SarahJanet's Books

Gregor the Overlander and Granny Torrelli Make Soup

I'm in charge of the Young Reader's Choice Awards at work this year, which means I will be going out to the schools and talking about the awards and the books that have been nominated for it. I'm really excited about doing this - I remember being in elementary school and reading the books for these awards (then called the PNLA awards) - I even won a prize in grade five for reading the most in my class. (I got a copy of the Last Battle, signed by my extremely beloved grade five teacher with a note about what a good reader I was.)

So I decided that although it's not required of YRCA contacts, I was going to read all of the YRCA books this year, something I always mean to do but never quite get around to. There are three categories for the awards, Junior, Intermediate, and Senior. There are 21 books total in all three categories, and I had read precisely one of them before the nominations came out. (Actually, I read it after the nominations came out, but I already had it signed out when the nominations were announced: The Time Traveler's Wife. Which my roommate read this week and also loved to death.)

Last year, I was kind of underwhelmed by the YRCA books that I read. There were a few good ones, but some of them were just plain mediocre. So I was sort of nervous about embarking on this reading project, because I didn't want the books to totally suck. There are a lot of good books out there; I didn't want to waste precious reading time on crappy ones.

Much to my delight, the first two I read were excellent.

Granny Torrelli Makes Soup is a book by Sharon Creech, who is an extremely popular children's author that I've never really gotten into. Her books are quite unusually written, often featuring extremely short chapters and unusual stylistic choice. This book, while brief, is appealing and intruiging. The story of a 12-year-old girl's uncertain feelings for an old friend are tidily brought out in a lengthy series of cooking escapades with her grandmother, and the culture of her family is presented in a refreshingly unstereotypical fashion. Rosie, the granddaughter, is cute without being cutesy, and Granny Torrelli is the kind of grandma everybody secretly wishes they had. Bailey, the object of Rosie's desires, is blind without being Blind - his disability is not ignored, nor is it harped on. It's a book that could have easily gotten into treacley without any trouble at all, but it manages to be light-hearted while still making its point. I was extremely pleasantly surprised by it.

Gregor the Overlander is a juvenile fantasy. This is always a tricky place to start with me. I am a recent convert to fantasy, and even now I rarely read adult fantasy, preferring kids' fantasy for the most part, but even then I'm picky. I don't go in for unicorn/princess/dragon stuff, for the most part, nor am I wild about extremely complicated other worlds. My type of fantasy is stuff like Harry Potter, or Alanna, by Tamora Pierce, which feature regular people doing unusual things. But I'm picky even within that concept. I hated So You Want to be a Wizard, which has a very similar idea, and I was bored to tears by Wizard of Earthsea, which is a little more fantastical and a little less realistic, but still. Fantasy is very touch and go.

So I was very pleased to discover that Gregor is neither predictable nor dull. It's tricky, in fantasy, to come up with an idea that hasn't been done to death. (Let's face it. Harry Potter, while one of my personal favourites, is far from original. Fun, yes. A good use of the genre, yes. Well-written, not particularly. Totally addictive, yes. But blindingly original, no. There are a million books about regular kids becoming wizards. Or witches. Or whatever. Wizard boarding school is not earth-shattering creativity, people, it's a well-established concept that features in loads of other fantasy books.) But Gregor is an interesting idea that starts out in our reality, which is how I like my fantasy to take place. It features an alternative universe that exists parallel to our own, and it's peopled (which is the wrong word, I suppose, since they aren't all people) with surprisingly appealing characters and moderately suspensful concepts.

The story is focused on a prophecy which Gregor, an Overlander who arrives in an Underland filled with giant bugs and rats, is destined to fulfill. Gregor is meant to be a hero, but he is understandably resistant to the idea. He doesn't become heroic in an unbelieveable blaze of glory, and his uncertainty with his destiny is far more believeable than a lot of fantasy heroes tend to be.

His little sister Boots is a bit of a show-stealer, and the creatures of the Underworld are varied and intruiging, and given a lot of layers for minor characters in a fairly short children's book. Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by this book all the way through, and wasn't even irritated with the blatant set-up for a sequel, which often annoys me.

Pleasantly surprising, both of them.

posted by SarahJanet @ 11:33 PM