Monday, November 23, 2015

BOOK REVIEW

The Land of Stories
"The Wishing Spell"

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This book is written by Chris Colfer. Chris Colfer is a Golden Globe winning actor and best known for his role as Kurt Hummel on Glee. The Land of Stories: The Wishing Spell is his first novel. This book is  The #1 New York Times Bestseller.

Once upon a time, in contemporary Anytown, lived Alex Bailey and her brother, Conner. The two are passably lively variations on familiar types: she’s an energetic egghead sitting at the head of the class; he’s a jokester snoozing in the back row. Their adventure begins a year after their father’s death, and Colfer brings a light touch to describing their grief even while laying it on thick with thematic resonance. (Mr. Bailey died driving home from his bookstore.) Their paternal grandmother, twinkling into view on their 12th birthday, bequeaths to them a family heirloom, an old storybook anthology whose cover turns out to be a dimensional gateway in the tradition of C. S. Lewis’s passage to Narnia.

Stumbling through this bookwormhole, the kids plummet into a world where Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White have each married a son of King Charming; where Goldilocks is a glamorous fugitive mounted on a cream-colored steed named Porridge; and where Red Riding Hood, in a room pulled together by a wolfskin rug, overdresses to impress Jack, of beanstalk fame. Colfer, perhaps grown tired of treating his characters with gentle reverence, imagines the red-caped lass as a camped-up tart, vain — and pining in vain for the giant-killer: “She was showing too much skin, wearing too much makeup, and was dressed too well for the middle of the day.”

This is no place for young children, what with its gibbering goblins and echoing wolf howls. Relying on the kindness of strangers, foremost an amphibious gentleman plainly in need of a smooch, the twins seek out relics, including Sleeping Beauty’s spindle and Cinderella’s slipper, in order to activate a “Wishing Spell” and make their escape. Off they go on a quest that combines a scavenger hunt, a breaking-and-entering spree and a tour of the stars’ homes.
Children will find lots of hope within its pages, along with bravery and kindness and self-acceptance. It's a book about how every seemingly happy ending creates a new set of struggles to contend with, which you have to keep trying your best to overcome -- while also making good moral decisions and finding some kind of peace in spite of hardship. It's also a book about how things often seem to happen for a reason, and how unexpectedly wonderful things can happen as a result of painful struggles.

The book has some interesting meditations on the nature of deep loneliness and longing -- and what people are capable of doing to remedy those heartaches. It's one of the strongest themes that run throughout the story. It appears as a theme in many ways with a variety of outcomes, and manages to be melancholy and uplifting at the same time, which is really lovely. Even with all of that sadness being examined so deeply, the book manages to be really funny and light.

Another thing the book does strongly is preaching the power of understanding and compassion, even towards people who have done terrible things. It doesn't condone those terrible things, and it heavily emphasizes doing the RIGHT thing, but it deftly paints the characters as more complex humans than the classic Good Vs Evil stories do, which makes it all much more interesting and more relevant to real world conflicts.
It isn't a perfect book, of course, and it could have benefited from a little more editing in a few places, but it's very charming and clever and more-than-a-little magical. I found myself giggling out loud at least once every chapter, and I even got a little teary-eyed in a few places. It will speak to children and adults on different levels emotionally while taking them all on a sweet, exciting adventure.


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