Dream with Our Eyes Open

Arnold Spirit Jr., known as Junior, is having one heck of a life. He was born 14 years ago with hydrocephalus (water on the brain) and a mouth that eventually grew 10 more teeth than the norm. As a result of his brain problems and the surgery that he had at 6 months of age to correct them, he has serious vision problems, a huge head, seizures, a stutter, and a lisp. His family is dirt poor, his father is an alcoholic, .

But he is also a budding cartoonist, a Spokane Indian, a passionate, loving soul, and despite everything, an optimist.

In a whirlwind chain of events that starts when he realizes that his geometry text is 30 years old, loses his temper, and throws the book across the room, Junior enrolls the previously all-white high school in the town 22 miles away, loses and makes friends, becomes a basketball star, lands in the hospital, and experiences tragedy after tragedy among those he loves. And he still hangs onto his hopes through it all.

It sounds as though this should be a tragic, touching book - and it is. But it is also hilariously funny. It's illustrated throughout with drawings by Ellen Forney, which represent Junior's cartoons and drawings and add to the the book's charm and wit.

(Read more ... with spoilers!)

I liked this a lot: after I finished it, I went back and read all my favorite bits, and then started the whole book over again.

On a holy mountain in the center of the Twelve Kingdoms, a fantastical creature - a chimera by definition, but called a lamia in the story - is born for the express purpose of nurturing the next-born kirin, one of the sacred beings who are the only ones who can make a king. She is given the name Sansi and settles down to wait for the lodestar of her life - whom she already calls by his formal name, Taiki - to finish gestation and be born. But a magical storm of great force blows across the mountain, and the embryonic kirin ends up in our world, in the womb of a normal human woman. Sansi is left bereft for 10 years.

Taiki is born a human child, into a troubled family that doesn't understand him. As we meet him, he's undergoing a punishment of being forced to stand outside without a coat, in the falling snow. It's not too surprising that when he suddenly sees something strange in the narrow space between the house and the shed - a human arm and hand, protruding from a space too small for such a limb to fit - he goes to investigate. And finds himself pulled into another world.

This story is a journey mainly of the mind and the heart - although we also learn a great deal of the mythology and ways of the Twelve Kingdoms. Taiki, raised to think of himself as human being who seemed to lack most of the attributes his family desired, is suddenly pampered and cherished - and charged with the destiny of entire kingdom. Will he ever be able to tap into the powers that a kirin rightfully born into its animal form knows how to use instinctively? And how can he possibly make a wise choice among the supplicants who seek the throne of the Kingdom of Tai? Sansi, born to essentially serve as his mother, is similarly left adrift by the arrival of her 10-year-old charge, whom she never got to nurse as a infant kirin (are they called fawns? - or kids, maybe?) and whom she cannot teach what he needs to know.

Despite the weirdness of the Twelve Kingdoms cosmology and biology - the way that both children and young animals are born still flips me out - I was touched by both Sansi's and Taiki's situations. When Taiki makes his choice - and nearly drives himself mad with doubts over it - it was all too easy to identify with his pain and bewilderment. The resolution of the situation is emotionally satisfying and involves some of my favorite characters from volume 1.

Sometimes I read a book, and it feels as though the author has decided to write in the style of some other author. For example, Thursday's Children, which tells the story of sister-brother ballet students Crystal and Doone Penny, reads as though author Rumer Godden had decided to write a la Noel Streatfield, author of Ballet Shoes and other children's classics about children in the performing arts. Similarly, Interworld reads as though Gaiman and Reaves had decided to write a Diana Wynne Jones science fiction/fantasy novel, somewhat in the mold of both The Homeward Bounders and Deep Secret, with perhaps a bit of A Tale of Time City thrown in. It's not as good a book as those first two, and isn't really as good as Gaiman's own Coraline, either, but it's a pleasant enough read. However, it has some strange similarities to other things I've read.

The hero and first-person narrator of Interworld is the decidedly unheroic young Joey Harker of Greenville, who describes himself as "the kid who could get lost going to the corner mailbox." When an eccentric Social Studies teacher sends Joey and his fellow students out on an exercise in which small teams are dropped off at random locations around town and told to find their way to various checkpoints - without the use of maps - Joey figures his goose is cooked. And because his team includes the girl he fancies, he imagines he's going to be humiliated, as well. So it's not too surprising that he is soon telling the object of his affections to wait a moment while he checks out the next turning, and running ahead .... through a bank of mist. On the other side is a McDonald's - with a green tartan arch. No, Joey isn't in Greenville anymore. Soon the kid who could get lost in his own house is skipping across dimensions from world to world. It turns out that Joey is a Walker, and as such, he's in danger from representatives of two opposing evil forces, representing the extremes of magic and technology, who exploit Walkers for their ability to travel from world to world. But the Walkers from the various worlds have banded together to fight the HEX and the Binary forces, and Joey soon finds himself training for exotic missions with ... multiple versions of himself.

I was reading these between manga series, and I have to say I was underwhelmed. This isn't the Garth Nix of Sabriel, Lyriel, and Abhorsen ... we're back to the Garth Nix of   >sigh<   The Ragwitch.

Asthmatic Arthur Penhaligon is a young teenager in what seems to be a near-future Britain, which is a more totalitiarian place than it is today. He's destined to die because of complications from his illness, but instead becomes involved with a mysterious artifact that turns out to be a Key. He has, in fact, become part of a Collect-the-Coupons quest, to use the terminology of Nick Lowe's essay in Ansible.