books
Here are three books I think you should know about. I was going to talk about several more, but as usual, I got carried away with my commentary and it ran pretty long.
Flowers in the Attic - V.C. Andrews (1979)
The Boxcar Children...with incest!
That's how I'd sum up this book in five words.
I may forget what happened just yesterday, but I will hold unsolicited book recos in long-term storage indefinitely. Onetime inamorata Chandra, of Canada, tried to impress me of her intelligence by telling me she'd read both A Clockwork Orange and Stephen King's IT by age ten. It took me until age thirty-eight to catch up, but I did it. A longtime AOL Instant Messenger friend from Illinois whom I chatted with extensively in high school extolled Great Expectations, and it took me ten years to get around to reading it, but read it I did. A school chum from Kenmore mailed me a letter in 1992 recommending Treasure Island, and I read it nineteen years later.
Flowers in the Attic was recommended by a V.C. Andrews superfan at jury duty in 2015, so the fact that I got around to it in only nine years is pretty good. (An old lady at the Elma library recommended A Tree Grows in Brooklyn that same year, and I'm still working my way around to that one.)
So yeah, if you mention a book to me, know that I will almost certainly read it, but I might be on Medicare by the time I do.
In Flowers in the Attic, a bunch of verbose children who all speak like Anne of Green Gables lose their doting father to a tragic automobile accident. Their useless mother, possessing neither skills nor intelligence nor a job, moves them all into their rich grandparents' home. Except they can't let the grandpa know the kids exist, for he would be angry and deny them their fabulous inheritance.
The reason he would be angry is simple. The children's mother married her own uncle. The grandparents, especially the grandpa, find this icky. And so the mother forms a plan: she'll secret the children away in the attic while she, with the grandmother's help, tries to win back the grandpa's affection. If she can make a good impression on him, maybe he'll restore her inheritance, and he won't be angry when he finds out she had four incest babies.
OH, BUT THAT'S NOT ALL THE INCEST.
The children spend A LOT of time locked away in that attic. The mother keeps moving the goalposts, first telling them it couldn't take her more than a couple of weeks to get things squared away, then a couple of months, then a few more months, then...well, you get the picture. They end up spending over two years locked in the attic, with only their gigabitch of a grandmother for a warden. And the elder two siblings? Well, let's just say it gets icky between them.
I don't know why this book is so beloved. It seems it's just one of those rite-of-passage books, a book you read in middle school precisely because you're NOT SUPPOSED TO. I get that. Mine was rather tame by comparison. I remember being expressly forbidden to read Neal Shusterman's Shadow Club because it sounded, according to my mom, not very Christian. What she didn't know was that I'd already checked it out of the school library, and so I kept it hidden in my backpack and read it anyway. It was great. I get the feeling lots of adolescents did the same kind of thing with FITA, which is the cool way of saying Flowers in the Attic.
I think the theme of this book is believe in yourself.
One word: WTF
Rating: 6
The One and Only Family - Katherine Applegate (2024)
This is the final entry in a quartet. The first novel, The One and Only Ivan, was the 2013 Newbery Medal winner. It's pretty good, but I wouldn't say it's the greatest book of all time. A fellow at a library conference a few years back gushed that he cried "for hours" the night he finished that book, and when he woke up in the morning he cried "for five more hours." I don't know how that's possible, but I hope that guy is on lithium. Maybe part of my brain is underdeveloped, but I have never cried over a book, not even a little. As I once mentioned in a rant about obnoxious book-lovers, only two books have come anywhere close to making me cry: Where the Red Fern Grows and A Man Called Ove. Both made me gaze pensively into the distance for a few minutes. That was all.
Anyway, The One and Only Ivan is inspired by the true story of a gorilla that spent most of his life on display at a ramshackle mall before finally retiring to an Atlanta zoo, where he reportedly passed his remaining years in relative peace and comfort. The other books in the series serve as extended epilogues, expanding on the stories of his friends the dog (The One and Only Bob) and the elephant (The One and Only Ruby). In The One and Only Family, we meet Ivan's wife and children and find out how they're faring at the zoo.
Like the other sequels, Family might satisfy dedicated fans (I can only imagine how many hours that guy from the conference wept over this one), but if you're a robot like me you will basically just shrug and move on with your life. Nothing much happens in this one, except for the climax. The climax happens when a kid falls into the gorilla habitat, and it's basically Harambe Redux, except this time the apes convince the humans they mean no harm, and nobody gets killed. Given the damage Harambe's death did to our timeline, I must assume the positive outcome in this fictional story means their world never experienced COVID or a Donald Trump presidency.
There is literally only one reason I'm even telling you about this book, and that's because it was written by Katherine Applegate, the author of the iconic 1990s publishing phenomenon, ANIMORPHS.1
I think the theme of this book is apes together strong.
One word: good
Rating: 7
Animorphs #5: The Predator - Katherine Applegate (1996)
Growing up, my parents did not explicitly forbid the reading of very many books (unless you count Dungeons & Dragons manuals, which goes without saying). I honestly can't remember whether Goosebumps was officially banned, but I knew better than to ask. No, the one series I remember being told NOT to read was Animorphs. Why? No idea. I presume somebody at church went ahead and read the books, then--OK, stop laughing, I know they didn't read the books. Probably a friend of a friend had a kid who read them, and that kid was into demonic concepts like "nature" and "DNA." Besides, the cover artwork, with its stepwise transformations of one organism into another, was damningly redolent of evolution. This series was definitely off-limits.
But I have been legally an adult for a good number of years now. I read what I want. And I gotta say, this series OWNS. PERIOD.
These five kids--Jake, Rachel, Cassie, Marco, and Tobias--are walking home from the mall one night when an alien ship crashes right in front of them and a thing called an Andalite drags itself out, mortally wounded. The Andalite, a prince among his people, warns them that horrible slug-creatures called Yeerks are coming to Earth--in fact, they are already here! Yeerks are parasites that get into the brains of host organisms and turn them into "controllers." Anything and anybody could be a controller. A dog, a person, literally anything. The mighty Andalites have opposed the Yeerks from one end of the galaxy to another, using their awesome ability to physically transform into other organisms at will.
Before expiring, the Andalite prince bestows this gift upon the children, and thus are born...THE ANIMORPHS.
I'm not kidding: these books are actually kind of good. Series with a zillion entries are often low-effort trash, but Animorphs seems to have been written with care and attention to detail. I appreciate that it's a continuing saga where each installment matters--I've always been frustrated by books and TV shows where seemingly life-altering events happen in one episode or book, only to be completely forgotten in the next. No indeed, it seems each of the fifty-four books in the main Animorphs series matters, each one detailing a mission or sortie in the grand campaign to defeat the Yeerk menace. I only hope it doesn't become like the equally-frustrating type of series where consequences do indeed exist, but the overarching story never seems to go anywhere.
Animorphs may have been written for middle-schoolers, but it's pretty good. I wish I'd taken advantage of those Scholastic book catalogs more often, those little pamphlets where you'd tote up your selections, clip out the order form, and then submit it to your teacher along with a check or money order. Weeks later, you'd find a little stack of books on your desk. I did order books that way occasionally, but by rights I should have done it every time. In an alternate past where I not only did this but also had permission to read Animorphs, I can see eleven-year-old me eagerly awaiting each installment, like the kid in the Zoobooks commercial.2
In Animorphs 5: The Predator, Marco uses his gorilla morph to...well, I kind of forget what, specifically, happens in this one. I'm already a couple of books further along, and I'd be SEVERAL books further if not for some ASSHOLE who keeps holding onto each book for the full three weeks in Libby. Yeah, probably some jerk CHILD who's actually in the target audience and takes longer to read books, and doesn't realize a MIDDLE-AGED MAN who was in the target audience when these books came out thirty years ago is waiting his turn. Pete's sake, just let me "play through" like they do on golf courses. I'm a slow-ass reader, and even I can get through one of these in a day.
Anyway, I can't look at the cover of this particular installment and not think of that smirking bandanna guy meme.
You know, smirking bandanna guy? Anybody?
I don't care how many crickets are chirping right now, you know I'm right.
It would be hilarious if Marco from the books really did grow up to be Bandanna Guy, who (checks notes) apparently is a Brazilian stripper, and the whole "animorph" phase of his life made about the same impression on him that a supporting role in a sitcom might've made on a former child actor. If you recognized him in the gym, oiling his pecs in front of a mirror or doing lines of whey protein, he'd give a little snort, flash that devastating smirk, and say, "Yeah, man, when I was a kid I used to turn into a gorilla. Other shit, too: birds, dolphins. It was kinda wild. Spot me on the squat rack, bro?" And that's all he'd ever tell you about it.
If you walked away from this entry for a few minutes, yeah, I'm actually STILL talking about Animorphs, but don't worry, I'm about to wrap it up.
Like I was saying earlier, both the Ivan quartet and the Animorphs saga are the work of the legendary Katherine Applegate, and I believe an Ivan/Animorphs crossover is the literary phenomenon nobody but me knows the world is waiting for. As I mentioned in my thoughtful review of The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, whenever feasible, all the characters an actor plays throughout his career should be canonically linked in some way. Example: William Daniels voiced KITT on Knight Rider and played Mr. Feeny on Boy Meets World. Connection? KITT was a super-advanced form of artificial intelligence, and his creators obviously would've wanted his vocalization to sound erudite, professorial. So they hired some well-known academic, Mr. George Feeny, to record the samples for KITT's voice modulator. See? It doesn't have to be anything elaborate. Just connect the dots, folks.
In much the same way, whenever possible, all of an author's characters should exist in a shared universe. Some authors do this, but others need to get with the program. When I ask, "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, what do you see?" I want him to be able to reply, "I see some letters climbing a tree."
Now let's imagine an Ivan/Animorphs crossover. Man oh man. Ivan spends much of the last book dwelling on his role as leader and protector of the zoo's Gorilla Villa. A wise ape, he never rules with force, although he does possess the combined strength of several grown men. Can you just imagine if the Yeerks tried to pull something at the zoo? The phrase "fuck around and find out" immediately comes to mind. He could team up with the Animorphs in a violent battle for the ages. Ivan's gentle, middle-grade novel would quickly become an R-rated bloodbath.
I can't even tell you how genius this is. What if another rule was that the copyright dates of the books aligned with the in-universe timeline? That way, since Animorphs came out in the nineties, and the first Ivan book came out in 2012, Marco really would have had time to grow up into Bandanna Guy. Maybe, despite putting the Animorph phase of his life to rest, he would still be drawn to animals and would be a part-time maintenance worker at the zoo. When the Yeerk/gorilla battle broke out, he'd use his powerful muscles to fight alongside Ivan and Ruby and Bob, but he'd soon realize that even great human strength was not enough. Reaching deep within, he'd remember his morph ability and--haltingly at first, but then fired with power and purpose--transform into a mighty ape to fight with Ivan.
No, yeah, I know: what if IVAN was an Animorph, though? Like maybe he was an Andalite sent to Earth on a deep-cover mission and got stuck in his ape morph (this can happen). Or what if--holy shit--what if the Yeerks managed to infiltrate the minds of Ivan's family and turn them into Controllers? Would he destroy them to spare them a fate worse than death?
What would that weepy guy from the library conference think of all this?
Great blazes, I need to find Katherine Applegate's email address and send these ideas to her. Some of my students wrote her a few years back with the idea for the second sequel, The One and Only Ruby, before that book even came out. Probably she was already working on it, but I like to imagine she read that letter and said, "Huh, good idea." I won't ask for any credit for the Ivan/Animorphs crossover idea, but if she wants to give me a shoutout in the acknowledgements section, neither shall I protest.
I think the theme of this book is anything you set your mind to, you can achieve.
One word: intense
Rating: 9
1 Katherine Applegate...ANIMORPHS: Really, though, Katherine Applegate is a ruddy legend. Put aside her Newbery-winning Ivan saga and cult classic Animorphs series, and she's still got certified bangers like Crenshaw, Willodeen, and Wishtree. Wishtree did not make me cry but did make my voice hitch when I read it to a class some years ago. Now it would probably just make me angry, knowing more than half the country would chop down the tree.
2 Zoobooks: An Animorphs/Zoobooks crossover is a compelling possibility. The kids in the books are always getting into unforeseen scrapes when they turn into animals--as a bug, one kid wanders into a roach motel; as a lobster, another is almost boiled alive. It would not be a stretch to include a chapter or even just a throwaway gag where the kids find pictures of themselves in Zoobooks after an unwitting nature photographer got some pics of them in the middle of an op. "They got my good side!" Marco might boast, holding up a glossy centerfold of himself as a gorilla.
Flowers in the Attic - V.C. Andrews (1979)
The Boxcar Children...with incest!
That's how I'd sum up this book in five words.
I may forget what happened just yesterday, but I will hold unsolicited book recos in long-term storage indefinitely. Onetime inamorata Chandra, of Canada, tried to impress me of her intelligence by telling me she'd read both A Clockwork Orange and Stephen King's IT by age ten. It took me until age thirty-eight to catch up, but I did it. A longtime AOL Instant Messenger friend from Illinois whom I chatted with extensively in high school extolled Great Expectations, and it took me ten years to get around to reading it, but read it I did. A school chum from Kenmore mailed me a letter in 1992 recommending Treasure Island, and I read it nineteen years later.
Flowers in the Attic was recommended by a V.C. Andrews superfan at jury duty in 2015, so the fact that I got around to it in only nine years is pretty good. (An old lady at the Elma library recommended A Tree Grows in Brooklyn that same year, and I'm still working my way around to that one.)
So yeah, if you mention a book to me, know that I will almost certainly read it, but I might be on Medicare by the time I do.
In Flowers in the Attic, a bunch of verbose children who all speak like Anne of Green Gables lose their doting father to a tragic automobile accident. Their useless mother, possessing neither skills nor intelligence nor a job, moves them all into their rich grandparents' home. Except they can't let the grandpa know the kids exist, for he would be angry and deny them their fabulous inheritance.
The reason he would be angry is simple. The children's mother married her own uncle. The grandparents, especially the grandpa, find this icky. And so the mother forms a plan: she'll secret the children away in the attic while she, with the grandmother's help, tries to win back the grandpa's affection. If she can make a good impression on him, maybe he'll restore her inheritance, and he won't be angry when he finds out she had four incest babies.
OH, BUT THAT'S NOT ALL THE INCEST.
The children spend A LOT of time locked away in that attic. The mother keeps moving the goalposts, first telling them it couldn't take her more than a couple of weeks to get things squared away, then a couple of months, then a few more months, then...well, you get the picture. They end up spending over two years locked in the attic, with only their gigabitch of a grandmother for a warden. And the elder two siblings? Well, let's just say it gets icky between them.
I don't know why this book is so beloved. It seems it's just one of those rite-of-passage books, a book you read in middle school precisely because you're NOT SUPPOSED TO. I get that. Mine was rather tame by comparison. I remember being expressly forbidden to read Neal Shusterman's Shadow Club because it sounded, according to my mom, not very Christian. What she didn't know was that I'd already checked it out of the school library, and so I kept it hidden in my backpack and read it anyway. It was great. I get the feeling lots of adolescents did the same kind of thing with FITA, which is the cool way of saying Flowers in the Attic.
I think the theme of this book is believe in yourself.
One word: WTF
Rating: 6
The One and Only Family - Katherine Applegate (2024)
This is the final entry in a quartet. The first novel, The One and Only Ivan, was the 2013 Newbery Medal winner. It's pretty good, but I wouldn't say it's the greatest book of all time. A fellow at a library conference a few years back gushed that he cried "for hours" the night he finished that book, and when he woke up in the morning he cried "for five more hours." I don't know how that's possible, but I hope that guy is on lithium. Maybe part of my brain is underdeveloped, but I have never cried over a book, not even a little. As I once mentioned in a rant about obnoxious book-lovers, only two books have come anywhere close to making me cry: Where the Red Fern Grows and A Man Called Ove. Both made me gaze pensively into the distance for a few minutes. That was all.
Anyway, The One and Only Ivan is inspired by the true story of a gorilla that spent most of his life on display at a ramshackle mall before finally retiring to an Atlanta zoo, where he reportedly passed his remaining years in relative peace and comfort. The other books in the series serve as extended epilogues, expanding on the stories of his friends the dog (The One and Only Bob) and the elephant (The One and Only Ruby). In The One and Only Family, we meet Ivan's wife and children and find out how they're faring at the zoo.
Like the other sequels, Family might satisfy dedicated fans (I can only imagine how many hours that guy from the conference wept over this one), but if you're a robot like me you will basically just shrug and move on with your life. Nothing much happens in this one, except for the climax. The climax happens when a kid falls into the gorilla habitat, and it's basically Harambe Redux, except this time the apes convince the humans they mean no harm, and nobody gets killed. Given the damage Harambe's death did to our timeline, I must assume the positive outcome in this fictional story means their world never experienced COVID or a Donald Trump presidency.
There is literally only one reason I'm even telling you about this book, and that's because it was written by Katherine Applegate, the author of the iconic 1990s publishing phenomenon, ANIMORPHS.1
I think the theme of this book is apes together strong.
One word: good
Rating: 7
Animorphs #5: The Predator - Katherine Applegate (1996)
Growing up, my parents did not explicitly forbid the reading of very many books (unless you count Dungeons & Dragons manuals, which goes without saying). I honestly can't remember whether Goosebumps was officially banned, but I knew better than to ask. No, the one series I remember being told NOT to read was Animorphs. Why? No idea. I presume somebody at church went ahead and read the books, then--OK, stop laughing, I know they didn't read the books. Probably a friend of a friend had a kid who read them, and that kid was into demonic concepts like "nature" and "DNA." Besides, the cover artwork, with its stepwise transformations of one organism into another, was damningly redolent of evolution. This series was definitely off-limits.
But I have been legally an adult for a good number of years now. I read what I want. And I gotta say, this series OWNS. PERIOD.
These five kids--Jake, Rachel, Cassie, Marco, and Tobias--are walking home from the mall one night when an alien ship crashes right in front of them and a thing called an Andalite drags itself out, mortally wounded. The Andalite, a prince among his people, warns them that horrible slug-creatures called Yeerks are coming to Earth--in fact, they are already here! Yeerks are parasites that get into the brains of host organisms and turn them into "controllers." Anything and anybody could be a controller. A dog, a person, literally anything. The mighty Andalites have opposed the Yeerks from one end of the galaxy to another, using their awesome ability to physically transform into other organisms at will.
Before expiring, the Andalite prince bestows this gift upon the children, and thus are born...THE ANIMORPHS.
I'm not kidding: these books are actually kind of good. Series with a zillion entries are often low-effort trash, but Animorphs seems to have been written with care and attention to detail. I appreciate that it's a continuing saga where each installment matters--I've always been frustrated by books and TV shows where seemingly life-altering events happen in one episode or book, only to be completely forgotten in the next. No indeed, it seems each of the fifty-four books in the main Animorphs series matters, each one detailing a mission or sortie in the grand campaign to defeat the Yeerk menace. I only hope it doesn't become like the equally-frustrating type of series where consequences do indeed exist, but the overarching story never seems to go anywhere.
Animorphs may have been written for middle-schoolers, but it's pretty good. I wish I'd taken advantage of those Scholastic book catalogs more often, those little pamphlets where you'd tote up your selections, clip out the order form, and then submit it to your teacher along with a check or money order. Weeks later, you'd find a little stack of books on your desk. I did order books that way occasionally, but by rights I should have done it every time. In an alternate past where I not only did this but also had permission to read Animorphs, I can see eleven-year-old me eagerly awaiting each installment, like the kid in the Zoobooks commercial.2
In Animorphs 5: The Predator, Marco uses his gorilla morph to...well, I kind of forget what, specifically, happens in this one. I'm already a couple of books further along, and I'd be SEVERAL books further if not for some ASSHOLE who keeps holding onto each book for the full three weeks in Libby. Yeah, probably some jerk CHILD who's actually in the target audience and takes longer to read books, and doesn't realize a MIDDLE-AGED MAN who was in the target audience when these books came out thirty years ago is waiting his turn. Pete's sake, just let me "play through" like they do on golf courses. I'm a slow-ass reader, and even I can get through one of these in a day.
Anyway, I can't look at the cover of this particular installment and not think of that smirking bandanna guy meme.
You know, smirking bandanna guy? Anybody?
I don't care how many crickets are chirping right now, you know I'm right.
It would be hilarious if Marco from the books really did grow up to be Bandanna Guy, who (checks notes) apparently is a Brazilian stripper, and the whole "animorph" phase of his life made about the same impression on him that a supporting role in a sitcom might've made on a former child actor. If you recognized him in the gym, oiling his pecs in front of a mirror or doing lines of whey protein, he'd give a little snort, flash that devastating smirk, and say, "Yeah, man, when I was a kid I used to turn into a gorilla. Other shit, too: birds, dolphins. It was kinda wild. Spot me on the squat rack, bro?" And that's all he'd ever tell you about it.
If you walked away from this entry for a few minutes, yeah, I'm actually STILL talking about Animorphs, but don't worry, I'm about to wrap it up.
Like I was saying earlier, both the Ivan quartet and the Animorphs saga are the work of the legendary Katherine Applegate, and I believe an Ivan/Animorphs crossover is the literary phenomenon nobody but me knows the world is waiting for. As I mentioned in my thoughtful review of The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, whenever feasible, all the characters an actor plays throughout his career should be canonically linked in some way. Example: William Daniels voiced KITT on Knight Rider and played Mr. Feeny on Boy Meets World. Connection? KITT was a super-advanced form of artificial intelligence, and his creators obviously would've wanted his vocalization to sound erudite, professorial. So they hired some well-known academic, Mr. George Feeny, to record the samples for KITT's voice modulator. See? It doesn't have to be anything elaborate. Just connect the dots, folks.
In much the same way, whenever possible, all of an author's characters should exist in a shared universe. Some authors do this, but others need to get with the program. When I ask, "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, what do you see?" I want him to be able to reply, "I see some letters climbing a tree."
Now let's imagine an Ivan/Animorphs crossover. Man oh man. Ivan spends much of the last book dwelling on his role as leader and protector of the zoo's Gorilla Villa. A wise ape, he never rules with force, although he does possess the combined strength of several grown men. Can you just imagine if the Yeerks tried to pull something at the zoo? The phrase "fuck around and find out" immediately comes to mind. He could team up with the Animorphs in a violent battle for the ages. Ivan's gentle, middle-grade novel would quickly become an R-rated bloodbath.
I can't even tell you how genius this is. What if another rule was that the copyright dates of the books aligned with the in-universe timeline? That way, since Animorphs came out in the nineties, and the first Ivan book came out in 2012, Marco really would have had time to grow up into Bandanna Guy. Maybe, despite putting the Animorph phase of his life to rest, he would still be drawn to animals and would be a part-time maintenance worker at the zoo. When the Yeerk/gorilla battle broke out, he'd use his powerful muscles to fight alongside Ivan and Ruby and Bob, but he'd soon realize that even great human strength was not enough. Reaching deep within, he'd remember his morph ability and--haltingly at first, but then fired with power and purpose--transform into a mighty ape to fight with Ivan.
No, yeah, I know: what if IVAN was an Animorph, though? Like maybe he was an Andalite sent to Earth on a deep-cover mission and got stuck in his ape morph (this can happen). Or what if--holy shit--what if the Yeerks managed to infiltrate the minds of Ivan's family and turn them into Controllers? Would he destroy them to spare them a fate worse than death?
What would that weepy guy from the library conference think of all this?
Great blazes, I need to find Katherine Applegate's email address and send these ideas to her. Some of my students wrote her a few years back with the idea for the second sequel, The One and Only Ruby, before that book even came out. Probably she was already working on it, but I like to imagine she read that letter and said, "Huh, good idea." I won't ask for any credit for the Ivan/Animorphs crossover idea, but if she wants to give me a shoutout in the acknowledgements section, neither shall I protest.
I think the theme of this book is anything you set your mind to, you can achieve.
One word: intense
Rating: 9
1 Katherine Applegate...ANIMORPHS: Really, though, Katherine Applegate is a ruddy legend. Put aside her Newbery-winning Ivan saga and cult classic Animorphs series, and she's still got certified bangers like Crenshaw, Willodeen, and Wishtree. Wishtree did not make me cry but did make my voice hitch when I read it to a class some years ago. Now it would probably just make me angry, knowing more than half the country would chop down the tree.
2 Zoobooks: An Animorphs/Zoobooks crossover is a compelling possibility. The kids in the books are always getting into unforeseen scrapes when they turn into animals--as a bug, one kid wanders into a roach motel; as a lobster, another is almost boiled alive. It would not be a stretch to include a chapter or even just a throwaway gag where the kids find pictures of themselves in Zoobooks after an unwitting nature photographer got some pics of them in the middle of an op. "They got my good side!" Marco might boast, holding up a glossy centerfold of himself as a gorilla.