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justice_turtle ([personal profile] justice_turtle) wrote in [community profile] readallthenewberys2012-07-17 04:20 am

Newbery Honor: The Old Tobacco Shop, A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventu

TRIGGER WARNING: you don't want to read this liveblog if you have a "stranger danger" trigger. Seriously, don't.

Standard disclaimer: opinions are mine, books are not, Newberys belong to the ALA. Anon commenting is on, IP logging and CAPTCHA are on, anon comments screened for review.

Today's book is The Old Tobacco Shop: A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure by William Bowen, but I can't fit all that in the post title.



* ...oookay, this is officially a creepy book already. Because the first thing that happens is, a little boy is sent to the tobacco shop to buy his father some more tobacco, and the tobacconist makes him believe the wooden statue in front of the shop (not a caricature Native American for once; a hunchback instead, I don't even, why?) will come alive and EAT HIM, and drags him into the back room of the shop "to be safe". :P

* Good grief, the amount of rambling description this author does in between anything happening. I know my Kindle makes the pages pretty small, but if Mr William Bowen was not getting paid by the word I'd like to know why.

* "Freddie hung back a little, but his hand was gripped tight, and he couldn't have got away if he had tugged with all his might." Somebody tell me why "creeptastic" is not a valid reason for not making something a Newbery Honor Book, and also why I am reading this. ;P

* What happens next is, the kid meets the tobacconist's Aunt Amanda, who apparently lives in the back room, and sews and has her mouth full of pins most of the time. She judges the tobacconist for playing tricks on the little boy, but then she persuades the kid to come see her often by giving him gingerbread, so I am not less creeped out yet.

* How young is this kid? He's saying his name "Fweddie" and can't read a clock yet; he seems about five to me. This is altogether disturbing. O_O And I'm only about 6% in.

* Also the tobacconist keeps bullying the kid to say "Freddie" instead of "Fweddie" as if that'll help. :P I know it was a thing back in the day, but seriously, this book is full of problematic weirdness to the exclusion of all else so far.

* I don't like ANY of the grown-ups in this book at all. Now the sexton of the church is telling the kid it's against the law to wear his fancy clothes on a Saturday - apparently he's having a party with the tobacconist and Aunt Amanda to celebrate the fact that the kid can now say "Freddie", and so he got dressed up, but his shoes squeaked and woke up the sexton who was napping on the church porch. So the sexton's taking it out on the kid by telling him lies. Seriously, how so many annoying grown-ups.

* Also I don't think much of the kid's parents, if they randomly let a very creepy tobacconist take their kid to a pantomime by himself. Honestly I don't think much of anyone who sends a five-year-old to buy tobacco, either, but it was a different time. *handwave* Still and all, I don't like any of these grownups. (Well, I reserve judgment on Aunt Amanda; her main failing so far is a lack of keeping the tobacconist in line.)

* I do not even understand this conversation between Freddie and Aunt Amanda about the children she's never had - her being an old maid - but it's weird.

* And then the tobacconist asks the kid to look after the shop, because everyone in this book is extremely weird, and the kid takes a notion to smoke some ostensibly-magic Chinese tobacco that the tobacconist keeps going on and on about how nobody should ever smoke it because MAGIC.

* On which it actually turns out to be magic, which... is more actual anything-happening than I had come to expect from this book. *g* Anyway, for some reason, smoking magic Chinese tobacco kept in a china jar shaped like a Chinaman's head summons, not a Chinese person or a dragon, but a one-eyed sailor of apparently Caucasian extraction. O_O At least, his name's Lemuel Mizzen.

* ...now I have to research if cochineal actually comes from "Cochin China" or not. Oh my word. *researches* 'Kay, that's completely wrong: cochineal is native to South and Central America, but a similar dye came from Cochin in India, whence the name. "Cochin China" was apparently the Portuguese name for a province in South Vietnam, named after Cochin-in-India for reasons Wiki doesn't tell me.

* Okay, and the magical sailor has given the kid a treasure map in exchange for a plug of chewing tobacco. O_O

* And now the wooden not-Indian hunchback has actually come alive and the tobacconist has brought him into the shop, to speak terrible phonetic semi-Cockney and show no sign of eating little boys alive. This book is certainly a lot more interesting than the first quarter or so of it seemed to indicate.

* And then two old men from a song the tobacconist sings, who are mainly distinguished by one of them never having any tobacco in his tobacco box and the other always having some, have also turned up as real people, and the back room where Aunt Amanda sits is getting ridiculously busy and crowded. O_O I keep doing that emoticon.

* Good grief, what? I am dubious of this story's not being a dream starting when the magic sailor is summoned, although that would be cheating because it's been stated beforehand that the little boy dreams about these various characters regularly. But anyway, the mime from the pantomime just turned up pursued by a troupe of red devil-imps, which were banished by the sexton or churchwarden (I am thoroughly confused which he is, because Freddie is confused and the author is trying to write entirely at Freddie's cognitive level) using a bottle of Odour of Sanctity. I kid you not.

* And now Aunt Amanda has read out the writing on the treasure map and it's apparently a map to a sort of fountain-of-youth deal on an island somewhere in the Spanish Main. So the whole gang want to go and find it and have their circumstances fixed - the hunchback tobacconist and the maiden aunt, and the mime who can't speak and the guy with no money to buy tobacco and the obese sexton, because the writing on the map says specifically that all these things will be fixed by the island-of-youth-and-such. O_O

* ...so the grown-ups gang up on the kid and force him to smoke more of the magic tobacco even though he doesn't want to, in order to summon the sailor again. I do not like this book at all. Newbery Committee of 1922, I think your taste was wildly variable, not to say despicable in spots.

* I am now thinking very hard on what criteria I should set for skipping the rest of a book. I don't want to, because I'm a completist, but oh my giddy aunt.

* And now the kid's been talked into leaving for the Spanish Main without leaving his mum a note, even. The tobacconist says he'll write one "in the morning". O_O

* The next thing that happens, after the kid being seasick a few days on the boat, is the tobacconist admitting he forgot to leave a note. I REALLY DON'T LIKE THIS BOOK OKAY.

* And now there's a stammering cabin-boy and a stammering parrot, and apparently the parrot either is an intelligent lifeform making fun of the cabin-boy, or the cabin-boy thinks he is. I just don't know what to believe anymore in this book. I'm at 37%...

* After which the tobacconist talks the live wooden hunchback into singing, and then ROFLOLs at his accent. There are no nice people in this book. If nothing redeemable happens by the time I hit 50% I'm not sure I'm going to finish.

* ...the cabin-boy, being angry at the magic sailor for (apparently) teaching the parrot to stutter, has thrown all the bailing-dippers overboard, which as the ship is called the "Sieve" and leaks accordingly, is causing the ship to sink. So because EVERYONE IN THIS BOOK IS IMPOSSIBLY STUPID, they are having to make a raft out of mattresses, because of reasons.

* And now the cabin-boy tried to throw the pot of magic tobacco across the gap to them and missed, and it has sunk in the ocean, and the author is indulging himself in that annoying stylistic phrase of bad omniscient authors, "How terrible it really was they did not even yet understand, but they were soon to learn."

* ...um, and now the ship has faded away because the tobacco is gone, but the mattresses that came off it are still solid.

* And now some sort of a whale-fish, with giant sawteeth but also a spout, has got his dorsal fin embedded in the mattresses and is pulling the raft along the surface of the ocean (without sounding / diving AS WOULD BE SENSIBLE) to Somewhere.

* ...okay, and now they went through a tunnel-arch into the inside of a cliff-surrounded island, which I don't mind because Kipling did it too, but then they fell down a giant waterfall into about two feet deep of water and nobody was hurt. I can't even this book anymore. :P

* And now there are seven pirates who have swum into the lagoon-cave-lair in waterproof burlap sacks, and Aunt Amanda just fainted. I really hate to leave only the third book I try unfinished, but my patience is running OUT.

* And these terribly posh pirates have now explained that they are going to kill the adventurers by cutting their heads off - lady and child included - but instead of doing it directly, they take them to swim through the underground passage without drowning them first. Um. WHY?

* Of course the first person to have his head cut off is the mime, whose head we have seen cut off and put back on before; apparently this isn't a stage trick but an actual thing he does. O_O So he puts his head back on, and the pirate captain gets angry and tries to kill the executioner, and Aunt Amanda shrieks and tells him off - which, good for her, finally showing some gumption - and the captain is all like "welp, that's it, we can't execute you; guess we have to retire in High Dudgeon" (his capitals, not mine, for once).

* ...no, they're retiring to their home in High Dudgeon. Which is a place. And they're taking the adventurers with them, presumably to kill them later.

* Now we're getting back to the creepiness - mysterious hints about what might be in a pigeon pie besides chicken, and thirteen people in a tower (called Low Dudgeon) who don't live there per se (I assume they're dead / zombies), and so forth. This guy is good at creepy, but he ought not be allowed to write for kids. He ought to be sent to one of those behind-the-scenes places in fantasy novels where they write the world, and set to design acid trips.

* And once again the creepiness fails of its promise, as what's in the pigeon pie is a key, snuck there by a pirate who's taken a fancy to Aunt Amanda. So they escape at night - all of them, because one key opens all the door-locks OF COURSE...

* ...and meet up with the Society for Piratical Research, who wear fancy Victorian clothes and are even more excessively posh than the pirates. They're the Committee for Doubtful and Fanciful Tales, or the DAFT Committee, which is the first funny joke I've met in this book.

* Everyone is being thoroughly thickheaded, saying they'll be safer in the tower of Low Dudgeon than out in the forest, and completely ignoring the fact that thirteen undead people probably live there. Why am I reading this at night?

* Dude, not only were the dead thirteen not undead (just dead), but the sexton finally figured out that the pirates were all evil spirits because they'd been around pirating for 200 years, and banished them with his bottled Odour of Sanctity. O_O This is seriously the weirdest book ever.

* And then they find a 200-year-old sailor in the closet, who wasn't killed with the other pirates, and he tells them about a page's worth of his evil deeds and then disintegrates from the remaining Odour of Sanctity in the room; but he stays as a partial ghosty-thing, stuck in one place, and the Society for Piratical Research take claim of him as an exhibit to set up a museum around. O_O

* But the evil sailor gave the adventurers a note that tells how to buy a magic carpet, so they go back to the pirates' cave to collect all the treasure because they declare it now belongs to them, the pirates all being evaporated.

* And the tobacconist and the live wooden hunchback are quarrelling because the hunchback turns out to be anti-tobacco himself, so now the tobacconist says he's going to get an Indian for outside his door next time. :P

* Yadda yadda description. If I wasn't so utterly bored of this book I might speak well of it, but the author has no sense of when to stop or how to choose details well.

* Hrm, and now it seems that Aunt Amanda is going to turn out to be an enchanted princess, young and beautiful, identified by a birthmark on her finger. At least, I can't see any other interpretation for the story about a ruby ring we just heard - although as has been seen several times, predicting this book is about the last thing I should try to do. 8P

* And they've gone and lost both their treasure-map and the paper that tells them how to buy the magic carpet (I am assuming it is a magic carpet; that wasn't explicitly stated yet), and are going to try it from memory. Whyyyyy am I doing this.

* Or, um, let's see, they want to see a rug merchant who's apparently several hundred years old, dead, and whose spirit lives in a secret passageway behind seven stopped clocks with a secret code to them. This keeps getting weirder.

* He's a mummy. They're meeting a mummified rug merchant who's smoking a hookah and looking at them with eyes. O_O

* And they're not buying a flying carpet after all. They're buying magic hourglasses.

* ...uh. It seems the magic hourglasses hold the enchantment that has ALL of them enchanted into what they aren't; goodness only knows what everyone besides Aunt Amanda is. And so they have to put on white robes and walk through the White Fire of Purification holding the hourglasses, in order to destroy them and be unenchanted. At least I'm 79% of the way through now, so we ought to be reaching the climax of the book.

* Yup. And Aunt Amanda is now young and fair-haired and beautiful, not ginger or lame-legged anymore; Freddie is tall and grown-up; the tobacconist and the live wooden hunchback are neither of them hunchbacked; the fat sexton is thin and monastic; and the mute mime is a blathering Irishman! O_O An extremely good-looking Irishman, too. Seriously, this book. So much weird ableism and what-have-you.

* Okay, Aunt Amanda isn't a Princess, she's the Queen? I am confused. But anyway, everyone settles down happily in their roles on this magic island, and seems about ready to live happily ever after...

* ...except Freddie, now the Chevalier Frederick, takes one of the princes on an expedition up the mountain, where they meet an old man with a broken leg who makes Freddie carry him a ways and then demands fennel seeds and disappears while they're looking for them, and makes Freddie numb and chilled.

* So Freddie falls into a frozen coma and thinks he is little-boy-Freddie again, and I am entirely confused about everything.

* But the former adventurers take him on a climb up a high magic tower, and meet the old magician dude... and the magician dude says, hey, none of you were enchanted BEFORE but you all are now and I must un-enchant you again, kthxbai. Which is less ableist but waaaaaay more confusing, also I am not pleased that the eebil magician who (I am now being told) enchanted them was an Arabian type and this benevolent guy is white.

* So the moral of the story is "there's no place like home" and also "be yourself", but oh my word what a roundabout way to get there. And then there's another chapter, because of course there is, but the entire point of it is that you're not supposed to be sure whether little!Freddie was ill and delirious the entire time or whether the whole adventure happened and everyone is carefully not talking about it. Except they keep winking, so it's the latter, and oy.



In brief: lots of ableism, racism, awful people, and general facepalmery. Not worth reading at all; I'm not sure the liveblog is worth reading. :P
bookblather: A picture of Yomiko Readman looking at books with the text "bookgasm." (Default)

[personal profile] bookblather 2012-07-17 11:58 pm (UTC)(link)
Uh...

Oh man. I've only read your liveblog and already I am full of "WHAT DID I JUST READ."