Today for the CSFF Blog Tour, I want to talk a little about Jonathan Rogers.

I came across his book, The Bark of the Bog Owl, when it first came out and I loved the title. It was mysterious. It promised fantasy and adventure. It tugged at my heart by stirring up a picture of a wild loneliness. I read the first chapter at Amazon and was hooked. I read the book aloud to my children, and my husband heard us laughing and had to come and listen. We read it way too fast, with the kids begging for “just one more chapter” each time I tried to stop. Dobro Turtlebane is a sidekick in the Wilderking books (there are three of them. Buy them all. You’ll thank me after you read them.) but he stole the show, I thought. We all loved him. The feechies, unspoiled by civilized society, are very attractive folks despite their lack of polite lies and personal hygiene.

So began my love affair with Dr. Rogers and his feechie folk.

But in his latest book, The Charlatan’s Boy, Rogers goes a little more deeply into his protagonist than he did in Bog Owl, and he nails down more firmly a genre he launched with the Wilderking books—Frontier Fantasy.

What a stroke of brilliance. This is exactly what agents and publishers are always begging for. The new thing. Or, even better, the melding of two well-known and well-loved existing things, to make one super-duper-killer new thing.

Andrew Peterson says of The Charlatan’s Boy:

Imagine a southern version of a C.S. Lewis story or a Christian version of a Mark Twain tale.

And he nails it with that. If you think “CS Lewis meets Mark Twain” you’ll have a decent handle on Rogers’ children’s books.

There is nothing exclusively Christian about The Charlatan’s Boy. Yes, both Lewis and Rogers are informed by scripture in their views of human nature, but if I had to guess, I’d say their books are not meant to preach the gospel as much as they are meant to enrich readers by giving them a glimpse into their own souls. Maybe. Jonathan’s books remind me of Lewis not in their Christian-ness but in the the author’s ability to see human nature clearly, to love fallen humans despite their shortcomings, and to gently convict us of our own sins by making us laugh at his characters’ foibles.

I laughed at Puddleglum in The Silver Chair but while I laughed I learned the first thing from him: a persistent gloomy perspective is false. Then Puddleglum set out despite his feelings of doom, proving that he did have some faith, so I learned a second thing from him: actions speak louder than words. In the end it was Puddleglum’s simple faith in the world he could not see with his eyes that saved the day, so I learned my third thing from him: God is pleased to give broken people great victories even if they have only a weak faith. Wow! So many important lessons gotten from one fallen marshwiggle! If Lewis had lectured me on these things, I’d have missed most of them, I’m sure. But by showing me how ridiculous this marshwiggle was, and then by letting his weak faith bear fruit, Lewis taught me much.

I think Rogers gives us lessons from his characters in the same way Lewis did. He doesn’t lecture us. Instead he lays out a bunch of characters, all with conflicts, and he lets us see for ourselves if they are acting nobly or not. He lets us laugh at them and decide we don’t want to act so foolishly as they have done, or he lets us see their longing for goodness and decide we also want to be good. So in The Charlatan’s Boy we have Grady, who longs to be honest and is more honest than he knows; and Floyd, the deceitful flimflam man who feeds and cares for Grady even if he does a pretty poor job of it. We have Short Fronie, a tough barmaid with a tender side; and Barbary, a beautiful girl pining away because she’s using her great talent on cheap scams instead of worthwhile art. We have Wiley, who is easily duped because he’s an honest boy; and we have gullible villagers who are misled because they are full of pride or greed or a desire for a quick fix. We have weak gamblers and conceited cowboys with a kind of  ”honor among thieves” code of conduct.

Here’s a paragraph about the cowboys who are “forever stealing each other’s cows and breaking each other’s noses about it.”:

To look at them, you wouldn’t expect much out of the drovers in the way of gentermanly behavior. Their hair is shaggy, and their teeth ain’t all in their heads where they’re supposed to be, and most of them’s noses is mashed too flat on their face. Also, their language ain’t the most uplifting and improving language I ever heard. But they’ve got a code of behavior, and they stick to it as well as shopkeepers and schoolmarms stick to theirs. I’ll tell you this much: Floyd and me have had a heap more scrapes in the villages than we’ve ever had on the drove roads.

That paragraph also shows one area where I think Rogers’ latest story surpassed Lewis’s Narnia books. He brought to this story a first-person voice that is every bit as strong as I remember Huck Finn’s to be. As much as I loved Narnia, I was never as attached to the Penvensie children, or any of the protagonists, as I am attached to Grady.

Mark Twain was also an adept reader of, and poker-of-fun at, human nature. Rogers, I think has something over Twain, though. Rogers’ wit is missing the sharp edge that I think Twain employed. I think Rogers sees humor everywhere, but he doesn’t laugh at others as much as he enjoys them. Even when Grady’s been hurt, he doesn’t lash out. He never tries to fix Floyd. He takes people as they come, dislikes the mean stuff, but seems willing to forgive all that and enjoy what good he can find. Rogers comes across as nothing like the cynic that I think Twain was.

I may be wrong about that—I haven’t read any Twain in years. If I’m misremembering him, feel free to jump in and tell me. I recall him as being very funny, but his fun, I seem to remember, often had a meanness about it. I don’t remember Huck sharing any good times with the old women who made his life miserable, for instance. I don’t remember him admiring those women in any way, whereas Grady does admire Floyd’s skill. He’s fair-minded and gives credit where credit is due.

In the end, I think Rogers is uniquely his own. He shares in the best strengths Lewis and Twain possessed, but his world, his voice, and his perspective on life’s journey are his own and they seem to me to be uncluttered by what has gone before. They are delightfully fresh and great fun to read.

OK I’ve carried on far too long. I find it hard to rein myself in when I’m passionate about a thing and I am just a tad passionate about The Charlatan’s Boy. But I’m not the only one who is crazy over Rogers’ books. Check out what others are saying:

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