I generally like kids’ novels – Harry Potter, for instance, or The Hunger Games, or The Golden Compass, or The Blue Sword, etc, etc, etc. I think it’s because I can usually identify with the characters, and an adult having written them probably helps. That said, The Mysterious Benedict Society didn’t work for me. It might be aimed at a younger crowd than I’m used to, though these kids are 11 and 12, and Harry Potter started out at that age. I was also somewhere around 18 at that point – certainly nowhere near 30.
The Mysterious Benedict Society is about four kids, all of them basically orphans, who see an add in the newspaper offering adventures to kids who can pass a test. They’re the only for who pass, and they’re taken to a large house and, eventually, told what’s going on: There’s a Bad Guy who is sending out subliminal messages saying that he is awesome and that they should do whatever he says. He runs a school on an island just out of town, and they’re supposed to infiltrate it and discover his secrets. Well, they do both, then, in a heroic move, they decide to stay and try to destroy him. Things continue to happen. The end.
Again, I’m not a fan. It almost seems like Trenton Lee Stewart started writing a novel for a slightly older age group, then, mid-novel, decided he should aim a bit younger. I liked the beginning well enough. Stewart’s style is okay, though the characters are a bit flat, and there aren’t any particularly slow points. I found myself thinking too many times through the novel that the kids were being dumb and taking risks that even kids wouldn’t take. They seemed to be acting even younger than they were, which really irritated me. And then there are some stupid twists that made me roll my eyes. For instance (spoiler!): one of the kids is really short and pouty, though she turns out necessary. She’s probably as smart of the rest of them, but she has a really bad attitude. We find out why at the end of the novel: she’s a precocious two-year-old. Urrrrgh. Then, there are the life issues brought up in the beginning and then tied up way too simply at the end. Like (another spoiler!) one of the kids has a ridiculous photographic memory, and his parents take advantage of him, signing him up for game shows and amassing piles of money. He runs away, and his parents get tons of donations to help find him, which they spend on themselves. The kid seems a bit bitter, as he should be. At the end of the novel, though, when all the kids are being adopted (meh), his parents show up all apologetic, and all, saying they decided they missed him and went into debt looking for him. Instead of being angry like any normal kid would do, this particularly smart kid is perfectly happy to be reunited with his parents, and things go on as if nothing had ever happened. Yeah, right. I was annoyed.
So I guess I’ve just found a novel aimed at too young an audience with which I can identify, though the top of the book’s cover claims that it was at the top of the New York Times’ bestseller list, and I don’t know how it could do that without a bunch of adult readers. It’s also a series: the Mysterious Benedict Society has quite a few adventures on the bookshelves. I won’t be checking those out anytime soon.
