Every once in a while you find a book with a plot that puts characters you love in danger, and you race through, wanting to know what happens to them. And then, once you know they are safe, you go back and read it again, because you aren’t ready to say goodbye yet.

ND Wilson’s The Dragon’s Tooth is such a book.

I was eight when I fell in love with reading. The book that first dragged me in? Treasure Island. So if Wilson hadn’t already captured me with the first chapter of The Dragon’s Tooth, he would have had me for sure when the second chapter opened with the grizzled William Skelton (aka Billy Bones) showing up at the Benbow Inn Archer Motel.

Ah, but Wilson had already nabbed me with his first hundred words:

North of Mexico, south of Canada, and not too far west of that freshwater sea called Lake Michigan, in a place where cows polka-dot hills and men are serious about cheese, there is a lady on a pole.

The Lady is an archer, pale and posing twenty feet in the air above a potholed parking lot. Her frozen bow is drawn with an arrow ready to fly, and her long, muscular legs glint in the late-afternoon sun. Behind her, dark clouds jostle on the horizon, and she quivers slightly in the warm breeze pushed ahead of the coming storm….

We have picturesque language, and we have a coming storm, and we settle down, happily giving ourselves over to this teller of tales, confident that we’re in good hands.

When I was halfway through with the book I was raving to a friend about it, saying it was Treasure Island meets Harry Potter. The book starts out like Treasure Island and it has plenty of characters who bear names that point to that wonderful book and who played parts in keeping with their names. The plot, though, quickly heads off in its own direction and I came to think the book would be better explained as Indianna Jones meets Harry Potter: lots of action, a powerful relic sought after by evil men with nefarious designs, mythical powers (not magic), a school of sorts, and a secret society. There’s no sea voyage and treasure hunt, so I guessed the Treasure Island trivia was thrown in just for fun.

The star of the story is Cyrus Smith, 12 years old, who has taken a beating from life. He misses his parents—one dead, one disabled—and his home in California. He misses the cliffs and the ocean breeze and the life he had. Now he lives in a moldy inn with his sister and his brother, and they are barely scraping by.

Cyrus shows promise from early on, despite his sad circumstances. He takes control where he is able. He sinks his school papers in a stream—his small way of rebelling against the idea that his sister and his brother should take the place of his parents. He’s also thoughtful and inventive. He collects things. He sees the potential in what others have thrown away. He has plans. But he’s a mixed bag, hopeful one minute and leaning toward despondency the next. Looking at the motel’s old pool, which is full of tires instead of water, Cyrus thinks:

The pool was a mass grave for worn rubber. An open grave. Someday when Dan wasn’t around, he’d try to melt them all down. Maybe with a black rubber bottom the pool would actually hold water. Or not. Things would find a way to go wrong.

Cyrus also rescued an old, broken record player, intending to fix it. But he never got around to it. So we have in Cyrus a complex character. A boy. a regular boy who collects junk, but also a boy who has been dealt some heavy blows and who is more thoughtful because of those trials. He wants to make things good but can’t really work up the energy to follow through, or perhaps he can’t muster the faith to believe that anything he does matters.

But we can’t spend too much time trying to figure out what makes Cyrus tick, because in the first chapter, there comes into his life a stranger. A disturbing phone call. A man who knows his name and who demands a room in the motel. There is a clap of thunder and a shotgun blast and we are off and running headlong into adventure.

And that’s all I’m going to give you, because if I don’t quit now I’m afraid I’ll go on and on and on. Why does the author choose Cyrus and Antigone for names for the brother and sister? There is so much to dig into, with this book. There’s a Dr. Phoenix and Ashtown and John Smith and The Order of Brendan and the Fountain of Youth. I’m not sure, but I suspect the author had a reason for naming all the people as he did. I suspect that we’ll end up with a story about life and death and resurrection. I’m pretty sure that I’m not well read enough to get everything out of the book that the author put in. Still, I was able to enjoy the story immensely, because the characters are so vibrant and real and lovable and the plot is so engaging.

And in the end, maybe we’re back to Treasure Island. Maybe Billy Bones left a treasure map.

Maybe not.

Read the book and see what you think.

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A few lovely quotes, snatched from random pages:

…listening to a team of cicadas electrocuting the air….

…blue skies walled with rowdy black clouds….

The wind was muscling through his hair….

Interesting article in PW. There seems to be no question that YA is dark. We seem to all agree on that. I guess the trouble comes in when some of us think that’s a bad thing and others think that’s a good thing.

I thought this was interesting:

In those pre-Harry days, one persistent worry was that the YA category was losing the upper half of that audience—15–19-year-olds—to Danielle Steel and Stephen King. Nowadays, the traffic is going the other way: adults are shopping in the YA aisle.

Yeah. I like that.

Other points the article hit on? There’s money being made, the paranormal craze seems to be dying, the dystopian craze may get its second wind with The Hunger Games movie, and everyone is looking for the next big thing but no one is sure what it will be.

I wonder if it the next blockbuster will be ND Wilson’s latest, The Dragon’s Tooth, which I just finished. I’d describe the book as Indiana Jones meets Harry Potter, with a serious hat-tip to Treasure Island thrown in for fun.

This is an MG book, not YA, but it will cross over and be read by all ages, I have no doubt. It’s the first in a series of five, and it has “movie” written all over it.

I’ll be writing a review on this one soon. But don’t wait on that. If you like action books with characters who are real and lovable and with writing that shines, buy this one posthaste. I have it on the Kindle and now I’m buying the hardback for my son—who is way past the middle grades but who will love this one all the same.

It struck me the other day that as often as I think about and talk about my favorite orphaned characters, I have never put Harry Potter in the list.

How odd. I honestly think the books are brilliant. I love how easy they are to get lost in. I love the world and many of the characters. And yet, I never think of Harry when I think of favorite characters in books.

Harry seems like he’d be my kind of orphan—a kid who was abused. A smart, talented kid who was unappreciated. How could anyone read about the awful, narrow-minded, selfish, mean Dursleys and not feel for little Harry who lived in the closet under the stairs and who got a coat hanger and a pair of his uncle’s old socks for his eleventh birthday?

And yet, even though I loved the first three books, I never considered Harry Potter a friend. I thoroughly enjoyed the comical, over-the-top way Dudley Diddicums and his blind, stupid parents treated Harry. But that hyperbole made the Dursley’s feel like cartoon characters—delightful to read (Dudley is the funniest villain around), but not real.

The world seemed real. Rowling painted the place in great detail and that made it feel like she was telling me about an actual place that she knew well. I loved Hogwarts and Hogsmeade. And I grew attached to some characters in the books, too. I loved Hagrid and Fred and George from the start. But Harry and I never bonded.

As the books went on, they got less comical. Harry had real enemies. His fat, red-faced, irrational uncle moved the family to a tiny island in a stormswept sea to escape letters, dropped by owls, that kept coming down the chimney. That was idiotic (and funny and thoroughly enjoyable) but it was not real danger. Dementors? There was real danger. Harry’s godfather who was in prison for murder? That guy was scary. And yet, I still didn’t care much about Harry.

I’m not sure why.

I never thought about it before, and the books are too long for me to go back and read over to see why I didn’t love Harry. But I’m going to guess that Harry never struck me as a good boy who was suffering unjustly. Sure, the Dursley’s treated him badly, and he was stuck there through no fault of his own, but he answered the maltreatment with anger and payback. Some of what he did was accidental, but even the accidents were triggered by his anger.

There is in the little orphans I love, a feeling of unworthiness, maybe, or at least no sense of entitlement. They accept their fate as a matter of course and they desire to better their circumstances through hard work and clean living without bothering to blame anyone for the harsh worlds they inhabit. Anne is spunky and fights back, but she believes Marilla when she says Anne is “next door to a heathen” and she tries to improve herself. Grady accepts Floyd as his friend and doesn’t waste a lot of time railing against his lot in life. He tries to be an honest boy as best he can be, and he takes what life gives him. Gibby’s greatest joy is to serve his drunken, neglectful father, and he doesn’t know that good fathers don’t treat children so horribly.

So I think the orphans I love best are the ones who take their lives as from God’s hand, and they keep walking, doing what they find to do, looking for love as they go, but not really feeling like they’ve been cheated—or certainly not dwelling on it.

Harry is looking for love, too. I loved him best when he found his godfather and I really, really hated that his godfather died. If Sirius had lived it would have changed Harry drastically. When a child knows he’s loved, he reacts to the world differently than the unloved child reacts. But Sirius doesn’t live. Dobby adores Harry and that does raise him up in my estimation some. Just not quite enough. Harry keeps pining after his dead parents, and he seems to be an angry boy much of the time. He talks back to the Dursleys and gets back at them when he’s given opportunity.

Many of the children in the books were a little too bratty for my liking. They were moody and angry a lot of the time. That may be true to life for some teens. But who wants to spend eight hundred pages with children who are so disagreeable?

Harry winds up being heroic, but I think for me it came too late.

I may have to rewrite my last book, because I think my heroine may be too much of a whiner. Maybe I can fix her. If you liked Harry, what was it that drew you to him? Did you think he was too angry, or am I imagining this? What about Dudley? Are there any others out there that thought Dudley Diddicums was hysterical? I remember one scene where he whacks Harry in the head with his school stick. It was so funny. So exactly what Dudley would do. Yes, I thought Dudley and his mother were perfectly drawn.

Saraswati is the Hindu goddess of knowledge and wisdom, so we know from the title that this book is about India. What Schröder doesn’t make clear in the title is that the book challenges the belief that the gods always have their way or, at least, that our fates are predetermined by the gods. Or perhaps the author is trying to show that Saraswati’s way is for us to act and make our own ways in the world. I don’t know enough about Hindu beliefs to know.

The book might have been more aptly titled, Akash’s Way, because the story follows an Indian boy named Akash as he goes about achieving his goals.

Akash is a likable protagonist with a reasonable goal and you feel for him from the beginning of the story. He lives in a dusty Indian village where life is not fair. Akash, through no fault of his own, has less than others. His father works hard, but his uncle is an addict who sucks the life from the family. So Akash knows from the beginning that he will have a hard time earning money to pay a tutor so he can continue his education.

Akash has one love—numbers. He has a natural ability for working with numbers, for seeing patterns in the numbers. He will go to any lengths to try to earn money for a tutor. When things go from bad to worse at home he faces the truth—if he will ever get to school, he will have to set out and make his own way. The gods don’t seem to want to help him. No one in his family will help him. It is up to him.

The story is not all that bleak, though. Even though he is in dire circumstances, there is an easy-going assurance to Akash that makes you hope and believe that he will eventually succeed.

I liked Saraswati’s Way for a couple of reasons. First, I liked Akash very much. I liked his voice. I liked that he was not willing to accept his fate. I liked that he was smart and focused on his goal. I also liked the fact that the book questions blind faith in the gods, or our giving ourselves over to a fatalistic view of life.

What I didn’t like so much was…

SPOILERS! IF YOU WANT TO READ ON, HIGHLIGHT THE SPACE BELOW AND THE WORDS WILL APPEAR.

I think what bothered me about this book was perhaps the lack of moral guidance the boy had. It wasn’t clear to me what the theme of the book was. I think the author was trying to tell us that we need to rely on ourselves and work hard and make our own way instead of following Saraswati’s way or waiting on any other god. What I saw, though, was a boy who engaged in illegal activity that is of the sort that was hard to forgive. He had an addict uncle and he knew street boys who had sniffed their brains out and yet he was not opposed to dealing drugs to get what he wanted.

That scheme quickly backfires and he shows compassion on a man in need and is rewarded (is the goddess now rewarding him for choosing a better path?) by gaining his goal at last. He gains the goal by lying, though. Apparently Saraswati doesn’t mind that?

In the end, I believe it is my lack of understanding about Hindu beliefs that hindered my understanding of the boy’s feelings and motivations. He was on the one hand a kid like any other kid, with desires and with brains and with a drive to succeed. But on the other hand he was a boy who brought baggage with him that I couldn’t relate to. I needed things spelled out a little more in the end, I think. What did Akash think the goddess had to do with his failures and successes? Was she, in his estimation, moving him in a direction she wanted him to go in by opening and shutting doors when he tried different ways to achieve his goals?

That said, I must say that Monika Schröder has once again given me a character that is from a different culture and yet is very likable and interesting. I think this book would be a great place to jump off from for middle grade students wanting to study India or world religions or street children. There was a lot of color in this book that made me want to dig deeper into Indian culture.

Day three of the CSFF Blog Tour, for Jonathan Rogers. I was thinking yesterday that we needed a whole week. Because the more I think about the book, the more I love about it.

But we’ve run out of time. So I will limit myself to discussing some of the spiritual elements I saw in the book.

I read the book for the fun of it. I wasn’t looking for a sermon. I wasn’t looking to be drawn close to God in any way. The truth is that I enjoy Jonathan’s stories and I can rejoice in the talent God has given him whether the stories give me any spiritual messages or not. But I am also, always, pleasantly surprised by the depth of the stories Rogers writes. So, since a couple of bloggers on the tour have mentioned that they didn’t find strong spiritual elements in the book, I thought I’d put out just one thing I saw. I want to look at the climax of the story, because I thought it was such a strong picture of salvation.

So, here we go.

SPOILERS! IF YOU HAVEN’T READ THE BOOK, DON’T READ BEYOND THIS POINT.

I MEAN IT!

I’M NOT KIDDING!

LAST CHANCE TO STOP!!!!

OK, for the rest of you, if you want to read the post, highlight the space below and the words will magically appear.

In the climax of the book, Floyd turns on Grady in a big way, and Grady has his moment of truth. He has, all his life, tried to please Floyd. He has forgiven Floyd for his meanness. He has tried to convince Floyd to settle down on a farm and enjoy family life with a son who will love him. He has loved Floyd by default, even though Floyd wasn’t worthy of love. But finally Floyd betrays him.

So Floyd shows himself to be the anti-Christ.

Here are the darts that Satan, the master of all charlatans, shoots at us before we are saved—here is his patter: God can’t love you because you’re too ugly. You’re an orphan. You’re unlovable. Look at how good I am to you. I take care of you and give you a job and food to eat even though you are ugly and worthless. God is mean to you. He abandoned you under a tree.

In the climax of Grady’s story, the boy comes face to face with the ugly truth: Floyd has used him as long as it was convenient, but at the end he sells him for a two-copper raise. And we hear this wild wailing from the boy, as he owns the painful truth that Floyd was never on his side. He’s been more alone than he even knew. He gives up his last hope of finding love.

The betrayal is immense.

Floyd casts him aside, and the boy sinks into the pit. Who will save him now? He is utterly lost.

We can determine what God looks like by looking at Floyd—the anti-Christ—and working backwards. Floyd will kill Grady to save his skin. God will die to save our skin. Floyd thinks Grady’s ugly. God gives us beauty. Floyd casts Grady aside, God takes us in and gives us the great honor of working alongside of him as a yokefellow. Floyd hates Grady and doesn’t have a problem with making him lie and cheat, God looks on us with love and his love makes us better and more honest. Floyd discards Grady when he is no longer useful, God waits for us and longs for us to return to him.

I hope in future books Floyd will be redeemed. But for right now, he’s playing the part of The Betrayer, The Usurper, The Charlatan, The Liar and The Father of Lies.

Children reading this book will not take from it what I took. What they will understand, I think, is 1) We don’t have to settle for love that is less than love. We don’t have to pretend that someone who uses us is really loving us, because 2) there is real love in the world. If we keep looking we’ll find the one who will see us as beautiful and who will give us significance by loving us.

They may understand even more. They may get that 1) we’ve been separated from our loving father, stolen away by a charlatan and 2) our loving father is waiting for us, longing for us to turn from following the charlatan and come back to him.

Grady didn’t make a decision to leave the charlatan and find his people, but in the fullness of time, his people found him. And he responded to being found by joyfully following his own people. He went with the feechies. He saw that he was one of them. He didn’t reject them; he felt a kinship with them. This echoes the way we Christians respond to God when he finds us. We leap for joy when the Spirt says, “Come on feller, you belong with us.” We stand for a minute gawping, as Grady did, and then we know in our hearts that it’s true, we belong with them.

Rogers wasn’t preaching a sermon in this book. Types, in literature, aren’t exact representations of the thing they are standing in for. And nothing is spelled out, so there is room for interpretation here. I don’t even have any idea if Jonathan thought about Satan being a charlatan or if he was trying to make Floyd a type of anti-Christ. And I certainly don’t expect middle grade children to bring to this book the life experience I bring. I don’t expect them to see what I see.

So if the children won’t get all these things from the story, why should parents bother letting the children read the book? I believe if a child grows up feeding on books like this, it is quite likely that there will come a day when he will hear the gospel preached and he will hear the Spirit say, “Come on feller, you belong with me,” and he will know in his heart that he does, indeed, belong with God. He will recognize in God that lover of his soul that he has been searching for all along.