The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman

by Meg Wolitzer  
Dutton  2011  

Three kids at a Scrabble tournament realize there are more important things in life than winning. Wait. One of these kids has a superpower?  

Life's been tough for Duncan and his mom who have moved back to mom's childhood home in Pennsylvania to regroup at Duncan's Aunt Djuna's house. New kid at school, fish out of water, mom working for a thrift store owned and run by the town eccentric.

Oh, and Duncan can apparently read text by touch. Sounds a little like reading braille but what Duncan can read is ink. Which makes him perfect for cheating at a game like Scrabble where letters have to be picked from a bag, as bully Carl realizes. Yes, a Scrabble-playing bully. Carl and his equally less-than-scrupulous mother connive to get Duncan to be part of Carl's team for the national Youth Scrabble Tournament in Florida, which is where everything will come to a head.

But this apparently isn't enough story. We also need two other parallel narratives; April and her partner Lucy in Oregon and Nate and his partner Maxie from NYC are all down for the adventure and have their own reasons. Lucy comes from a family of jocks who live and breathe sports and don't believe Lucy's Scrabble event is a sport (and they're right, but whose quibbling) and (deep breath) she's also on the hunt for a boy she once met years ago at a pool at some motel, fool-heartedly believing that by teaching him how to play Scrabble he would possibly show up in Florida on this one particular weekend. Nate is the tragic character, the son of a Scrabble tournament loser, who's spent his entire life home schooled and trained for this event, this filial act of redemption. Compared to these twisted narratives Duncan's magic fingers and his hapless milquetoast meanderings hardly stand out.  

Ah, but Duncan has a conscious, and is actually a natural Scrabble whiz without his magic touch. He teaches that bully Carl a lesson in humility and (oh, sorry, this might be a spoiler) wins the tournament fair and square. Lucy concedes that her hopes are wild and baseless, and for a while there's a fear that either Nate or Duncan might be the mystery boy in question, but... what? Ho! Look at that! Next door to the Scrabble tourney is a gymnastics championship and, what's this? Mystery boy is a gymnast? Wow, that's almost a sport as well, and so, Lucy finds her boy. Nate, tragedian of the bunch, just wants to be a normal kid and while he loses the competition, he gets the girl. Yup, he asked Maxie along because he sort of harbored a crush on her and her carefree ways, and in losing he not only teaches his dad a lesson but earns his freedom.

While none of these four plots (the three teams plus Duncan's abilities) would stand on its own as a book, combined they stretch credulity to the point of busting a gut in and odd and empty manner. The characters get a cursory depth, perfectly acceptable for a TV sitcom perhaps but lacking any real backstory or shading. And sadly I am coming to the realization that television is defining the depth of the pool when it comes to literature. The idea is that if you throw enough complication and interconnection into the hopper you create a sense of depth that prevents readers (and viewers) from asking questions because they believe they're getting "real" answers (and "deep" characters) in dribs and drabs. When the story is over we have the feeling we have taken the journey of a thousand miles when all we've been doing is circling the block. If the loose ends are tied up who cares that none of our questions were answered? Add a touch of magical realism as a hook, string the plot along by jumping between threads, and we feel sated despite the nutritional void.

No, not every book needs to aspire to literature. Every story doesn't need to be serious, nor does magic need to be explained scientifically to the satisfaction of character and reader, but in the end I feel that if a story is worth telling it should tell the reader something worthwhile. If not telling us something new at least tell us something old in a unique way.

Cheaters never win, winners never cheat; Girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl gets boy; There's more to life than winning.


The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman in less than 25 words. Any kid who writes more than that in a book review is padding his assignment.

Mercury

by Hope Larson 
Atheneum / Simon & Schuster  2010

A tale of gold prospecting and romance and karmic debts paid off over several generations with just a kiss of magical realism in this graphic novel. 

In the settled Canadian province of Nova Scotia the Fraser's of French Hill have settled into a life of barely sustainable farm life when the mysterious stranger Asa Curry comes calling.  He's discovered gold on the Fraser property and looks to help mine it with a share of the proceeds. In the Fraser household daughter Josey has become smitten with Asa and over time he becomes the forbidden fruit she pledges herself to.  But there's something dark about Asa that causes Josey's mother to worry that he is a harbinger of death. 

One hundred and fifty years later the Fraser house has remained in the family but has burned down, causing the current Frasers, Tara and her mother, to become displaced.  While her mother works to find a new job and get settled in a new town, Tara returns to attend high school and, with the aid of a mercury-filled pendant that's been in the family for generations, solve a mystery that connects Tara's story with Josey's.  The phoenix out of the ashes of the house fire, as it were, allows Tara and her mother the chance at a new life that was denied their ancestors.

Jumping back and forth between stories it becomes clear that Tara and Josey's stories will cross paths, but with Larson that doesn't mean it is easy to guess.  The tale of the stranger with seemingly magical (and dark) powers is not unusual for the 18th and 19th centuries, and here those elements are handled as matter-of-fact as we treat the "magic" that allows us to use cell phones today.  This is Larson territory, where the magic is real, and she leaves much for the reader to discover and define for themselves.  Crows with faces of people, "spells" that can see the future, gold-seeking pendants and yellow snake guides are blended with they typical stories of teens encountering first loves and exploring territories as mysterious to them as anything else in this world. 

Larson's pacing and scene-setting is measured and exacting – nothing moves too fast or too slow – poetically cinematic in flow.  Having the panels set in the past against black backgrounds, while the present day sections are set against traditional white space, almost seems superfluous because we can the different ages by costume, but in a black and white comic it has the effect of turning the past almost sepia.  The visual darkness takes advantage of our knowledge of the pasts limitations and shrouds them in the darkness of a time before we became "illuminated" and magic was replaced by science and logic.  Larson's magic is elemental – mercury, gold, fire – with powers we can barely contain.  How is that not like love?

Savvy

by Ingrid Law
Dial / Penguin 2008

Ugh.

It has taken me days to try and sort out what bothers me about this book. I think it's the mixture of pseudo-magical realism and corn-pone storytelling. The narrator won't shut up, isn't very bright (none of the kids in this story are), and is the mouthpiece for the author's ham-fisted "everybody is special in their own way" message.

On their thirteenth birthdays the Beaumont's receive their "savvy," that special something they possess that no one else does. For Mibs, on the eve of her thirteenth birthday, the question is what form will her savvy take. Will it be the the quiet kind, like her mother's ability to do everything perfectly, or like her grandmother's ability to capture radio waves in mason jars like lightning bugs? Or will it be like her brother's, one who can harness electricity and another who creates hurricanes whenever he's near a large body of water?

Sadly, Mibs birthday plans are interrupted when the author decides to drop an obstacle in Mibs path: her father is involved in an accident on the highway and is laid up in a hospital to the south. Convinced by the lamest of evidence that her savvy involves "waking" objects previously believed to be permanently inert, Mibs in convinced she can bring her daddy out of his coma. But how to get to the hospital when she's been left behind by her mother?

That's right, stow away in the back of a traveling bible salesman's bus. And while you're at it, why not make it you and two of your sibling. And a couple of preacher's kids. Got it? That's five kids who think it's a good idea to stow away on a stranger's bus. The fact that he's a bible salesman is supposed to make you feel safe about it all.

Once they discover they're headed the wrong direction they prevail upon said salesman to deliver them where they need to go. He agrees that he can take them there eventually, but has his stops to make first.

Yeah, I've got a vehicle full of stowaways and I think I'll just drive around with them for a bit while they sort things out among themselves. No one's going to ask me down the road what the hell I was thinking, driving them around for days without anyone knowing...

Oh, and Mibs gets her savvy. And I have to ask: is this a metaphor for getting your period, or having ritual circumcision, or a bar mitzvah? Anyway, she gets it. Her savvy is being to hear what people are thinking but only through whatever ink happens to be on their skin. Even a temporary tattoo is able to speak to Mibs who figures this out several chapters after the reader has and is falling asleep.

I'm sorry, I can't seem to give a straight summary here.

Here's where you first lose me: The character's name is Mississippi but her younger sibling can't pronounce that and calls her Mibs. Okay. But that's what everyone calls her? She lets teachers and strangers and friends and enemies call her by her family name? No, I don't think so. But that's a quibble.

Next wrong fork in the road: stowing away on a stranger's bus to get someplace. Uh huh. You don't first admit knowing it's wrong, then try to lay a claim that you believe the driver to be safe, all the while exhibiting a failure to understand your own critical facilities. A history of bad judgment in a character shouldn't allow for safety to prevail at its most crucial point. Kids get into trouble all the time thinking they know enough to stay safe, make bad decisions, and trust people they shouldn't as a result. Here we have not one but FIVE kids who all fail to do the right thing, believing there's safety in numbers while they are on a bus headed in the wrong direction with no one knowing where they are.

Yeah, yeah, don't give me that stuff about the news bulletin on the TV throughout and the police looking for them. That's all after the fact (and worse, it is there to tie up a loose end concerning he paternity of one of the kids!). The fact is dumb kids + dumb decisions should not = positive results. We don't live in that world, and even if we lived in a world full of people with secret "savvies" it would strain credulity to believe that these are the actions of smart, savvy people.

Lastly (for now), if you want a main character to spout the curious homilies and expressions of a Southern Carl Sandburg at least make them sound like they're coming from a kid and not an old lady. Kids will incorporate the language they learn and know, but not with such abundance and variety as they do here. Yes I get that it supposed to take on the feel of a tall tale, all that language-of-the-people stuff, but it feels as wrong as shoulder pads on a t-shirt; it's a statement, but is that really the statement you want to make?

In a bit of backward glancing at all the people who loved this book, and all of those that didn't, I'm starting to get a sense that this book could be a new litmus test for determining whose judgment I can trust. I think there are a lot of people out there, many of them librarians, who would consider this prime Newbery material. Sadly. Probably the same ones who agreed with the Newbery committee over The Higher Power of Lucky. Savvy nabbed a Boston Globe/Horn Book Honor recently. Let's hope it stops there.

*shudder*

I'm not going to burn in a place I don't believe in, but I'm sure my ass is going to get bit one day for this.