Jumping The Pages

It is snowy, cold and blech outside...seems to be the perfect time to curl up with my computer, a cup of coffee and write a rambling.  Today I shall ramble on about a book that caught my eye called The Book Jumper by Mechthild Glaser.  I was at the bookstore looking for a completely different book, when the cover jumped out at me...and seriously with a cover like this I pretty much had to buy it.  It ended up being a bit hit or miss for me, though it did re inspire the return of my book journal...but before we get to that, as always SPOILERS AHEAD!

Amy and her young mother Alexis are both in the throes of heartache.  Alexis has been dumped by her married boyfriend and Amy is experiencing the teenage angst of betrayal and embarrassment by a friend via social media.  They flee from their town in Germany to the tiny Scottish isle of Stormsay and their family home called the Lennox House.  They arrive fittingly in a storm and are greeted by the stern matriarch of the family Lady Mairead, Alexis's mother and Amy's grandmother.  They are welcomed on the condition that Amy learn how to become a book jumper.  What the heck is a book jumper?  I'm glad you asked.  You see on this little tiny isle there are two families, the Lennox family and the Macalister family.  These two clans have been responsible for hundreds of years for caring for the storylines of books.  They accomplish this by lying in a circle of standing stones, laying a book over their face then voila! they are in the book.  Amy chooses The Jungle Book as her practice book, but finds that she can easily move between stories, making friends with various characters.  Amy also discovers that she can jump into her e-reader and that she does not need to be in the standing circle to do so.  She is in a class with Betsy and William, the daughter and nephew of the current Laird of the Macalister clan.  Betsy is not a fan of Amy's, feeling she is too old to be properly trained...also she is a Lennox.  Will is cordial.  The three are taught by three guy's who are kind of monk like and are all scarred by burns.  While exploring the various literary worlds, Amy discovers that idea's are being stolen, altering the storylines in all the books in the world (yeah...we will discuss this later).  Nobody believes her, until she and Will discover the body of Sherlock Holmes in the real world.  Apparently Will would pull Sherlock out of the book to talk to him.  He vanished one day and it turns out he was murdered.  Apparently the Sherlocks in the other stories agreed to help out in the dead ones book so all was well.  The three students are taken to a place deep in the library and shown a story that explains a lot.  Apparently the Lennox family used to have a castle, but after a tussel, a fire broke out and destroyed it along with a one of a kind manuscript of a story not written down anywhere else.  The three teachers turn out to be the only characters rescued from the destroyed story and now live on the Stormstay teaching the new jumpers.  Amy discovers her mother making out with Desmond, one of the rescued book guys,  and after a bunch of angst and back and forthness learns that he is her father.  Yep, I guess when you spend most of your life on an island that only houses two families and a less then a dozen other people, you fall in love with the ageless book character...and then have a kid with him.  This helps explain why Amy is such an advanced jumper as in reality she is half fictional...yeah...anyways moving on.  We continue to go back and forth, Will and Amy fall in teenage love, accusations and suspicions fly 'cause nobody actually talks to each other and finally we figure out what is going on.  The old burned manuscript that had only fragments of pages and the three men saved had one more surprise.  Somehow the princess in the story also managed to escape the destruction and has been hibernating on the island.  She is a young, spoiled petulant thing who enchanted Will to be her Knight and jump into the stories to steal ideas.  She is trying to use these ideas to restore her story.  Once we know this we are able to piece together her story...which is not a very nice one. Most of the info finally comes from Desmond, who was the original Knight in the story.  Essentially the princess, when she get's bored, enchants a man to be her Knight, sending him out to slay a monster that is ravaging her kingdom.  The sick part is that the princess has actually turned the Knight into the monster, having him commit heinous acts, then sending him out unknowing to find the monster.  The only way to stop the monster is for the Knight to kill himself...starting the cycle all over again.  Will finds a way to stop the princess, getting himself killed in the process and Amy is able to return the idea's back to their original books.  She takes Will's body into his favorite book, Peter Pan and Tinker Bell is able to bring him back to life as a story character.  Amy spends most of her time in the books, exploring them with Will and that is how the book ends.

World Building - There is a lot of different ways to look at the world building in this book.  The island of Stormsay is fairly well realized, I could probably find my way around it if I needed to, and the atmosphere of it is complete.  The rest of it however is patchy.  I never got a full sense of the family, the history or the mechanics of the book jumping.  I felt I wanted either more information, or better merging of the different pieces of this complicated world.  I unfortunately did not get the feeling of full immersion that is the hallmark of a well built world.

Story - We have the problem of too many stories to accurately judge this category.  Some of these stories are more successful then others.  The best story in my humble opinion was the one of the ruined manuscript.  Through out the book, there are fragments given to us that make it sound like a fairly typical fairy tale, to find out that it is a pretty dark and twisted story is pretty awesome.  I feel like I did with the world building that if we had more information it would have been easier for the reader to see where all the various disparate stories tied together.  For me it was a bunch of flipping back and forth and wondering if I missed something.  In general, each story line was pretty good, they just didn't completely gel to create a whole.

Character - This book had a ton of characters in it.  Some where created just for the book and some were pulled from the literary world.  I was pretty ambivalent about most of the characters, didn't really hate any of them...but didn't really fall in love with any of them either.  For the most part, most of the characters where just there to further the story without a whole lot of personality, history or motivation.  Will, Amy and Alexis where the most formed of the characters, and I liked Will the best of those three.  Amy and Alexis where your fairly typical young mom/teenager duo that seems to be popular lately, didn't hate them, didn't love them.

Editing - So this book was translated from it's native German, which is pretty cool 'cause I love getting view points that are not typically American.  That being said, the flow of the book was not my favorite.  I felt that the there were to many storylines and not enough information.  While this is mostly on the writer, I feel an editor can maybe point out to an author that maybe the reader isn't in the author's head and needs some background, or history, or consistency for the book to work.  It isn't horrible editing, but like the rest of the categories...meh

Book Jumping - Ok, here we have one of my biggest issues with this book, and a particular literary peeve in general.  For me the overall concept of the book jumping left me with a ton of questions and very few answers, in fact it inspired me to get out my book journal again so that I could write down all my questions about book jumping.  Here are just a few thoughts I had.  Who discovered it? Why only these two families?  How diluted can the blood get?  Seriously how do these two tiny families keep track of EVERY book?  What is their purpose again?  If they are the only ones who can jump...aren't they the only ones who can mess up the story? Why are the characters aware of the jumpers?  Umm...about the timelines?  How do you turn the page?  Seriously, other then the mechanism of lying down and putting the book on your face there is not much given to us about the jumping.  I hate it when an author has a concept, especially a potentially good concept and then the execution is poor.  I understand that I will never have all the info or answers I want for things like this, and I don't always need them...I just want a concept to make sense. Since the book jumping was such a huge part of the book, I don't feel like I am wrong in wanting to know how it actually works.

Books About Getting Into Books - I have not yet found a book that has successfully executed a concept where characters from the real world can get into book worlds.  I have read some great ones that deal with elements of books in the real world, or authors or things like that, but anytime I read about a character actually getting into Wonderland, or Neverland, or Pemberly...it just does not work for me.  I think it's cause for me a good book world is complete and personal to the reader.  If you asked me to draw, or describe Pemberly and then you asked my baby sis to do the same thing, I bet you would come up with two equally valid, yet very different pictures.  So when an author tries to put a character into that world it infringes on my view of the world.  As for my own personal self, I'm always torn.  If I had the opportunity would I want to jump into a literary world, or is the bigger appeal the fact that I am completely outside of it?  Ok this is getting very philosophical and may require it's own post.

Fictional Father - After all of my mehness about the book...I have to admit I kind of liked the idea that Amy had a father that was a fictional character. Aside from the zillions of questions it brings forth, it also had the added advantage of me paring up literary characters and wondering what their offspring would be like.  I may have also had some literary fantasy's on which literary crush I would allow to father my fictional kids...

Overall Impression - Overall I feel pretty meh about the whole book.  It seemed to have a ton of stuff in it without really going anywhere.  There were moments of awesome and the concept was pretty cool, but the overall muddledness, lack of info and too many literary pet peeves made this book disappointing.  I feel that it had a lot of potential and if this author exports any other books over the pond, I will probably give her another chance 'cause I feel like she has good ideas.  I give this book 5 out of 10 inkpots and realize that other people enjoyed it more then I did which is also awesome.   Also the book cover is worth it just to have on my book shelf.   Happy Reading Everybody!

Not So Good To Be Queen

Being inspired by my trip to the Renaissance Festival I read the book The Wild Queen by Carolyn Meyer. This book would probably be considered historical fiction by most folks and follows the life of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots .  This book is part of the authors Young Royals series, of which I have read several and have enjoyed the mix of history and fiction.  The books are about real life people, and contain their real history that has been embellished with what author has written to fill in the day to day conversations and such (does that make sense).  As always SPOILERS AHEAD (well only if you don't know your history).

The plot of this one is interesting because it is based on the actual recorded life of an actual person, with just certain details added in.  I do not know enough to distinguish the facts from the fiction, but from what I do know the major events are all real and recorded.  A young Mary Stuart is crowned Queen of Scotland at just six days old.  She is sent to France at the age of five to live in the household of the French monarchy where she is eventually to marry the eldest son and heir to the throne Francis.   Mary or Marie as she is now called has much family in France as her mother was from a noble house of France before she moved to Scotland to marry the King.  Mary learns much of court life and the power and lack there of a woman can wield in it. At the age of 16 she married Francis, who was a small and sickly boy who never attained his manhood.  According to the book, Mary and Francis never consummated their marriage as Francis was too delicate and child like.  Mary is named Queen Consort alongside Francis when he gains the throne after the death of his father. During this time Mary Queen of England has died and her half sister Elizabeth has claimed the throne.  Several of Mary's family feel she has a better claim to the English throne, but it all falls to naught.   Alas Francis falls ill and dies leaving Mary a widow at the age of 18 and with no power whatsoever in the country of France.  Mary returns to Scotland amid treaty discussions with England to claim her throne.

 Mary does not want to sign a treaty with England until Elizabeth names her heir in the case of Elizabeth dying with no children.  Elizabeth does not want this because she feels it will cause people to try and depose her to put Mary on the throne.  Mary is welcomed back to Scotland where against the will of almost all her advisers she marries her cousin Henry, giving in to his every wish and whim out of  a desire to please him.  This union quickly sours and other then her precious son James, no good comes from this marriage.  More arguing, fighting, treating and such occur and one fateful night the lodging where Henry is staying is blown up.  Henry is found dead and Mary is blamed for plotting to kill him.  Mary is captured by Lord Bothwell and forced to marry him (making this Mary's third husband in her young life).  They attempt to put the divided kingdom back together with John Knox pushing for a Protestant only kingdom and the devoutly Catholic Mary decreeing a policy of tolerance.  Knox has also persuaded several important people (including her bastard half brother James) that a woman will never be fit to rule a country.  Mary is captured by her brothers people who force her to abdicate in favor of her son with her brother as regent.  Mary escapes and flees to England hoping Elizabeth will help her regain her throne, even though they still have not resolved there own issues.  Mary is taken captive in England and held as prisoner for 18 years before being placed on trial for plotting Elizabeth's death.  Mary is sentenced to death and is beheaded.  Ironically her son James does ascend the throne of Scotland and later England when Elizabeth dies leaving no heirs.  All of the subsequent monarchs of England and Scotland came down through the Stuart line.

I like books like this because it makes history a bit more interesting.  I know that a lot of it is speculation or filling in the gaps, but the basic history is still present.  It get's frustrating to read these stories sometimes and realize just how powerless even a sovereign monarch can be, especially if you were female.  The reader also has the advantage of hindsight which makes you cringe at the inevitability of some of the choices these characters make.  I think the best part about this book, and books like it is that it makes me want to go find out more about the real history of these people and places.  It is a great jumping of point to see where your historical interests lie, or to discover something that never even occurred to you before.  Most people know about the big events and people in history, but a lot has been documented and discovered about other less known players and events which add an even richer layer to already known history.  This isn't really making any sense because it is hard to review just the book instead of the whole learning/discovery process so I will just let you read it for yourself.  An interesting side note if you will, I actually played Mary Stuart in the play Mary Stuart with my best friend playing Elizabeth in a meeting that never took place in real life, but in the play she took great pleasure in condemning me to death :-)  We won a couple of awards for our performance so this era will always hold a special place in my heart.  I recommend this book for anybody interested in history, historical fiction, or a way to get kids started on history in a more palatable story form.  I give this book 7 out of 10 coats of arms.

What is your favorite period in history? Do you like the fictionalized versions as a way to learn history or are you a purist history buff?  What about alternative histories where the death of Kings and Queens is really an alien plot to seed the world with pod people?