A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Posterchildren is a rather labored pun based on posthumans (mutants with powers) being called "posters" in this universe. Posterchildren can apply to Maillardet's Academy, which is much like Professor X's School for Gifted Youngsters.

This is what I'd hoped Cute Mutants would be: diverse teenage mutants exploring their powers and their relationships with each other. Posterchildren has 100% less Tumblrspeak, which made it much more enjoyable for me. The characters are very likable and the powers are fun when they're explored, though they aren't always. There's some important characters whose power never even gets mentioned, or if it did it was in one sentence and I blinked and missed it.

This is basically a novel-length New Mutants with original characters fic, focused heavily on just hanging out at school. It's a lot of fun if you go in with that expectation and the knowledge that it basically just stops without resolving any outstanding plot issues. There are a bunch of shorter subsequent stories but they're mostly about the supporting and minor characters.

I read this because it was in the Yuletide tag set, but then no one requested it. I'm glad I read it though. I enjoyed it and if an actual sequel ever gets written (unlikely) I would read that too.

You can get Posterchildren: Origins plus bonus stories at this site.

Imagine the X-Men, but Tumblr. Or rather, as is explicitly textual, imagine the New Mutants, but Tumblr.

My new morning routine involves me googling superpowers in general, and my ability in particular. Nothing new ever shows up. The closest thing I found is psychometry, which is a psychic thing where you get 'readings' from objects, like you touch a wallet and know 'oh this person prefers dubs to subs i.e. is wrong' or 'the woman who owns this writes Dramione fanfic i.e. is kinda yikes.'

Four teenage girls and a trans boy get powers after kissing the same girl at a party. The girl, Emma, is just as confused by this as they are. Inspired by Dylan, who can talk to objects and is a huge fan of X-Men comics, they start exploring their powers and having teen drama.

I don't know my sexuality. I've read so much stuff on the Internet about it and I just get more fucking confused. My God, the hours I spent on AVENwiki. I used to think I was some kind of ace but then this thing with Lou started. He was the closest I had to a friend before the kissing part of our relationship started and now it's – well, it's different. Putting a label on it is complicated.

I've mostly managed to get my school uniform on while musing on gray-aces and demisexuals and the like...

But things get serious when they learn that while they all kissed Emma consensually (she created a spin-the-bottle app to see if she was really ace or not), a local 20-something incel transphobe forced a kiss on her and got powers which he's using to commit crimes and terrorize people. He must be stopped!

The powers are really cool - Alyse's ability to transform her own body based on the emotions she's feeling is creative and beautifully described, and Dylan's talking objects are delightful. I love the general idea of "updated New Mutants." I was extremely charmed by the reading list of X-Men comics at the end of the book, excellent choices all.

Unfortunately, I can only enjoy Dylan's narrative style for the length of a Tumblr post. Overall, the book was way too Tumblr-twee for me. But I bet some of you would enjoy it a lot. It's a five-book series, and the first three are 99 cents.

You can read this without being spoiled for more than the first few episodes by not clicking on the cut tags. Cut tags are spoilery through S4 E7.

Dr. Bright is a therapist who treats atypicals (people with powers). They are not known to the general public, but a secret sinister organization, the AM, studies them.

At the start, she has four clients we follow. Caleb is a sweet teenage empath who's struggling to not get overwhelmed by other people's emotions and who has a sweet romance with another boy at his school, Adam, who is not atypical. Sam is a young woman who time-travels when she gets anxious. Chloe is a college-age woman who is an extremely strong receptive telepath.

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We learn early on that Dr. Bright has a secret agenda and wants to use her clients' powers for her own purposes. This is actually not my beef with the show or its portrayal of therapy. Obviously, it's unethical but the show knows it is and this is discussed a lot. Her clients learn what she's doing and why fairly early, and because she does have sympathetic motives they stick with her.

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Chloe, the telepath, I think is incapable of tuning out other people's thoughts. (This isn't 100% clear but it seems like it.) If she attends a therapy session, she can/will read Dr. Bright's mind. That means that she knows everything Dr. Bright knows, including everything Dr. Bright's other clients tell her. She routinely blurts out stuff other clients told Dr. Bright to different clients of Dr. Bright. Effectively, no one can have any secrets or privacy around Chloe, not just because she knows things, but because she will tell everything she knows to everyone.

(Dr. Bright's clients all end up meeting each other, which sets up its own set of ethical issues which I'll get to shortly.)

If I was Dr. Bright dealing with this genuinely fascinating problem in a therapy ethics, there are multiple possible ways to deal with this. The best way would be to only see Chloe over the phone. Another might be, since my clients all know each other anyway and know this is happening, to ask them, privately and individually and after discussing it, whether they consent to Chloe knowing everything they tell me. If even one person says no, then all of Chloe's sessions happen over the phone, permanently.

If I was the writer of this podcast, I would make clear is whether Chloe is literally incapable of shutting up about other people's secrets, whether she can but it's difficult for her for whatever reason, or whether she just doesn't want to or get why this upsets people.

Why this is happening makes a huge difference! Especially since Dr. Bright is literally there to help people control their powers. If Chloe is incapable of shutting up and her other clients don't consent to having her blurt out everything they tell Dr. Bright, then all her sessions need to happen by phone so she can't read Dr. Bright's mind. If it's difficult for her not to blurt, then Dr. Bright should be helping her with this. If she just doesn't think it's a problem and so refuses to stop, she should be booted as a client.

In the show, the why is not made clear but it seems like it's difficult for her not to blurt and she doesn't want to stop. (At one point she complains how haaaaard and saaaaad it is for her to be expected to keep other people's secrets.) Whatever the reason, everyone keeps telling Chloe not to blurt out their secrets to third parties and Dr. Bright keeps complaining that the whole situation is unethical, but no one ever boots Chloe out of their life or asks Dr. Bright to only see her by phone or do anything about it. Chloe is portrayed as a sweet cinnamon roll too good for this world, but in real life, she would be murdered so fast.

Any time someone brings up Chloe blurting out everything other clients told Dr. Bright to third parties, Chloe or someone else points out that Dr. Bright was also unethical. ONE PERSON BEING UNETHICAL DOES NOT MEAN IT'S OKAY FOR SOMEONE ELSE TO BE UNETHICAL. ALSO, CHLOE, SHUT THE FUCK UP BEFORE SOMEONE SHOVES YOU OFF A CLIFF.

This brings me to my biggest single problem with the show: almost everyone in it is from the Crab Nebula. (On FFA, "from the Crab Nebula" is shorthand for "person operating off of an incredibly strange set of assumptions about life/human beings/everything.") The particular quadrant of the Crab Nebula is, I think, young people on Tumblr.

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Almost everyone's values and ethics and reactions are skewed from how humans normally are, and they're all skewed in the same weird directions.

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People keep defending the evil lab with "but they do some good work," which is true, but WHO THE FUCK CARES WHEN THEY'RE ALSO IMPRISONING AND TORTURING PEOPLE WHO SOMETIMES DIE AS A RESULT? The evil lab people say they don't kill anyone on purpose and their experiments aren't meant to kill anyone, which appears to be true, but WHO CARES! They literally grab atypicals off the street, lock them up, and do experiments on them and sometimes they die! Not killing them on purpose doesn't make that better!

As of season four, everyone knows they still have atypicals locked up and experimented on, but no one is doing anything to break them loose and they're still half-heartedly defending the AM as "they do some bad things and some good things, it's complicated." NO IT ISN"T!

And that's not all! There is SO MUCH Crab Nebula reasoning!

A telepath constantly blurting out your secrets to third parties? Worth resignedly bitching about but not worth doing anything about.

A time-traveler using her ability to spy on the evil organization kidnapping, experimenting on, and sometimes killing atypicals? BAD. INVASION OF PRIVACY.

A therapist telling one of their clients something another client told them in therapy? Unethical enough to literally say "So much for ethics!" in a "Oh well, can't be helped" manner.

A violent sociopath is seriously injured when attempting to kidnap your friend? TERRIBLE. THE WORST.

Guiltily not caring if that sociopath dies? TERRIBLE. THE WORST. (No one ever wishes him dead without feeling guilty about wishing harm on another human being. I wish people harm all the time because they're harming other people, and I feel no guilt about it, and those aren't even people who threatened to murder someone I loved!)

Using the word "rape" or "sexual assault?" Apparently so horrifying that it can't be done, even when people are explicitly talking about it, such as exchanges like this:

Character A: "Did he... do anything to you? You know, when he kidnapped you and you spent all that time together, I mean I don't know his sexual orientation but, well...?"

Kidnapped Character: "No! Absolutely not! Nothing of the kind happened."

YOU CAN SAY SEXUAL ASSAULT, THESE ARE ADULT CHARACTERS ON AN ADULT SHOW DEALING WITH TRAUMA.

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There's this weird prudishness and naivete going on, which is especially weird given that the show deals very openly and explicitly about topics like trauma, mental illness, and sexual orientation. This juxtaposition feels very Tumblr teenager to me.

AND ALSO, when you have a situation where your clients end up all knowing each other and hanging out together, one's telepathic and two are empathic, and they don't have any real therapy options other than you, stop wringing your hands about the unethical lack of privacy and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

It's actually a very interesting problem in therapeutic ethics. The most relevant ethical frameworks I can think of come from group therapy and situations in which dual relationships and clients knowing each other is unavoidable, such as being a therapist in a hospital or in a very small town where you're the only one.

The solution that comes to my mind is to get everyone's input, first individually and then (if they all want) in a group setting. You could decide that within the group, you don't have secrets, but you cannot reveal anything from within the group to anyone outside of the group.

And this is just touching the surface! There's so much more, like why the fuck Dr. Bright wouldn't tell a client that the organization she's involved with KIDNAPS AND EXPERIMENTS ON PEOPLE LIKE HER when there is literally no reason not to tell her other than that-- HER STATED REASON FOR NOT DISCLOSING THIS - is that the organization doesn't always do this and is sometimes helpful WHEN IT DOESN'T DECIDE TO KIDNAP AND EXPERIMENT ON YOU WHAT THE ACTUAL CRAB NEBULA FUCK.

This children's SF novel starts with a lovely, haunting scene in which Alanna and her twin brother Mal are playing on the alien planet on which they've only just arrived. The scenery is colorful, and they discover that they can use the thin material of their protective suits to hang-glide on the wind. But Mal goes too high, and--

--Alanna wakes up on a spaceship. It was all a prophetic dream. I regret to say that that scene is the best part of the book, which is especially annoying as I picked up this book after reading the first few pages. Mal doesn't appear again till the last page, they never fly with their suits, and no one ever has any fun for the whole rest of the book.

I'm not surprised this book is so unknown, as while it has interesting ideas and imagery, it's really incoherent and jumbled and inconclusive.

Alanna is on a spaceship because Techmen have taken over the Earth and offered people food and medicine and other good things if they implant crystals in their foreheads, so the Techmen can suck their energy. Alanna's family were Independents who refused the crystals, so they've been packed off on a one-way colonizing expedition on a ship crewed by Techmen. Alanna meets a crotchety old man who the Techmen want, and they threaten that she'll never see her family again if she doesn't get them the old man.

Things which are never explained: why the Techmen want the old man, why they can't find him themselves given that everyone's cocooned in a spaceship they run, who the Techmen are, whether they're human or aliens or elves or what, how the Techmen got to Earth, and why the Techmen are escorting the Independents to another planet.

The cocooned Independents are chucked on to a planet, where Alanna gets separated from everyone and meets some alien rodents who she threatens for ages before adopting one as a pet. The Techmen again demand that she give them the old man, though at this point she has no idea where he even is. She meets an alien dog creature who kills some of the rodents (not her pet) and then it turns out they both can astral project and they take a tour of the planet where she sees an ooze devouring everything in its path. The dog creature explains that on this planet, everything gets glommed together and reconstituted as particles and then back to ooze. The Techmen kill Alanna's pet rodent before she and the dog shoo them away. Then she's reunited with her family.

Things which are never explained: How the colonization is going to work when the planet is covered in ooze that eats everything, why the old man was important, why the Techmen everything, why the dog randomly killed a rodent, why this book's editor didn't request more clarity.

Five paralyzed kids live in a miserable room in Belleview, where they never get visitors or to go outside or have any activities, and the staff is largely uncaring. Their one consolation is that they have each other, one kind nurse, and their imaginations. But when Belleview is condemned, they're threatened with being broken up and each placed in different hospitals.

Brick, one of the boys, longs so hard to be somewhere else that he unexpectedly finds himself in a new world, where he sees flowers and sunrises for the first time. And some more mysterious things as well. He also finds that the world has healing properties--not an instant cure, but enough that them all going there and surviving there is feasible. He manages to teleport his friends and their nurse, who loves them and also longs to escape, to the world. But once they're there, they find new dangers they need to survive...

I loved this weird little book. It's full of things I love - psychic kids, healing and recovery, survival, suspense, portals, exploring a strange new world, outcasts, friendship, and coziness coexisting with danger. It's slightly dated but not as much as you might expect - racial diversity is described in somewhat dated ways, but the characters aren't stereotypes.

There is magical disability healing, but it happens slowly enough that the entire book is still about disabled characters doing stuff, and they're never seen as lesser because they're disabled. (They clearly could have stayed paralyzed but still had happy lives on Earth if their circumstances weren't so awful - if they could have stayed together, been treated well, and been taken out to spend time in nature.)

The book ends at a "and there will be many more adventures" point which is sudden but satisfying; I would have liked to have read more, but if there had been more, I'm pretty sure I would have still liked the first part best, while they were all just exploring the new world and figuring out how to survive in it.

Only $1.99 on Kindle!

The Magic Meadow

A classic teleportation novel. Teenage Davy teleports for the first time to escape his abusive father, ending up in a place he sees as safe: the public library. He takes the opportunity to run away, and promptly teleports again (back to the library) when a gang of truckers try to rape him.

The first half of the book is a meticulous working out of how a smart teenager could do cool things with teleportation but no ID or street smarts. The second half is about him doing cool things with teleportation to foil hijackers and evade government agents. Both parts involve a whole lot of dealing with trauma, in an unsubtle but realistic way. There's a romance that never shows why Davy and Millie are into each other specifically, though it's pretty realistic about how undealt-with trauma is not good for relationships.

I found it maddening that Davy often makes no attempt to hide the fact that he can teleport and repeatedly does it in front of random people without ever thinking through the implications of that, even though he thinks through the implications of practically everything else. By the end of the book, the government knows all about him, he’s threatened to kidnap the President, and he can be stopped if he gets drugged or cuffed to something heavy. There’s a sequel in which I assume that comes back to haunt him.

The book was notably dated in two ways: New York City is a hellhole of crime where you can’t step outside without getting mugged, and a plane or ship gets hijacked about once a month.

I liked the first part of the book better than the second. The hijacking stuff was ostensibly higher stakes, but I found it dull and implausible. The teleportation mechanics were fun, though since they're so meticulously detailed that it bugged me a bit that there is no energy cost in teleporting. He can do it as much as he likes, as far as he likes, to any place he’s seen in person, and it never makes him tired. Where does the energy for that come from?

It never addresses the question of why Davy can teleport, other than to confirm that his parents can't. I'm guessing spontaneous mutation.

I read this years and years ago, and recall having basically the same reaction. I re-read it because someone (Layla?) said I should read the sequel, which I never picked up. On to the sequel! (I see that there are actually four sequels, one of which is a movie spinoff.)

Linking to paper version of book. I don't recommend the Kindle, which I read, as it loses the spaces to indicate transitions. Without them, the book seems to often jump, as it were, to a completely different time and space within the same scene.

Jumper: A Novel (I see that this version has been graced with "A Novel.")

King’s famous/infamous first novel. Most of you probably know the gist of it whether you’ve read it (or seen the movie) or not— it’s just that iconic— and it doesn’t matter if I spoil it in outline because King also tells/teases you with what happened right from the get-go. But if you don’t, it goes like this:

Carrie, who is secretly telekinetic, is raised in near-isolation by her abusive, mentally ill mom, a batshit fundamentalist whose beliefs bear only the most tenuous relationship to any actual religion. Carrie is not taught of the existence of menstruation because all things bodily are the Devil’s handiwork, and panics when she gets her period in the girls’ locker room shower. Because teenagers can be fucking monsters, she’s pelted with tampons by the other girls, who smell blood in the water in more ways than one.

Sue Snell, a girl who feels guilty over failing to stop the bullying, joins forces with some other teenagers to try to give Carrie a nice prom. Unfortunately, the hateful bully contingent also has plans for Carrie, and also at the prom. Let’s just say that Carrie doesn’t do anything I wouldn’t have done at that age and under those circumstances if I could’ve killed people with my brain.

I first read this book when I was a bullied teenager, so I was an ideal audience in one sense. However, it was neither the first book I read by King nor the one that made me go on to read more. (Those were The Stand, followed by Firestarter.) I liked it but I didn’t love it, which is still my feeling about it now though probably not for the same reasons.

At the time, though I identified with Carrie’s situation, I didn’t identify with her as a person. She’s sad and plodding and downtrodden and not all that bright; none of what happens to her is her fault, but in addition to circumstances caused by others (like her terrible clothes) her personality gives off an aura of victimhood that makes the bullies decide to pick on her rather than on someone else. (King is very, very clear about that part: bullies gonna bully. If Carrie hadn’t been there, they would have just selected a different target.) To be clear, I don’t mean that she’s insufficiently awesome for me to identify with, just that her flaws aren’t my flaws.

(I confess: when our ages matched, I found an unsettling amount to identify with in Harold Emery Lauder. I mean. His goddamn name is only one syllable off mine, and it has almost the same metrical emphasis. That’s not exactly a coincidence. In both cases, it was selected by a teenage writer because it’s unique, the meter makes it memorable, and it just sounds like a writer’s name. King really had my number. But that’s not a coincidence, either: name aside, it was his number, too.)

What’s most remembered about Carrie are the set-piece scenes. The shower and the prom scene are iconic for a reason, but there’s quite a few in the book that have that same extraordinary vividness of emotion and image. They’re bizarre and singular in terms of events (so you recall them) and depicted with perfectly selected details, like the sort of nightmare you wake up from to lie sweating and telling yourself “It’s not real, it’s not real,” and dread having again for the rest of your life.

The other notable element is the blistering, raw, absolutely dead-on portrayal of what it feels like to be a bullied teenager. And also what it feels like to be any teenager in the sort of world I was a teenager in, which I hope to God is less common nowadays, when high school was their society, adults did not give a fuck, and it didn’t make much of a difference that the majority of the teenagers were perfectly decent people, if self-centered in a developmentally appropriate way, because God help you if the bullies close their eyes, spin around, and come to a stop with their finger pointed at you. Tag, you’re it. Your life will now be hell for the next four years.

Sue Snell is a good person. So is her boyfriend. It almost saves the day. But, as in Cujo, there are other forces at work, though here it’s human factors rather than chance or fate. Bullies gonna bully, and Carrie is emotionally fragile, primed to snap by her abusive mother, and in an act of agency with truly bad timing, she’s been practicing her power. The kerosene was already pooling on the floor, but some assholes just had to toss in a match.

Finally, Carrie is not spectacularly but still quite nicely structured, partly in a way that King was later to make one of his trademarks (multiple plotlines coming together into a dramatic unified climax) and partly in one that I don’t think he ever did on that scale again, which was to construct the book largely out of “found materials,” like newspaper articles, court transcripts, interviews, etc. The latter is interesting but distancing, fine but not noticeably better than what a lot of competent writers could do. The present-day sequences are way more impressive and have King’s specific voice.

A lot of what makes King a great writer was there right from the start: the well-crafted structure, the storytelling, the memorable scenes and images, the way with character and place, the trainwreck you see coming, the sympathy with his characters even as you know that a lot of them are not going to make it, and the moral force.

Even more interestingly to me as a writer, it shows how he overall had the sense to build on his strengths rather than his weaknesses in subsequent books. The found materials? Only ever used again in small, judicious doses. But the idea that he could do odd things with structure and that he should feel free to experiment and write each book in the way he thought suited it? That stuck. And most of all, the willingness to just go there with whatever outrageous, taboo, gross, or “you can’t write that” image that popped into his mind. Forty years later, those girls throwing tampons at Carrie still feels dangerous. If he’d never written it and someone submitted it now, there’s an excellent chance they’d get the exact same “what the everlasting fuck am I reading?” reaction.

King wasn’t the writer who taught me the value of just going there (Harlan Ellison did that) but it’s a good lesson to learn. Maybe the best. You don’t have to be gross or horrifying or shocking. You just have to be true to your self. We all have an inner voice and outer critics saying, “This is too revealing, too embarrassing, too weird, too risky; if I write it people will know the inside of my head looks like that.” But the insides of all of our heads are full of weird, embarrassing, scary stuff. It’s powerful stuff, too.

Maybe it’s tampons and a bucket of pig’s blood. Maybe it’s walking trees and a golden ring. Maybe it’s you and a gun and a man on your back. Whatever it is, it’s the real deal. Go there.

Carrie

Given that this is about a lesbian Latina boxer who is genetically unable to feel fear, I have no idea why it took me so long to get to it. It is not only exactly up my alley, but is very well-written, gripping, moving, sometimes funny, sometimes sexy, and probably of wide appeal even to people who don’t find that premise instantly charming.

In the not-quite-post-apocalyptic near future, the town of Santa Olivia has been cordoned off as part of a gigantic effort to seal the border between the US and Mexico. The inhabitants of the town, mostly poor and Latino/a, are stuck there, subject to the American military base on site but with no recourse from the government of either country. However, it’s not an orderly dystopia, but a poor and somewhat lawless town where people live their lives and have relationships and sports and happy times, even though conditions are hard and unjust.

Speaking of sports. The American military commander loves boxing. Once a year, a match is held between an Olympic-level boxer he brings in, and whatever man from Santa Olivia wants to face him. If the latter can win, he gets a ticket out of town. Needless to say, this creates a thriving boxing subculture, jumping at the prize that’s perpetually just out of reach.

But all this is prologue. The story concerns a young woman from Santa Olivia who falls in love with a fugitive from Haiti… a man who was experimented on and genetically engineered. Urban legend calls those men werewolves, but they can’t shapeshift. However, they’re stronger, faster, and unable to feel fear. He’s on the run and soon leaves… but not before fathering a little girl, whom he playfully names Loup.

The bulk of the story is about Loup growing up, mostly in an orphanage. Being unable to fear gives her an odd emotional tenor, not quite autism spectrum but similar. She seems strange to other people, and in her circumstances, being unable to fear means that she needs to hide herself lest she attract unwanted attention. But while she puts off some people, she intrigues others, and soon she’s at the heart of a little band of orphanage kids.

Loup may not feel fear, but she knows injustice when she sees it, and there’s a lot around. There’s also a local legend of a child saint, Santa Olivia, depicted as a little girl in a blue dress. Loup and her friends take on the role of Santa Olivia, stealth dispenser of justice. (In one hilarious scene, she creates a rain of live snakes.) And then there’s that boxing match…

I loved this book. The town and its people feel incredibly real, making unpredictable choices in the way that actual human beings do. The power dynamics, both social and individual, were also strikingly realistic. The relationships were wonderful, from Loup’s childhood buddies to her first romance to (my favorite) her relationship with an arrogant asshole male boxer who goes from being an enemy to a sparring partner to an unexpected friend.

This is written in a completely different style and tone from Carey’s Kushiel’s Dart books, so if you didn’t like those, you may well like Santa Olivia. If you did like those, you may also like Santa Olivia. There’s a sequel, but the story feels complete within the book.

Santa Olivia

A sleepy California town is enclosed in a mysterious barrier at the same instant that, pop! Everyone over the age of 14 vanishes. And some kids get psychic powers. (Actually, some got their powers several months before the pop - no word yet on why.) And animals mutate.

Flying rattlesnakes! Talking coyotes! Kids running around with tentacle arms and telekinesis!

This would be utterly and completely up my alley... except for the non-existent characterization.

The characters are either good kids trying to do right, with maybe one or two other traits, like "leadership abilities" or "bulimic," or complete psychopaths, with maybe one or two other traits like "intelligent" or "seductive." Speaking of which, I don't love the stock character of the sociopathic manipulative seductress in general, but it is about 500% more skeevy when she's fourteen.

Cool mutant animals. Cool mutant powers. But, alas, I didn't care about any of it.

I also disliked the disjunct between the flat emotional tone (probably due to the paper-thin characterization) and the amount of horrific stuff happening to children, and by that I mean kids way younger than 14.

Spoiler for child harm.

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Also could have benefited from characters I cared about. And less retro gender roles. Girls run the daycare and infirmary, boys run law enforcement and government.

There are three girls with powers that could be used in a fight. Two are not introduced till near the end, and the third dies on the same page she's introduced. The main boys' powers are very strong telekinesis, super-strength, laser beams, teleportation, monster-type physical alterations accompanied by super-strength, and altering reality. The main girls' powers are healing, sensing how powerful other mutants are, and sensing how awesome the hero is.

I am not kidding about the last one. Astrid, the love interest, has the power to sense how awesome people are. She's not sure what this literally corresponds to, except that it doesn't seem to just be about who has the most bad-ass power. (The latter is a power another girl has.) But she assures the hero that her mutant power has detected that he is objectively the most important person she has ever met.

A really fun premise and some intriguing mysteries, but not enough to make me continue the series.

Gone

The author of this book collected a set of peculiar vintage found photographs, some altered to produce apparent wonders, some merely odd. I assume he created the splendid pen name of Ransom Riggs. He wrote an evocative first chapter built around a few of the photos, about a Holocaust survivor who tells fantastical stories to his grandson, which only the boy believes.

And then, his invention exhausted, he wrote several more hundred pages of half-haphazard, slow-paced, off-key story to fill out the rest of the book, interspersed with more found photographs which sometimes seem to have dictated the plot, and sometimes seem to be there solely because the premise of the novel was “built around found photos,” but have no apparent relevance. Distractingly, the photos don’t even always match the text, and not in a deliberately unsettling or spooky manner. They’re just wrong, like using one photo of a child and one of a different and much older person, and claiming they’re both of the same teenage character.

The plot follows Jacob, the grandson, now sixteen, who witnesses his grandfather’s death at the hands of the monsters he always feared. Could the monsters of his grandfather’s stories be real? Jacob’s shallow, poorly characterized parents send him to a psychiatrist. But Jacob manages to convince his father that they should go to Wales, where his grandfather lived at a home for refugee children, which he described as a magical place, so that Jacob can prove to himself that his grandfather’s stories were fantasies. Jacob, of course, really wants to prove that they were real. Naturally, they are: he finds the house, suspended in time, and still full of magical kids.

This sounds right up my alley. And yet nearly everything was wrong with it, starting with the voice. Jacob’s narration usually sounds like it was written by a literary-minded adult, with discordant breaks into unconvincing teenage slang when Riggs remembers that he’s supposed to be sixteen. He does not have any characterization, and neither does anyone else in the story except for the mostly off-page grandfather – the book’s only truly believable and interesting character— and some caricatured Welsh people. (The slang phrase meaning "to tease someone; to pull someone's leg" is "taking the piss," not "taking a piss," right?)

The peculiar children have powers but no personalities. There is a bizarre romance between Jacob and one of the peculiar kids, who due to being trapped in time also had a romance with Jacob’s grandfather. EW.

The pace is slow, except when a lot of pell-mell action suddenly occurs at the end, leading to a great big “to be continued” non-ending.

But my biggest problem was with the lack of atmosphere, in a book which probably hit the bestseller lists based on its promise of a delicate, nostalgic spookiness. Except for the first chapter or two, there is very little of that. The overwhelming impression of the book is blandness. The package is beautiful, but when you open it, there’s nothing inside.

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children