is described much more kindly than David Balfour's Uncle Ebenezer but they are superficially similar character types, and Davie's nineteen. XD Josiah doesn't read like he isn't nineteen so far, if that makes any sense.
* Okay, now Josiah's been sent away while Cornelius and Uncle Seth talk. And Cornelius comes back every day, Josiah never learning any more except that Neil has some very strong hold over Seth and can boss him around like nobody's business. Also the small town, being a small town, is gossiping all the gossip and being rude to Cornelius in the street, and generally playing Power Of Public Opinion to the best of its ability. I'm prejudiced in Neil's favor just for that. ;P Public opinion as the rod of justice ANNOYS ME. *this is a G-rated blog, for language if not for themes*
* There are rumors that Cornelius murdered one Eli Norton twenty years ago, and was followed out of town by law officers, long since dead. Josiah describes them as having "run Gleazen out of town", but I'm not sure the first connotations of that word are meant, since he also says they were "hot on his trail".
* Cornelius was apparently a wild youth in his 1806 way: henhouse raids, drunken revels, burglary, rumored arson. But everyone including Uncle Seth is now being all "omg he might've actually reformed, I don't believe it". *grumpy grump grump* This is going to be a long book. I'm only on page seventeen. O_O
* Okay, pretty much everyone except the blacksmith and the minister believe in Cornelius's demonstrated reformation, including Josiah, whose narration's become a lot more kindly toward him. But Uncle Seth is extremely nervous about him for Mysterious Reasons. Also, Josiah quotes a very peculiar line from the first day's blackmail-ish dialogue - "You and I have robbed too many churches together when we were boys" for Uncle Seth to refuse Neil a hearing - and speculates that this is the source of Seth's odd behavior.
* Neil claims to be friends with the Dictator of Venezuela, one General Paez (I don't know if he's real); Josiah throws in a narratorial "I have wondered since". Certainly the annoying habit of Victorian and pre-Victorian writers of ham-handedly pointing out the Important Stuff in a flashbacky way is in full force here.
* Now the doctor and the minister claim to think Neil's okay, but Josiah both thinks that Neil is laughing up his sleeve at them and after their visit catches the doctor and minister "talking in undertones and smiling significantly"? I'm too confused for this book. :P Foreshadowing is one thing, but these shadows are so thick I can't even follow the plot anymore.
* ONWARD. Because I am stubborn. But I'm calling my halfway rule: if nothing happens by page 180 (there are 360 pages, handy) to persuade me to spend any more time on this book, I'm making a "couldn't finish" tag.
* Next up, Josiah's off on another errand, at night this time, and takes a shortcut across a field. He sees a light in an old barn, goes to investigate in case of fire because it's a dry summer, sees four men playing cards in secret, cannot identify any of them, and falls off a wall. Give us some solid info already, O writer! I'm tired of waiting. Drawing out the hints and giggles for this long is not intriguing, it's boring.
* Descriptions of the two other clerks. Arnold Lamont is a mysterious Frenchman who claims "fortunes of war" for his unexplained cropping-up around 1814 or 1816 and will explain no more; Sim Muzzy (that's his name, I'm not amused) is "a well-meaning, simple fellow", which I suspect is code for "mentally not up to snuff". Seriously, Muzzy. Black mark, sir. Sim is also "petulant, talkative", and a terrible chess player.
* Reference to Sim's "poor wits" confirms he's mentally challenged. Detailed description of his "biting his lip and puzzling this way and that and working his fingers" when distressed. Oy. I am not at all comfortable with this book.
* Cornelius turns up sweaty and possibly winded or possibly it's just Josiah's imagination. Could he have been one of the men at the secret card game? (Why on earth does it matter if he was, you utter load of snotty Puritan nosey-parkers?) End chapter.
* Neil now begins to hand out all sorts of trinkets and gewgaws to the kidlets, having acted arrogant and snotty till the Arbiters of Taste approved of him, and now becoming sweet and nice. I go a step further and postulate that the author probably thinks he's giving us information but doesn't realize that nobody in this book is at all convincing or makes any sense. They're little cardboard puppets who dance as they are told to by the Plot.
* I'm going to start skimming and making notes less often. :P I'm still only on page 27, and I want to get through this thing. I am not enjoying it.
* Josiah is in his early twenties.
* Cornelius brings out fencing-gear for the young men of the town, proposes to hold a fencing school, and singles out Josiah (called "Joe Woods" here) as having the making of a swordsman, presumably before he's ever seen the lad fence. "It never occurred to me that Cornelius Gleazen could have had a motive that did not appear on the surface for so choosing my name from all the rest," narrator!Josiah remarks, and I HEADDESK FOREVER. At least make up your mind whether you're suspicious of the man or not, Josiah! If you're going to observe him suspiciously in your own character, be consistently suspicious. If you're only going to suspect him in hindsight, keep on with the Little Did I Know shtick. But make up your mind!
* "in spite of my youth I instinctively felt that only by suffering could a man [Arnold Lamont] win his way to such kindly, quiet dignity." Good grief. You mean people besides Anne of Green Gables actually go on that way? (Plot recap: Neil's fencing school is a thing. Josiah caught Arnold snickering at it one day, and thought Josiah himself was the one being laughed at. Obvsly it's Neil really, but anyway. Somehow the topic came up in the middle of a quarrel over whether Josiah is interested in the ladies / going to get married someday, which quarrel is hinting awkwardly that Arnold has lost his wife in the war and doesn't want to talk about it. Also Josiah stops for a digression about how he's going to fall in love soon and he and Arnold are going to go on far adventures together. GET ON WITH IT ALREADY. I don't even care if you fall in love horribly sappily as long as something happens that isn't hints and hyper-dense foreshadowings!
* "Perhaps, had we been keener, we should have suspected that something was wrong, simply because no one - except a few stupid persons like the blacksmith - had a word to say against Neil Gleazen. You would at least have expected his old cronies to resent his leaving them for more respectable company. But not even from them did there come a whisper of suspicion or complaint." Good grief, man. Stop trying to write a novel and go ghostwrite for Steven Moffat; the number of timeline tenses you're trying to juggle here, with all the flashbacks and flash-soons and if-onlys, thoroughly justifies it. Also the fail matches up well. ;P I think the only lady we've had a glimpse of so far was the mincing flirt who started the quarrel between Josiah and Arnold up there.
* Now Uncle Seth has broached the topic of going away to adventure for rich stakes, still in terms that wouldn't make any sense if I hadn't read the subtitle, but at least it's a sign of maybe getting an A-plot sometime this century. ;-) Also, Cornelius is all of the respected and they're talking about him going to Congress, and not lightly either.
* Mmmkay, Cornelius wants Uncle Seth's money to buy a ship, I assume for the aforemooted adventure to Cuba and Guinea. The map in the front of the book (I had to check about Guinea) seems to indicate they'll also wind up in Montevideo afterward, and I note rather suspiciously that there's no sign of a return route. Hm.
* Oh lord. Cuba? Guinea? 1826? Tell me Cornelius isn't fitting out a slaver. I don't think I can take this man's attempts at writing about the slave trade. And I have another book by him on my list - "The Dark Frigate", which may well be about either a slaver or pirates or both, if this one is not.
* Now Uncle Seth is calling someone's mortgage and threatening to foreclose, in order to raise more money for the venture (I assume). The guy who holds the mortgage is OF COURSE portrayed as this totally stand-up guy who's just had a run of specified bad luck - horse broke its leg and he had to shoot it, he's been so sick his crops failed, AND he's "good for the money and he pays his interest on the day it's due". Gordon Bennett. Sorry, I'm in a mood, but all this care to specify that X, Y, or Z person who lacks money is quite definitely A Good Person Anyway They Were Just Unfortunate gets on my nerves. It's the natural progression of the Land Of Opportunity flipside where anyone poor or downtrodden had to be lazy and undeserving unless it's specifically specified they were not.
...look at me, I'm so mad I can write a phrase like "specifically specified" and not even change it. ;P I've just dealt with that "but it's a GOOD poor person! not like alla THEM poor people! I can help it without implying I should help ALL the peoples!" far too much IRL.
* Mmmkay, so Josiah goes to call the mortgage because Seth sent him to and Josiah thinks it'll be easier on the mortgagee (why I do not know; no one in this story has any rational motivations beyond the thinnest tissue-paper excuses for advancing The Plot), and then a storm hits and Josiah has to stay overnight and sees the mortgagee, whose name is Abraham Guptil, sneak off over the field in the morning on an unknown errand. I'm so tired of documenting foreshadows.
* Anyway, and now Josiah has promised to see Mr Guptil and his wife and kid safely settled with another home and job, and has no idea how he's going to do that. ANNOYING IDIOT JOSIAH.
* I do hope I don't have a straight-up good/bad/good/bad counterchange throughout the list. That would be too weird. *counts up* At least it can only last till 1936, because otherwise I'd have to declare The Good Master a bad book. (Please, please don't let that happen on re-reading... :P)
* Oh, good grief. Now Arnold has agreed to fence with Josiah, has revealed himself to be an excellent fencer - much better than Josiah - and now Josiah Is Struck By The Realization that Ahnold (I have to get my laughs somewhere) is No Mere Shopkeeper's Clerk. If this really is one of the best books of the year, I pity the year. ;P
* Uncle Seth announces "I've bought a ship and we're all going to Africa." Who "all" may be is not yet specified. Gee whillikers, I am starting to think longingly of some of the books I've read from this list that I didn't even like the first time around, because I'm pretty sure they're going to be more readable than this one. I'm only 45 pages in! Out of 360! :P And I can't skim because of all the snickerdoodle foreshadowing.
(Um. That was me not swearing. I really need to get better at it. *g*)
* Wait, Neil's now been run out of town THIRTY years before? Seriously, get a better editor. If ten years have just now gone by... I thought it was one winter. Maybe a year at most. I hope that's a typo. :P
* And then Cornelius walks by the store In A Scornfully Triumphant Way, in the dark, not knowing that Josiah is watching him. And this is the end of Part One. THIS IS A TERRIBLY BADLY WRITTEN BOOK. WHY, O NEWBERY COMMITTEE, WHY.
* ...I just peeked at the end of the book. Josiah's going to come back from Africa (via South America) with not only a wife but, I quote, "the black Fantee, Paul, who remained the most faithful of servants". I have ceased to care at all about this book. :P What on earth is a Fantee, anyway? Is it a name for a tribe of black people, like Hottentot? I've only heard of "going fantée", small f, as a synonym for going native, and I always thought it was connected to India in some way. *googles* Okay, it was a colonial-era country in Africa, somewhere in the area of modern-day Togo. (Heehee, I love linking people to the CIA World Factbook when it's apropos. It feels so... spyish. XD)
I am still committed to the idea of doing this book justice, but the practicality has me wondering. :P
* Face, meet palm. This book's Wiki entry gives me the very important bit of information I did not have before: that there were 212 votes cast for the first Newbery, that the winner of that year took 163 of them, and that The Great Quest came in second with TWENTY-TWO. Meaning the others had even less. My guess is that this year, at least, the whole shortlist was given runner-up status (as it was then called), and thus titled Honor Books when the name was converted even though half of them are undeserving the honor. (If you ask me, three of the six shouldn't even have been on the shortlist. o_O)
* According to The Newbery and Caldecott Medals: A Guide to the Medal and Honor Books (linked off Wiki), all the books which received any votes in the first Newbery were included on the list. "Great Quest" took 22, "Cedric" took 7, "Old Tobacco Shop" took 5, "Golden Fleece" took 4, and "Windy Hill" took 2.
* Okay, new solution. I'm keeping the 50% rule for hopeless cases, but before that recourse, there is Speed Liveblogging. I keep trying to liveblog in a great deal of detail because I'm worried I won't do justice (what justice there is) to the book otherwise, but - from here till the end of the book, new rule. As long as I give at least one sentence per chapter of remarks, plus quote anything especially hilarible, I'm good. It's better than not finishing at all. ;P
* By the math I'm only an eighth of the way through. OKAY THEN. Also, there will be unexpected slave-trading, I found a spoiler. Oy VEY.
* This thing sounds like the young Anne of Green Gables wrote it. Seriously, it's full of presentiments and "instinctively felt" and all the rest. Although, whatever else you can say about Anne, I think she'd have put ladies in! :D
* Young Josiah is a major jerk to Sim Muzzy of the terrible name. I do not like Mr Charles Boardman Hawes, though I am somewhat mollified toward him by learning that he died at age 34 without getting the news that he'd won a Newbery Medal (not for this object - for his OTHER entry on the list, "The Dark Frigate").
* Ahnold is being foreshadowy and mysterious and solemn and wise. o_O Seriously, terrible writer, how did the Newbery nominators like this stuff.
* Josiah tells in a very clumsy way how his attitudes toward Neil, Seth, Sim, and Ahnold show basically how young and snotty and naive he was... and then adds, "Although I have betrayed my vanity in a none too flattering light, it would be unjust, I truly think, not to add, at the risk of seeming to contradict myself, that I was instinctively kind-hearted, and that I did not lack for courage." Which is so hilarible that I begin to wonder: is Mr Hawes really a bad writer, or is JOSIAH just such a terrible writer and Mr Hawes makes the mistake - or the artistic choice - of staying too closely in his voice? I don't know.
* Okay, they're under the impression they're going to fetch a treasure of gold hidden on the coast of Guinea. All of them: Neil, Seth, Josiah, Sim, Ahnold, plus the foreclosed mortgagee Abraham Guptil, who I assume is going to leave his wife and child behind? :P They'll stop in Cuba first to add some more men to their crew.
* Golly mackerel, and now Abe Guptil has signed for the voyage without even knowing about the gold? Just leaves his wife and kid at her dad's place, and signs on, because he doesn't have his farm anymore. I mean, I suppose it's possible, but... if it were me, just knowing about voyage-wages, I'd either stay home and be a hired man on a farm, or sign on a ship not manned entirely by weirdos. (No offence to Sim; I'm assuming Abe will think of him as a poor hapless weirdo to snicker at behind his back, like Josiah asserts the rest of them do. And I think the others are weirdos. *g*)
* And once Uncle Seth's shop is sold, Neil goes out and gets drunk with his old rowdies, who are apparently the people he was playing cards with in the abandoned barn, before. Because *omg* it's Too Late for Seth to back out of whatever! Nobody argues with this - when Seth runs off to try and fetch Neil back "before it's too late", Ahnold takes charge and makes everybody pack their stuff into the wagon so they can sneak out of town before daybreak. :P None of these people have any sense, I assert; none. It isn't just Josiah being a sap makes the writing seem bad, it's bad all through.
* So then Neil murders one of his old drinking buddies and sets the barn on fire, and the fire starts spreading through the dry fields, but apparently no one's worrying about that because they're too busy trying to get Neil back to the town and fetch his stuff out of the inn, and he winds up ripping up the innkeeper's shoulder with a handy corkscrew. Chunks and spurting are involved. Ew. I'm pretty sure I've read an excerpt from "Dark Frigate", Mr Hawes's other book on the list, that always made me wince with its graphic descriptions of battles. (Unless I have yet again confused it with "Kidnapped". At least in this book, he has the Robert Louis Stevenson voice going on like nobody's business, except without the fun turns of phrase. "I saw one man go down like a pair of breeks" - that's a Stevenson sentence I have to consciously not plagiarize every time I want to write someone getting hit over the head. Yes, this is why I have never yet published a story where anyone gets hit over the head. Trufax.)
* Anyway. THEY'RE OFF. Running from the law with a murderer, whyyyyyyy? *headshake* Seriously. Stick around and say "we were duped" and get the man hanged. Have some sense already.
* They keep talking about thirty years. Could an editor really miss that? Was it actually supposed to be ten years Cornelius hung around and nothing much changed?
* There is so much potential in this book for Josiah/Ahnold slash, if only the writing wasn't so terribly bad that it doesn't actually work. Seriously, they're sharing a cabin on the ship now, and there keep being all sorts of meaning looks and shoulder-patting and who knows what all. It's so sappy, though.
* The captain of the ship, whom Josiah "likes at once" in the way that tells you he's a Good Person and you're supposed to like him too on no evidence given, has just resigned in Cuba because Neil is a jerk. Also I think the captain has an idea that there's going to be slave-trading and doesn't want to be involved? The foreshadowing is so BAD, I can't tell what it's aiming at, and not just on a Josiah level. There's definitely an actual authorial level of bad writing going on here.
* The use of italics in this book is terrible. Also, apparently the new captain is going to be a sort of Spanish Sydney Greenstreet type, a Cuba-Mafia friend of Neil's who somehow doesn't mind leaving home to captain a slaver himself. Despite being, you know, built like Sydney Greenstreet and with a similar mild manner. O_O
* Oh, Gordon Bennett. '"A man," Arnold had said, "does not tell all that he knows." There was no doubt in my mind that Arnold was a man in every sense of the word.' ...I'll just be over here trying to figure out when I got slash goggles, thank you very. ;P
* So Arnold's been bribing the cabin boy to report to him - and states with assurance that "he does not dare lie to me", in a terribly Sherlock Holmes offhand tone - and apparently knows ALL THE THINGS. He's turning out a bit of a deus ex machina, here, with his mysteriousness and nick-of-time-ness.
* I'm a third of the way through the book.
* Spanish Sydney Greenstreet here is going to be the mate, not the captain, because of reasons. His name is Molly Matterson, so I guess he isn't actually Spanish? Just dark-skinned and speaks Spanish fluently in "a low, effeminate voice". Could be part-Spanish, I guess (I mean, I write about a part-Spanish guy named Mortimer, who am I to talk?). I just have no confidence in this book to do anything well. The n-bombs are flying thick and fast, from the villains; good guys use "negroes", small N, but mostly discuss "the slave trade" more in the abstract.
* Oh, good grief. I flipped ahead to two random points; on one, I found our Josiah remarking "I cared little enough for the mere fate of [our cabin boy, who has probably been taken by cannibals]", and on the other a line ("I had never been so Joe'd in all my life before"; compare with "I had never been so be-Davided since I came on board") that makes me absolutely certain Mr Hawes had been at the Stevenson more than was good for him. I really don't want to just rip this book apart verbally and tack up the pieces next to the relevant bits of Stevensonian art, but it'd be so much easier than going on trying to take it seriously as a good book in its own right.
* ...and one more random point brings up "We were six white men, two of us wounded, three of us arrant desperadoes, but all of us at least white of skin, surrounded by a black horde"...
...I can't handle this book anymore. I'm skipping. I've given it enough of a fair chance to make a judgment, in my own opinion. IT STEEEEEEEEENKS. 120 pages is a fair chance, right? Can I make it the 100-page rule instead of the 50% rule, now I'm out of Gutenberg books and the rest will be dead-tree versions? I'm going to, I think.
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"Great Quest" took 22, ... "Old Tobacco Shop" took 5, ... and "Windy Hill" took 2.
That explains a lot, and I bet you wished you'd known that before you read them.
one of those obnoxious head-in-the-clouds nerds who drive so many adventure plots by walking into something they ought not and calling it a virtue that they weren't canny enough to see trouble coming
One of these days, I really need to write that rant about the protagonist of Schmitz's The Witches of Karres...
no subject
On the other hand, whoever voted for "Cedric" and "Golden Fleece" had pretty good taste, even if there were only 11 of them together as opposed to these inexplicable 29... ^_^
*googles "Witches of Karres"* Uh. Wow. I would be interested in the rant? :-) Also, I can't think of any novelette / short story off the bat that was improved by being expanded imo, although I'm sure there is at least one I'll think of as soon as I post this. XD
(Wait, I lie. Cobra by Timothy Zahn - started with a short story, got a sequel, expanded into a book with three more short-stories, happens to be all-round amazingness. Highly recommended if you like thinky sci-fi, well-handled PTSD, complicated characters doing space politics, and/or really good cyborg fight scenes. :D Can't recall if I've squeed about it on my personal journal's "reading log" tag, but that's one of the two dozen books I grabbed off my bookshelf on the Desert Island Question a week or two back.)
no subject
The examples that occur to me off the top of my head suggest that turning a series of short stories into a book tends to be successful more often than expanding a single short story to book length. That tends to raise the question: if all this new stuff matters, why wasn't it in the story in the first place? (I remember Anne McCaffrey once answered that by making the novel follow the short story only up to the point where the male lead propositions the heroine: in the original short, she surrenders to his charms, but in the novel, she knocks him out with a spanner and runs for it. I wouldn't count the novel as a successful expansion, all told, but that part was amusing.)
Having mentioned the rant with, I admit, the hope of being asked to say on, I'm now having second thoughts about whether it would be wise or fair to rant without re-reading the book and making sure I have an accurate memory of its faults. That would mean finding another copy, since I didn't like it enough to keep the first time I read it.
Also, I'm curious: was there a particular thing you googled that prompted the "Uh. Wow.", or was that just a general reaction?
no subject
Also - I don't even know if this is an accurate impression, but each paragraph of the summary sounds like a different sci-fi trope / story. It's late at night here, I'm not sure if I'm making sense, but... like, the third paragraph sent my head straight to Andre Norton's Plague Ship, while the second paragraph reminds me strongly of a Star Wars tie-in novel but I can't identify which one. :P Is it as... plot-twist-packed as all that makes it sound, or does it more try and fail? (Or do you recall clearly enough to say?)
I love that summary, though. I kind of want to take it apart and try to write a drabble series in the tones of the different books it reminds me of, or something. My favorite part is the paragraph that just says. "And they want the Sheewash drive. Avidly." It's so noir.
****
ETA: TIMOTHY ZAAAAAAAAAHN. Which of his have you read? (Have you got hold of the Quadrail series, "Night Train to Rigel" etc? I love those to pieces. ...paired with the aforegoing paragraph, I might have just given away my sekrit passion for ALL THE NOIR. XD It's rather startling how little noir I'm actually familiar with, given how much I like the atmosphere. "Casablanca" doesn't really count, does it? Even though "Humphrey Bogart deadpans in a trench coat" is a plot point. ;P)
no subject
From what I remember, it's not so much plot-twist-packed as it is that kind of pulp-fiction plot where there's a plot thread with a set of adventures strung onto it like beads, and the individual adventures don't necessarily have a lot to do with each other. Like, to complete their objectives they have to visit three planets, and on one planet they have an adventure involving spies, and on another planet they have an adventure involving giant killer reptiles, and on the way to the third planet they have an adventure involving pirates, and on the final planet they have an adventure involving whatever it was they've been chasing around all these planets for. (NB: The preceding sentence doesn't necessarily bear any resemblance to the actual plot of "The Witches of Karres".)
I have to admit that the only Timothy Zahn I've actually read are his first set of Star Wars novels. (Makes propitiatory gesture toward the ghost of Alec Guinness, who reputedly got really narky about people who couldn't distinguish between "I'm a big fan of your work" and "I loved you in Star Wars".) I'm not sure how much of his own stuff made it out to this part of the world; I don't remember having seen any of it around.
(Oh! Computer says the entire Quadrail series is available through inter-library loan! ..."Cobra" hasn't become available since I checked this morning, though. Not good enough!)
no subject
*checks on Quadrail series* Ooh, #5 is out! I need to read that after I get back from vacation. I've only read through #4, which ends on a cliffie.