Posted on by TracyC

The Magician’s Company

The Magician’s Company by Tom McGowen, 1988.

This is the second book in the Magician’s Apprentice trilogy.

The story picks up where the previous book left off. Armindor the Magician, his apprentice Tigg, and their friend Reepah, who is a creature called a grubber, are on their way home with the “magical” devices that they retrieved in the last book, taking them back to their Guild for investigation. On their way home, they pass through a land consumed by civil war, and they pass a wagon surrounded by dead bodies. They can tell that the people were civilians, probably entertainers, and further down the road the find a young girl about Tigg’s age (around 12 years old), struggling along, carrying her belongings. They ask the girl about herself, and she breaks down crying, telling them how she and her family were fleeing the war, but her aunt and the other members of their puppeteer troupe were murdered by soldiers. The girl, whose name is Jilla, survived by hiding in a secret compartment in their wagon. After her aunt and the others were killed, Jilla gathered up what she could, taking the puppets that would help her to earn her living and a few other belongings not stolen by the soldiers, determined to continue her journey to a safer place, like the city of Inbal.

Armindor and Tigg have horses, and they offer to help the girl on her way to Inbal, a city in another territory. Along the way, Tigg tells Jilla the story of their previous adventures, and Armindor invites Jilla to stay with them awhile longer and even come home to Ingarron with them because it would be very difficult for a young girl to manage on her own in a strange city. Jilla is happy to stay with them because she is thankful for their help and worried about managing on her own yet.

In Inbal, Armindor and Tigg visit the sages in the city to show them their discoveries. They speak to Tarbizon, an old friend of Armidor’s, showing him what they found and explaining the threat posed by the reens, a species of intelligent but diabolical creatures that evolved/mutated from rats, have the ability to talk, use blowguns with poisoned darts, and are plotting to take over the world. (Yes, really. Even they think it’s weird.) Before they continue their journey to Ingarron, they decide to stay in Inbal for the winter because it would be difficult to travel until spring. Someone breaks into the place where they are staying and goes through their belongings. They have no idea who did it, but apparently, whoever it was didn’t find what they were looking for because nothing seems to be missing. Since they will be staying in the city for awhile, they decide to rent a house instead of staying in the guestinghouse (inn) where they have been staying.

While they are looking for a house to rent, Tigg is kidnapped. Fortunately, Reepah is able to sniff out where he is. Armindor pretends that his “magic” is what told him where his apprentice was in order to intimidate the kidnapper. Caught and frightened of the magician’s powers, the kidnapper admits that he was paid to abduct Tigg by Pan Biblo, who is the head servant of Councilor Leayzar, who is part of the High Council of Inbar and who has convinced the other sages that the reen do not pose a serious threat in spite of Armindor’s warnings. When they rescue Tigg, Tigg says that a man had questioned him about the spells that he and Armindor retrieved from the Wild Lands and Armindor would be willing to trade them for Tigg. From this information, Armindor realizes that Leayzar wants the lost technology they’ve discovered, but he can’t figure out why. It doesn’t take long for Armindor to realize that Leayzar is working with the reen. The reen have hired humans to work for them before, and they desperately want pieces of lost technology in order to gain dominance over humans.

Armindor and the others go to the sages in the city and tell them what they’ve discovered about Leayzar, and the other sages take it seriously. Some of them wonder why Leayzar would want to ally with a group that is an enemy of his own species, but Armindor says that it’s hard to say because they don’t know what the reen told Leayzar. Maybe Leayzar doesn’t understand what the reens’ full plans are and whatever they promised him in return was just too compelling to resist. At the end of the previous book, some of the weenitok gave Armindor a sealed box that they found, left over from the end of the Age of Magic. The sages decide that it’s time to open the box and study its contents in the hope of getting some answers. If the last book didn’t fully establish that their world is our world in the far distant future, the contents of the box explicitly state it.

Inside the box, there is a recorded message from the year 2003 (the future at the time this book was written, but the past to us in early 2021, and it’s interesting what this message has to say about the world in 2003). The message is from Dr. Dennis Hammond of the National Science Foundation Project for the Preservation of Civilization. He says that there has been a war between the “Pan-Islamic Brotherhood” (the closest real-life equivalent would probably be the Muslim Brotherhood, but that’s more of a social/political movement or terrorist group (depending on who you ask) rather than an official alliance of nations) and the United States and its allies, including Canada, Europe, China, and the Soviet Union (which stopped existing just a few years after this book was published in real life and would just be called Russia in 2003). Dr. Hammond says that thermonuclear war is pending, and he and other scientists are worried because they think the resulting destruction will be the end of civilization as they know it. (He doesn’t explicitly say this is World War III, but that’s basically what it amounts to. In real life, we haven’t actually had World War III yet as of early 2021, although in 2001 and the following years, there was some speculation that the destruction of the World Trade Center and other terrorist attacks might eventually lead to World War III, so it seems that the author has caught on to a source of world tension even if he didn’t predict how it would come out.) In order to preserve existing knowledge about science and world history, they made a series of these boxes containing small computers designed to last for about 10,000 years and hid them at various locations around North America (so now we know roughly where these characters are) so that future generations that find them will have access to knowledge that may have been lost. The computers even contain language tutorials just in case language has changed too much for this speech to be understandable. It’s fortunate that the early 21th century scientists thought of that because it turns out that none of the sages understood a word of what the voice in the box said. The readers now understand the full situation, but the characters don’t.

Everyone is astonished at this talking box. They’ve never even heard of such a thing, and they think that it must be a “spell” from a past “magician”, which he created to preserve his voice. They understand that the voice is speaking an unfamiliar language, and there is a picture on the included screen showing a finger poking one of the buttons in the box, so they get the idea that the box wants them to press buttons. When Armindor presses the red button indicated, the computer in the box begins a simple language tutorial, showing them pictures of familiar things and saying their names, like “sun” and “cloud.” The sages understand that they’re being taught an ancient language, and they quickly begin taking notes. Armindor is moved to tears because this is exactly what he has been hoping to discover for years, the secrets behind all of the ancient “magic.” They can tell that the “magician” who made the box was trying to teach them, and they’re more than ready to learn!

But, there is still the matter of Leayzar and the reen to deal with. When they learn that Leayzar is looking for Armindor, Jilla suggests a cover they could use to hide their identities: becoming a troupe of puppeteers with her puppets! Becoming puppeteers also gives them the opportunity to spread word of the reen threat to the public through their puppet plays.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

I said in my review of the last book that Armindor and Tigg don’t find any easy answers or any miraculous device that instantly solves all of their society’s problems and launches them back into an age of technology. The computer in the box comes the closest to that, but it’s still not an easy answer because Armindor and the other magicians and sages of his time can’t understand the language it uses or how the computer works when they first find it. They understand enough to know that it’s trying to tell them something and that its creators are trying to teach them how to understand and use it, but it’s going to take some time before they reach the point where they will understand enough of the language to figure out all of the information that the computer has to share. There will be enough work cut out for future “magicians” (really, scientists) of their time, like Tigg, to figure out how the computer works, what information it has to share, and how they can teach the rest of their people what they’ve learned. It’s a turning point in their history, but it’s not an instant solution. Plus, although the characters don’t really understand it at first, the readers are told that there are other boxes that are still waiting to be found. Do these boxes all contain the same information, or are there other pieces of knowledge in each one? There are plenty of secrets for a new generation of scientist/magicians to unravel.

Posted on by TracyC · 2 Comments

The Magician’s Apprentice

The Magician’s Apprentice by Tom McGowen, 1987.

From the title of this book and others in this series, it sounds like the stories take place in a fantasy world. When you’re reading this book, it seems like fantasy at first, but it’s not. It’s actually science fiction.

Tigg is a poor orphan boy who makes his living in the city of Ingarron as a pickpocket because he has no other means for survival. One night, he notices that a sage has left the door to his house open, and although it’s a risk, he decides to enter and see if he can find anything worth stealing. The sage, a man called Armindor the Magician, catches Tigg. In fact, Armindor had deliberately left the door open for Tigg to enter. When, Armindor questions Tigg about who he is, Tigg says that he’s about 12 years old (he’s unsure of his exact age and defines it in terms of “summers”) and that he has no family that he knows of. He lives with an old drunk who makes him pay to live with him with the money he steals.

Tigg asks Armindor what he plans to do with him. He can’t really punish him for stealing from him because Tigg hadn’t had a chance to take anything of Armindor’s before he was caught. Armindor says that’s true, but he was planning on stealing something, so Armindor tells him that he will do the same to him – plan to take something he has while still leaving him with everything he has. Tigg is confused, and Armindor explains his riddle. He witnessed Tigg picking someone else’s pocket and was intrigued by the boy because he seemed to possess courage, wit, and poise. He left his door open for Tigg because he has been looking for a young person with those qualities to be his apprentice. If Tigg becomes his apprentice, he will have to put his good qualities to use for him, but yet, he would keep these qualities for himself as well.

Tigg likes the praise but has reservations about becoming a magician’s apprentice because an apprenticeship would limit the freedom he currently has. His current existence is precarious, but the long hours of work and study involved in an apprenticeship sound daunting. However, Armindor isn’t about to let Tigg get away. He takes a lock of Tigg’s hair and a pricks his thumb for a drop of his blood and applies them to a little wax doll. He tells Tigg that the doll is a simulacrum and that it now contains his soul, so whatever happens to the doll will also happen to him. If Tigg runs away from his apprenticeship, Armindor can do whatever he likes to the doll as his revenge or punishment. Tigg, believing in the power of the simulacrum and feeling trapped, sees no other way out, so he becomes Armindor’s apprentice.

Although Tigg is fearful and resentful of his captivity as Armindor’s apprentice, it soon becomes apparent that life with the magician is better than what he used to have living with the old drunk. Armindor gives him a better place to sleep and better food. There is work and study, but it’s not as difficult or unpleasant as Tigg first thought. At first, he is daunted at the idea of learning to read and do mathematics, but Armindor is a patient and encouraging teacher, and Tigg soon finds that he actually enjoys learning things he never thought he would be able to do.

Armindor’s magical work seems to mainly involve healing sick people. When people come to him with illnesses, he gives them medicines that he calls “spells.” He keeps a “spell book” with instructions for remedies that he’s copied from other sources. Armindor teaches Tigg about the plants he uses in these spells. Armindor also does some fortune-telling, and he teaches Tigg that, too.

However, Tigg is still uneasy because, although Armindor treats him well, he still has that simulacrum of him, and he can also tell that the money he takes in doesn’t seem to account for his personal wealth. Armindor sometimes goes to meetings with other sages, and Tigg is sure that they’re doing something secret.

It turns out that Armindor is planning a special mission involving Tigg, one that will take them on a journey through uninhabited lands to the city of Orrello. Tigg realizes that if he leaves the city with Armindor, he will be committed to whatever secret plans Armindor has. At first, Tigg wants to take the simulacrum and escape, but when Armindor intentionally leaves the simulacrum unguaded where Tigg can easily take it, Tigg realizes that Armindor is telling him that he’s not really a captive and that Armindor is giving him a choice, trusting him to make the right one. Tigg realizes that he likes being trusted and that he trusts Armindor, too. He decides to stay with Armindor as his apprentice and go with him on his mission.

Tigg and Armindor leave town with a merchant caravan. On the way, the caravan encounters a wounded creature called a grubber. Grubbers are described as furry creatures about the size of a cat and have claws, but they have faces like bears and walk on their hind legs and may be intelligent enough to make fire and have their own language. One of the soldiers with the caravan things that the grubber is wounded too badly to save and wants to put it out of its misery, but Tigg insists on trying to save it. Armindor treats the grubber for Tigg, and it recovers. It is intelligent, and Tigg teaches it some simple human words, so they can talk to it. He tells them that his name is Reepah because grubbers have names for themselves, too. Armindor asks him if he wants to return to his own people when he is well, but by then, the caravan has taken them further from the grubber’s home and people, and he says that he doesn’t know the way back, so he’d like to stay with Armindor and Tigg, which makes Tigg happy.

However, Tigg soon learns that their journey has only just begun. They’re not stopping in Orrello; they’re just going to get a ship there to take them across the sea. Their eventual destination is the Wild Lands, an uninhabited area said to be filled with monsters and poisonous mists. Tigg is frightened, but also feels strangely compelled to see the place and have an adventure. Armindor finally explains to Tigg the purpose of their secret mission.

Years ago, there was another magician in Ingarron called Karvn the Wise, and he possessed some rare “spells” that no one else had. Armindor now has one of these “spells”, which he calls the “Spell of Visual Enlargement.” Tigg describes it as looking like a round piece of ice, and when he looks through it, things look much larger than they really are. Tigg is amazed.

Anyone reading this now would know from its description that what Armindor has is a magnifying lens. Tigg and Armindor don’t know the words “magnifying lens”, which is why they call it a “spell”, but that’s what they have. This is the first hint that this book is actually science fiction, and the “spells” are really pieces of lost technology and knowledge that are being rediscovered. One of Arthur C. Clarke’s Three Laws of science fiction is “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Armindor the Magician thinks of himself as practicing magic with “spells” because he’s doing things and using things he can’t fully explain, but he’s actually a doctor and scientist. He doesn’t fully understand why these things work like they do, but he’s investigating how different forms of science, technology, medicine, and knowledge work, and he’s passing that knowledge along to his student and assistant, Tigg. So, you might be asking at this point, who made the magnifying lens and why doesn’t Armindor understand exactly what it is?

Armindor knows enough to understand that the lens is made of glass, not ice. He knows what glass is, but he says that their people don’t have the ability to make glass that clear and pure themselves. This lens is the only one of its type they have, and it’s more than 3000 years old, from what Armindor calls the “Age of Magic.” Tigg has heard stories and legends about the Age of Magic, when people apparently had the ability to fly through the air, communicate over long distances, and even visit the moon. The events that brought an end to the “Age of Magic” were “The Fire from the Sky and the Winter of Death.”

Spoiler: I’m calling it a spoiler, but it really isn’t that much of a spoiler because, by the time you reach this part in the story, it starts becoming really obvious, even if the characters themselves don’t quite know what they’re describing. This fantasy world is our world, but far in the future. For some reason, thousands of years in the future, so much of our knowledge and technology has been lost, society has reached the point where people don’t know what magnifying lenses are. Also, there are creatures in this world, like grubbers, that don’t exist in other times. Something major must have happened, and it doesn’t take too long to realize what it was. Even when I read this as a kid in the early 1990s, I recognized what the characters are talking about. This book was written toward the end of the Cold War, in the 1980s, and the concept of nuclear winter was common knowledge at the time and something that was pretty widely talked about and feared, even among kids. We know, without the characters actually saying it, that the winter was caused by nuclear weapons rather than an asteroid striking the Earth because Armindor knows from writings that he’s studied that animals mutated after the “Fire from the Sky.” An asteroid or massive eruption can cause climate change due to debris in the air, but they wouldn’t cause mutation like the radiation from a nuclear explosion would. People also mutated, and Tigg and Armindor and other people now have pointed ears. People have been like that for so long, they think of it as normal, and it’s only when Armindor explains to Tigg about the concept of “mutation” that Tigg wonders what people in the past looked like.

Armindor explains that Karvn had a nephew who was a mercenary soldier. One day, this nephew came home, seriously wounded. He died of his wounds, but before he died, the nephew gave Karvn this lens, explaining that it came from a place in the Wild Lands. He said that there were many other types of “spells” and magical devices there left over from the Age of Magic. The nephew and his friends had hoped to make their fortune selling the secret of this place, but there was a battle, in which the nephew was seriously wounded and his friends were killed. He told Karvn where to find this place in the Wild Lands, but Karvn was too old to make the journey himself. He wrote an account of his nephew’s story, and after his death, all of his belongings and writings became property of the Guild of Magicians, to which Armindor also belongs. Armindor has studied Karvn’s writings, and he thinks he knows where to find this place with magic and spells, and he is going there to claim whatever he can find on behalf of the Guild.

There is danger on this journey. These lands, which Armindor says were once one country long ago, are now smaller countries that war with each other. (This is probably the United States and the different lands were once individual states. When they travel across water, I think they’re crossing one of the Great Lakes, although I’m not completely sure. The author lived in Chicago, so I think that might be the jumping off point for the crossing.) There are bandits and mercenaries and the strange creatures that inhabit this land, and it’s difficult to say whether there is more danger from the creatures or the humans.

This book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

I remembered this series from when I was a kid. It made a big impression on me because of the way that technology was treated as magic. The types of futures depicted in science fiction books, movies, and tv series can vary between extremely advanced technology and civilization, like in Star Trek, and this kind of regression to the past, where even simple forms of technology that we almost take for granted today seem wondrous and are the stuff of legends. Nobody knows what the future actually holds, but I thought this series did a nice job of showing how people who had forgotten much of the everyday knowledge of our time might think and feel when encountering it for the first time, knowing that people who lived in the past were once able to make these amazing things themselves and use them every day.

Because of the mutations that have taken place in animals, probably due to radiation from nuclear fallout, some types of animals have become intelligent. The grubbers, who call themselves weenitok, are peaceful, but the reen (which Armindor realizes are a mutated variety of rat) actually want to gain access to old technology so they can conquer the humans and take over the world for themselves. These are Armindor and Tigg’s worst enemies, along with the human they’ve hired to do their dirty work. (Yes, the mutated rats are paying a human mercenary. Even the characters in the book realize that’s weird.)

When Tigg and Armindor finally reach the special place with the magical devices, it turns out to be an old military base. Much of what they find there has been destroyed by time. Armindor tells Tigg to look for things that are made out of glass, metal that hasn’t corroded, or “that smooth, shiny material that the ancients seemed so fond of” (plastic) because these are the things that are most likely to still be usable. Tigg makes a lucky find, discovering a “Spell of Far-seeing.” It’s a tube that can extend out far or collapse to be a smaller size, and it has glass pieces similar to the magnifying lens, and when you look into it, it makes things that are far away look much closer. (Three guesses what it is.) Tigg also discovers a strange, round object with a kind of pointer thing in the middle that moves and jiggles every time the object is moved but which always points in the same direction when it settles, no matter which way the object is turned. Most of what they find isn’t usable or understandable, but they do find four other objects, including a “spell for cutting” that Armindor thinks that they might actually be able to duplicate with technology and materials that their people have. Each object that they find is described in vague terms based on its shape and materials because Armindor and Tigg don’t know what to call these things. Modern people can picture what they’ve found from the descriptions, and it isn’t difficult to figure out what they’re supposed to be. Sometimes, Armindor and Tigg can figure out what an object is supposed to do just by experimenting with it, but others remain a mystery. Armindor explains to Tigg that is what magicians do, investigate and solve these types of mysteries, “to take an unknown thing and study it, and try it out in different ways, and try to think how it might be like something you are familiar with.” (They’re using a form of reverse engineering.) Tigg decides that he really does want to be a magician and make this his life’s work. He’s going to become a scientist.

I liked it that none of the objects they find are any kind of advanced super weapon or a miraculous device that instantly solves all of their society’s problems and launches them back into an age of technology (although there is an odd sealed box that proves to be important in the next book). There are no easy answers here. In the grand scheme of things, they risked their lives for things that nobody in modern times would risk their lives to retrieve, but they have to do it because, although these things are common in our time, they are unknown in theirs. If they can figure out not only how the objects work and what they were supposed to do but why they work the way they do, they can gradually rebuild the knowledge of the past. The objects that they find are generally useful. Some are labor-saving devices, some are examples of scientific principles they would use to create other things (demonstrating concepts like optics and magnetism) and one is a medical device, which if they can figure out how to use it, will help advance their medical knowledge and treatments.

One of the fun things this book inspired me to do was to look at the world around me while imagining that I had never seen some of the basic objects in the world before. This could be a fun activity to do with kids, something like the archaeology activity that some teachers of mine did with us years ago, where we had to intentionally create objects from some kind of “lost” civilization for our classmates to analyze, to try to figure out what they were supposed to do and how that civilization would have used them. But, you don’t even have to create anything if you use your imagination and try to think what a traveler from another time or another world might think if they saw some of the things in your own home right now. Imagine what someone from a world without electricity would think of something even as basic as a toaster. How would you explain such a thing to someone who had never seen anything like it?

Posted on by TracyC

Miss Pickerell Goes to Mars

Miss Pickerell Goes to Mars by Ellen MacGregor, 1951.

This is the first book in the Miss Pickerell series, which was written to introduce scientific concepts to children in an entertaining way.

The story begins when Miss Pickerell is visiting her brother and her nieces and nephews. She takes the children to ride on a ferris wheel, but she refuses to get on it herself because she’s afraid of heights. Really, all she wants to do is take her pet cow home and start getting her rock collection ready for the exhibition at the state fair.

As she leaves, she offers a ride to a man when the bus he was waiting for didn’t stop for him. Although she isn’t anxious for conversation and would prefer silence after her visit with her noisy nieces and nephews, she does make a comment about the sound of a jet overhead. She explains that airplanes are her nieces’ and nephews’ newest obsession, and she’s glad because they were obsessed with flying saucers before, and at least airplanes actually exists. The man riding with her, Mr. Haggerty asks Miss Pickerell if she believes in flying saucers and space travel. Miss Pickerell says that she doesn’t believe in flying saucers and doesn’t think any intelligent person would, but Mr. Haggerty tells her that he will soon be traveling to Mars. At first, Miss Pickerell doesn’t believe him. He says that he works for a scientific expedition whose headquarters is nearby, but the captain in charge of the expedition wouldn’t want him to say too much about it too soon, just in case it doesn’t work out well.

However, Miss Pickerell can’t help but get involved in the project, considering that they’re doing it on her land. Miss Pickerell lets Mr. Haggerty out of the car in front of her farm, but when she enters her own house, she can tell that someone else has been there in the weeks that she’s been gone. Then, she spots the space ship at the end of her cow pasture.

Miss Pickerell marches up to one of the people working on the expedition and demands to know what they’re doing on her property. The man says that they thought that the house was abandoned because it had been empty for weeks and they wanted a quiet place to work on their project. Miss Pickerell threatens to call the governor and report them. She picks the governor to call because, since she lives in the country, there are no police nearby, and she’s met the governor before at the state fair, where he’s given her prizes for her rock collection.

When she calls the governor, he isn’t there, so she leaves a message with his wife and decides to talk to the men at the space ship again while she waits for the governor to call her back. Although she’s afraid of heights, Miss Pickerell climbs into the space ship to talk to the men – right before it launches.

Soon, Miss Pickerell is in outer space and headed for trouble because it turns out that, not only was she not supposed to be there but they’ve accidentally left Mr. Haggerty behind. Mr. Haggerty is important because he’s the one who’s supposed to do the calculations for the flight.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

I vaguely recalled my mother reading us one or two of the Miss Pickerell books from the library when we were kids. I think I liked them at the time, but it had been so long that I’d really forgotten what they were like.

I can definitely see the educational lessons in the book. After the ship launches, it takes awhile to impress on Miss Pickerell the seriousness of their situation and why they can’t just turn around and go back, during which they talk about Mars as a planet and how the ship’s course is programmed into the computer. A young man on the crew, Wilbur, shows Miss Pickerell how to drink water in outer space, and they talk about what gravity is and why there isn’t any in space. By accident, Miss Pickerell has caused further problems by bringing her hammer with her onto the ship because the hammer is magnetic, and the magnet is interfering with the ship’s equipment. Miss Pickerell’s first instinct is to throw the hammer out a door or window, but there are no windows, and Miss Pickerell is treated to an explanation about atmospheric pressure and oxygen in the space ship. Each event on the ship and on Mars itself requires explanation.

Fortunately, they do make it safely to Mars and back, and Miss Pickerell turns out to be surprisingly helpful and is actually glad that she made the trip. On their return, she finds out that Mr. Haggerty has been taking care of her cow, and the governor has invited her for a visit. The governor gives her an award, and she even brings back rocks from Mars with her and gives some to her nieces and nephews.

Posted on by TracyC

A Meeting of Minds

A Meeting of Minds by Carol Matas and Perry Nodelman, 1999.

This is the final book in the Minds series. Each book in the series begins shortly after the previous book ends, and this one starts only three weeks after the last book.

Princess Lenora and Prince Coren are still in Andilla for their impending wedding when, while simply walking down a hallway of the castle, they suddenly find themselves transported to a land of snow. The world in which they now find themselves is our world (which, I guess would be distant past of their world, the late 20th century). Disoriented and cold, Lenora and Coren go inside a shopping mall to get warm. At first, Coren thinks that Lenora has caused their present predicament (because, usually, she does, either consciously or unconsciously), but Lenora denies having anything to do with it.

At the time they’d been walking down the hallway, they’d been discussing the exhibition at the castle in honor of their upcoming wedding and Lenora’s desire for a better world. The exhibition was called “A Meeting of Minds” and designed to showcase the ways that different groups of people in their world live and what they envision as a perfect world. The entries in the exhibit were chosen as entries in a contest, and a panel of judges from different countries would choose winners from among them. The winning entries would be adopted as real laws in the hope of fulfilling Lenora’s wish of making the world a better place for everyone. What could go wrong? (Seriously, things in this world always go wrong when people try to enforce some vision of perfection, so what’s it going to be this time?) Could the exhibition have something to do with their present predicament?

Lenora and Coren briefly consider different possibilities, including the possibility that some unknown enemy has sent them to this strange place, but nothing really makes sense. Lenora has the uncomfortable feeling that something she’s done may have cause this problem after all, although she can’t think what it is. Either way, they are stuck in a strange land.

They stop a passing girl and ask them where they are, and she tells them that they’re in a mall called Portage Place. That doesn’t really explain much to Lenora and Coren, so the girl tells them to buy a map. Lenora and Coren don’t understand the concept of “buying” (in the last book, they didn’t know the word “economy”). When they try to ask her the name of her “world”, it turns out that the girl is an alien conspiracy theorist, wearing a shirt with a picture of an alien on it and the words “The Truth is Out There” (the slogan from the X-Files tv show). The girl is very excited, thinking that Lenora and Coren are space aliens. She tells them that they’re in Winnipeg on Earth and asks them where they’re from. Coren recognizes the name “Earth” as the old name for their world. This confirms that, although there are fantasy elements in these stories, Lenora and Coren are actually from the distant future of the Earth, although the three of them work out that they might actually be from a parallel universe of our Earth. However, her helpfulness ends when she suddenly seems to suspect them of being “Mindies” and making fun of her. Lenora and Coren don’t know what she’s talking about.

The two of them explore the mall, getting into trouble when they try to stop two girls from taking another child’s toy and end up having security called on them and not having money to pay for food in the mall food court. Fortunately, a couple of other young people in line offer to pay for their food. These young people, Barb and Thomas, seem to recognize them as Princess Lenora and Prince Coren, but strangely, Lenora and Coren learn that they think that they’re in costume and only pretending to be themselves. It slowly comes out that the authors of the book series live in Winnipeg and that there’s a fan convention in town for the books in which Lenora and Coren are fictional characters. (I’ve never actually heard of a convention specifically for this series of books, but I don’t live in Canada, so I can’t swear that it never happened. However, the characters later meet someone dressed as Spock at the convention, so it’s possible that this is supposed to be part of some larger book or sci-fi/fantasy-themed convention.)

Lenora and Coren don’t fully understand the concept of the fan convention, but Lenora sees it as a possible lead to what’s happening, so she insists on going to the convention center. At the convention center, Lenora and Coren encounter other people who are apparently trying to dress like they do and pretend to be them. Some of them even criticize what Lenora and Coren are wearing because their real outfits don’t agree with the fans’ interpretations of the characters. (Fandoms are like this in real life. The more someone likes something and spends time with it, the more they consider themselves an authority on it. They kind of are, but sometimes, fans get wrapped up in their own vision of what they’d like characters to be like that they kind of depart from the original story or get out of sync with the vision of the original authors. It’s almost like they mentally create an alternate reality of a world that was already fictional, which fits very well with the themes of this entire series.) Lenora and Coren think that they’re all very rude for criticizing the way they dress, telling them how they should talk to be in character, and thinking that Coren is a wimp or geek or that Lenora is annoying or arrogant, which some of them say right in front of them.

At this point, someone comments that Lenora sounds just like she does in the books, and the people at the convention start talking about all of the books in this series, which I’ve already reviewed. Finally, Lenora and Coren understand that these people know about them and are imitating them because they have read books about them. Coren is embarrassed when these fans start talking about some of his more embarrassing moments like they’re common knowledge. Lenora gets angry and decides that they need to talk to the authors. (Which seems to have been the goal of this book.)

Coren and Lenora get in line to talk to the authors of the books, but when they meet them, the authors also just think they’re fans of the books who are putting on a little skit for them. There’s some banter with the authors (including some inside jokes that Carol and Perry seem to have with each other, like how bad Perry’s handwriting apparently is), and the authors remark how much Lenora and Coren sound like their characters, although they don’t think they really look like them (which is interesting, as if they have a completely different vision of them in their minds). Lenora gets angry with them and accuses them of stealing from their lives to write their books, so she grabs some of the books the authors and signing and runs away with them.

As Lenora and Coren hide from security with their stolen books, they start reading about themselves. They find that the books do describe their previous adventures together, and they seem to capture some of what they were thinking and feeling at the time, but not everything is correct. In a twist that makes this book a little more interesting than it started out, not everything in the books they read is like the real-life Minds books. Lenora and Coren start noticing that Sayley plays a very prominent role and is described in glowing terms and that her favorite word, “scrumptious” appears frequently. Then, Lenora and Coren discover that one of the events at the convention is a worship service for the “Divine Sayley.” One of the other convention attendees tells them that the Sayley in the books was named after the Divine Sayley, who is a real figure in their world, an angelic-looking girl with divine powers, who seems to be a glowing version of their Sayley.

It seems that Lenora and Coren have discovered the source of this strange world and everything that has been happening to them, but how and why did Sayley do it? Or, did she really do it at all? And how can Lenora and Coren get home when their powers no longer work?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction and Spoilers:

First, I’d like to talk about why the authors wrote this book. It’s somewhat of a departure in theme and tone from the rest of the series, and because of that, it annoyed me. At first, I guessed that this book was just the authors’ excuse to have their own characters meet them in the story, to show off a few inside jokes for their own amusement, and to kind of toot their own horns. That sort of story annoys me. I don’t like it when authors do that. When I read a series that I like, I want to do it for the sake of the characters and the stories, not for the sake of the fandom, and any inside jokes the co-authors have with each other are not jokes I am personally in on, so I’m just not going to get the same charge out of them. (There’s an in-joke in this book about Perry Nodelman having some kind of special underwear. I don’t know what it is because it isn’t described, but I’ve seen lots of funny undershorts in those catalogs that come around Christmas, and I don’t really care which pair he owns. Younger readers would probably get more of a kick out of that bit of trivia than I do.)

However, I looked it up, and I found this explanation, written by one of the co-authors, Carol Matas:

Why We Wrote A Meeting of Minds

In thinking about the imaginative powers of the people of Gepeth, it suddenly struck us that they could have imagined us. After all, the Gepethians have the power to make whatever they imagine real, so why not this entire world of ours, including the city of Winnipeg and everyone who lives there–including us? Lenora and Coren are figments of our imaginations–but we might also be figments of theirs. In A Meeting of Minds, that is exactly what happens. Lenora and Coren and the authors Carol M and Perry N come face to face, as Lenora and Coren find themselves stuck without their powers in the city of Winnipeg and unable to get out. Who created whom? And will Lenora and Coren ever manage to escape this frightening city, worse than their worst nightmares? You’ll have to read the book to find out!

That explanation did make me feel a little better about the book, that more thought went into it than just a bunch of inside jokes for fans. The Minds books all focus on the power of the mind and the imagination and the nature of reality. A meta plot, like trying to decide if the authors created the characters or the characters created the author does fit with the theme of the theme of the series, almost like the end of Through the Looking Glass, where the reader is left to decide whether Alice dreamed the Red King or if Alice was just part of the Red King’s dream. However, by the end of this book, the question is resolved, as far as people in Lenora’s world is concerned. According to the story, Sayley really did create Winnipeg and everything in it, including the authors of this book and their books and fandom. There is something a little unsettled about the end of the book, but that’s not what it is.

I can’t talk about my full opinion of this story without some spoilers, though, so get ready: The current problem is actually a plot by Leni and Cori, the annoying doubles of Lenora and Coren created two books ago in the series, although it also turns out that their plot is part of the machinations of someone else.

It’s important to remember that Leni and Cori are basically Lenora and Coren themselves, sharing all of their memories up to the point in time when Lenora created them as separate people, but with twists to their personalities. She created Leni on purpose as a double of herself so she could go off and do what she wanted and people wouldn’t know she was missing, but she made Leni a distinct personality, who would like all of the boring things she didn’t like about managing a household and planning a wedding, so Leni would be happy to stay home and do those things while Lenora herself went adventuring. Cori was an accidental creation, when Lenora’s powers where acting erratically. She was in trouble and wished that Coren was there to help her, but she also wished that Coren was a braver, more action-oriented person, so Cori appeared as a kind of white knight figure to rescue her. Once Lenora created Leni and Cori, she didn’t have the heart to un-imagine them into non-existence because they are now distinct people and personalities by themselves.

Unfortunately, while Leni and Cori are pretty well-suited to each other, they both come with their annoying defects. Leni is frivolous and vapid, getting too wrapped up in petty details, like hair, clothes, and makeup, to care about larger issues. Cori is brave but reckless. He doesn’t have the real Coren’s thoughtfulness and rushes right into danger because his only solution to anything is fighting. Lenora and Coren come to appreciate each other more after seeing what their doubles are like and experiencing their annoying sides. Coren realizes that he doesn’t want Lenora to be like Leni, and Lenora stops complaining that Coren thinks too much. They don’t like their doubles, but the feeling is actually mutual. Because Leni and Cori have personalities that are almost opposite to Lenora and Coren, they find Lenora and Coren as annoying as Lenora and Coren find them, just for different reasons. Cori thinks that Coren is a wimp, and Leni thinks that Lenora is irresponsible and tasteless.

Part of the problem is that, while everyone knows that Leni and Cori are recently-created doubles instead of the real Lenora and Coren, Leni and Cori are still real people with all of the memories of Lenora and Coren. So, while the public and their royal parents acknowledge Lenora and Coren as their real children and the real princess and prince, Leni and Cori are angry and dissatisfied because they are no less “real” and have all the memories of being princess and prince. They are not treated as equals to Lenora and Coren, and their own parents don’t really consider them their children. Leni resents being treated like she’s secondary to Lenora, especially since Lenora made her to be the embodiment of all of the qualities that her parents wished she had. Leni is (for the most part) quiet and obedient, focused on spending all of her time looking the part of a princess, and rarely uses her powers in order maintain the Balance. While all of the preparations are going on for Lenora and Coren’s grand wedding, preparations that Lenora and Coren themselves don’t even find particularly interesting because they just don’t like all of the fuss and pageantry, Leni and Cori are also engaged to be married and actually want the pageantry of a grand wedding instead of the quieter ceremony being planned for them. With Lenora and Coren put out of the way, they can take over the wedding themselves, and Leni thinks that, once people get used to her instead of Lenora, they will think of her as an improvement and forget about Lenora.

Sayley did create the little world of Winnipeg that Lenora and Coren are trapped in as a display, her entry in the A Meeting of Minds contest, but Leni is the one who trapped Lenora and Coren in that world. In another twist, it turns out that Sayley created Winnipeg not as her example of the best world possible but as her example of the worst world possible, which she created for contrast. (Sorry, real world Winnipeg. It turns out that Sayley thinks snow is dreadful, but on the bright side, none of you will ever have to worship the Divine Sayley, which by itself makes real world Winnipeg immediately a better place for everyone.) When Sayley discovers what Leni and Cori have done, she wants to tell Coren’s parents, but Cori reads her mind and Leni banishes Sayley to her own exhibit along with Lenora and Coren.

By Sayley’s logic, what really makes her version of Winnipeg so bad is that nobody there believes in the power of the imagination. Everyone there likes to imagine things and they enjoy hearing about the power of imagination, which is why they are fans of Lenora and Coren, but none of them believe that imagination is real or that they can actually create the things they imagine. Their lack of belief in the powers of the mind is what prevents Lenora and Coren’s powers from working. Even though they worship Sayley as “divine”, Sayley says that they don’t really believe in her, they just consider her to be a symbol. Because of that, nobody there respects the real Sayley or listens to her. Sayley is unable to get the authors, Carol and Perry, to listen to them even though she tries to prove to them that she actually made them because she knows all about the embarrassing pair of underwear that Perry owns. Carol and Perry are still unconvinced and think that Sayley needs “help.”

Fortunately, there is one person in this world who Sayley allowed to have the power of imagination, Michael, and he believes that Sayley, Lenora, and Coren are all who they say they are. Michael figures out how to help them all to escape from the exhibit, but when they do, they still have to face down Leni and Cori and the evil force that is controlling them – Lenora’s old alter-ego and nemesis, Hevak.

The evil way that Leni behaves in this book is a clue that she isn’t quite herself. Normally, being well-behaved is a part of her personality, and her scruples would prevent her from doing any of the things she did, even though she secretly wanted to in the back of her mind. Hevak explains that, because Leni is another version of Lenora, he a part of her as well as Lenora. When Leni was feeling jealous and resentful about the wedding, it awakened him in her mind, and he used his influence to force her to overcome her normal inhibitions and do what she was thinking of doing. At first, I was thinking that having Hevak come back seemed like a bit of a cop-out and seemed a little like those cliched scenes in anime where the villain changes into their “final form” and reveals their “true power”, but that explanation actually does make sense for the way this world functions.

Just as Hevak and Lenora are poised for their ultimate battle, however, it all just kind of comes to an end. Defeating Hevak proves easier than it seems like it should because Hevak himself has changed, even though it doesn’t really seem like it from the rest of the book. What Hevak decides is that he’s been through just about everything – he tried to create perfection and failed, people have called him evil (because he does evil things), he tried to be perfectly good, and for a long period, he was stuck in a state of nothingness. Now, he wonders what it’s all for. He hasn’t really accomplished much, and he doesn’t really see the point in continuing on this way. He’s thought about it so much that he’d really rather return to nothingness and not have to think about anything. It’s a little anti-climactic for how much of a nemesis Hevak is.

However, Lenora can’t bring herself to imagine him as not existing permanently because he was always an extension of herself, so instead, she takes Michael’s suggestion and sends him to Winnipeg, which gives the authors a chance to make a few more jokes about life in Winnipeg. Michael says that there are many unimaginative people there who spend time not doing much or thinking much, so without his powers, Hevak will fit in nicely and feel comfortable. Sayley promises to make Winnipeg a little nicer than it is now without changing its character completely, giving it other seasons besides winter and making it part of a much larger world, so people in Winnipeg won’t feel trapped there if they don’t like the climate and can experience some variety. Unfortunately, she also says that, since Winnipeg was supposed to be her worst world, she’s going to give the other seasons a downside, too, which is why she decides to invent mosquitos for Winnipeg’s summer. (So, now we all know who to blame.) Michael isn’t worried because he says that people in Winnipeg are tough. I kind of liked Hevak’s banishment to Winnipeg for the humor value, even though it felt like a rather easy wrap-up to the story.

This is the final book in the Minds series, and from the way it ends, I think there could be room for another one after it, even though one was never written. The book ends with Lenora and Coren’s actual wedding, stopping just as the ceremony ends. It appears that they are going to live happily ever after with the form of perfection they’ve selected taking effect as the ceremony ends, but exactly what that means is never clarified, probably because perfection is a difficult thing to imagine and maybe complete perfection is impossible to achieve. Lenora and Coren are both happy, although Coren does have some slight misgivings about whether the perfection is going to be too perfect in some way. (Remember, this series is all about Balance.) However, he brushes his worries aside to complete the ceremony. Then, we don’t know what happens after that. Is their new perfect world everything they’ve ever wanted and keep everyone happy forever, or will there be new, unforeseen complications after their marriage? Would new, unforeseen complications actually make Lenora happier than a completely settled world because she actually likes excitement and new problems to solve? Could that actually be her version of perfection? Is there a chance that Hevak will return from Winnipeg or has he finally found his true niche there, shoveling snow? There are no answers to these questions because the series is over, so we’ll never know, but I’ll leave you with a final thought – this world is all about imagination and the power of the imagination to create, so if you imagine something after this, that’s what you’ve created.

Posted on by TracyC

Out of Their Minds

Out of Their Minds by Carol Matas and Perry Nodelman, 1998.

When the book begins, Princess Lenora and Prince Coren are going to Andilla, where their wedding will finally be held. (That seems to go against earlier books in the series, where they were planning to hold their wedding in Gepeth, but whatever. It turns out the Balance that governs this world has decided that it demands it, and so do the authors and story plot.) However, Lenora has been having strange, disturbing dreams about her vanquished alter ego, Hevak.

Lenora is still preoccupied by the concept of the Balance that governs their world and keeps it from descending into chaos because of the powerful mental abilities that the people in their world have. She still feels like the rules that help maintain the Balance are too restrictive, particularly in her home country of Gepeth, and it bothers her that there doesn’t seem to be a system that makes everyone perfectly happy. Somehow, no matter what system people in different countries have, someone is always unhappy or doesn’t fit in with the way the country lives. Lenora dreams of developing a perfect system of life and Balance, providing every individual person with perfect happiness and justice. Fortunately, since the last book in the series, she has come to realize that before she attempts to create a perfect world, she needs to think it over more and decide what a perfect world really looks like and how it should work.

It’s noble goal, and I don’t consider myself a cranky old cynic who hates youthful enthusiasm, but anyone who’s ever tried to get a roomful of people to agree on pizza toppings only to learn that at least one person in that room is also gluten intolerant and can’t eat the pizza at all unless you specifically take that into account at the beginning of the process knows that finding any system that makes absolutely everyone happy is not an easy process. Even putting together a system in which the majority of people are pretty happy most of the time is a major undertaking and involves taking into account various real world conditions and different peoples’ needs, things which Lenora has previously found boring and completely ignored in her lessons. She usually likes to play with ideas and consider possibilities more than getting into the nitty gritty details of how things actually work. I’m saying that she’s got a long way to go.

However, Lenora and Coren soon encounter other problems which are even more pressing than the preparations for their upcoming wedding. Something is very wrong in Andilla. Usually, the people there prefer using their imaginations to change their perceptions of reality rather than doing anything to actually change reality itself. They let their buildings turn to ruins as they live in the mansions of their imaginations, which is why Prince Coren prefers the way people in Gepeth live, actually creating and maintaining real things. (When Lenora sees what Andilla is like, she decides that she’ll never think of Coren as a coward again, as she has in previous books. He is usually more cautious than she is, but Lenora comes to recognize that it has taken courage for him to acknowledge the way his people really live outside of their imaginations instead of trying to hide from it and live in his own mind. It’s a step forward for Lenora.) People in Andilla also use telepathy to communicate directly with each other, mind to mind, rather than speaking out loud, something even Coren finds invasive at times although he uses that power, too. However, the people of Andilla are suddenly losing their ability to communicate telepathically, and their ability to maintain their imagined realities is fading. They’re having to resort to speaking aloud and seeing things as they really are, and Coren’s mother is beside herself. Coren’s father, the King of Andilla, hardly even seems aware of the problem because he has become deeply absorbed in his new hobby, baking things. People in Andilla usually do very little cooking, just turning very basic foods into whatever they want to imagine that they’re eating, but the King Arno has discovered the joy of baking in the new kitchen that Lenora’s parents actually created for his castle out of sheer desperation.

Kaylor, the Thoughtwatcher, who is the person responsible for maintaining Andilla’s version of the Balance, suspects that the king’s recent cooking might be responsible for shattering Andilla’s illusions, but most people don’t think that’s it. Everyone in the country seems to be affected, although King Arno can’t recall his two closest advisers complaining. Actually, he can’t recall seeing them around at all since the trouble began. Actually, nobody else has ever heard either of their names before. Actually, it looks like King Arno probably invented them as imaginary friends when he was a boy, forgot he invented them, and has been following their imaginary advice ever since because it generally seems to work out.

Lenora suggests that, since there don’t seem to be any answers to the immediate problem in the castle, she and Coren should go out to the countryside, meet the people of Andilla directly, and see if there are any answers there. (Plus they can get away from their annoying doubles, Leni and Cori, who were created in the last book, and the argument they’re having over who really owns Coren’s old room and the stuff in it.) Queen Milda and King Arno admit that, although they’ve spoken to many of their subjects with their minds, they’ve never actually met them face-to-face.

As Lenora questions Coren about the people in the castle and life in Andilla, she is also surprised to learn that, although everyone in the kingdom eats an odd kind of blue mush at every meal (while imagining it to be something far better), even Coren isn’t quite sure what the mush is made of and where it comes from. Of all of the people in his kingdom, Coren is the one who was always more interested in living in reality than fantasy and finding out how things really work, and it seems odd to Lenora that he’s never questioned the food that he’s eaten at every meal for his entire life in Andilla. According to Coren, it just appears in vats every day, and people help themselves to it or have a servant bring them some. No matter how empty the vats are at the end of the day, they’re always full the following day, and he has no idea who fills them, how, or why. To his surprise, Coren realizes that he’s never even thought to question it before, although he’s questioned nearly everything else. Lenora starts to wonder if that could be a key to the puzzle and if Coren actually has some kind of mental block against questioning the food, perhaps something his own people intentionally put there in order to keep their country’s version of the “Balance” in place, reinforcing the version of reality they’ve chosen to live in.

Investigation of the countryside reveals a previously unknown side to Andilla that everyone there has been ignoring, along with the dilapidated condition of their own homes and society. In a place where no community is supposed to be is an entire town of strangely neat, well-kept houses (the only well-kept houses in Andilla) and people all dressed alike whose only goal in life is constant work. The people there, who call themselves Skwoes, seem surprised that Lenora and Coren can even see them. They are the source of the blue mush that the other Andillans eat, although everyone else is unaware of it. The Skwoes are a forgotten part of Andilla’s Balance because everyone is too busy living in their imagination to notice them. Although they feed the rest of the population in exchange for payment from Andilla’s supply of gold, according to an ancient arrangement, they are disdainful of the lazy population they support, who spend their entire time living in their imaginations. (This is when we learn that none of our main characters have any idea what the word “economy” means, not to mention being completely unaware of the fact that Andilla actually has one.)

That explains part of the mystery, but there is still the question of why the Andillans have now lost their powers of imagination or why Lenora’s bad dreams about Hevak are getting increasingly worse.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction and Spoilers

Hevak is back … sort of. In the first book of the series, Lenora made her evil alter ego, Hevak disappear. But, we’ve also previously established that everything Lenora creates actually does exist somewhere. Exactly where Hevak went is somewhat nebulous, but he manages to communicate to Lenora that, when she made him disappear before, she accidentally sent him to another world where everything is the opposite of what it is in their world. Hevak says that this world really is the perfect world that Lenora has always dreamed of creating, where everything is happy. He also claims that he has now turned “good” himself and wants to help Lenora make everything in her world “good.” Hevak’s influence has been what has been causing all of this disruption to everyone’s powers, and he begins taking over Lenora.

Lenora does have a genuine desire to make the world a better place. She really always has wanted the world to be better, but what that means changes over the course of the series. At first, Lenora thought that making a better world involved more excitement, more freedom, and fewer rules. In this book, it’s about people loving each other and having all of their needs fulfilled. In the end, the characters aren’t completely sure whether that part was Hevak’s idea or whether Lenora’s desire for a better world was what called Hevak back from wherever he is now, but it does call into question what “good” really is and whether it really is possible to have too much of a “good” thing.

When Lenora, under Hevak’s control, tries to be “good” and help everyone with even their tiniest problems, she does create some fantastic and helpful machines that last even beyond the latest adventure. However, this form of “good” and trying to help everyone goes way too far because it is an extreme form. There is no “Balance” to it. In her “good” form, Lenora unconsciously drains other people of their powers, apparently so she can use them herself to make everyone “happy” and build the perfect world. She uses the Andillan ability to read minds in order to plant the suggestion of love in everyone’s mind, drawing them to her because she is suddenly ultra-appealing to everyone, and to find out what everyone wants and needs. Then, she uses the Gepethian of creation to make everything as everyone wants. Because this is an out-of-balance approach to making people happy, Lenora ends up being ultra-controlling (something she normally hates herself, when she’s in her right mind) of other people, and also because she has this desperate, uncontrollable need to make everyone happy, she struggles to grant their tiniest wishes, whether or not they would actually be good for anyone involved. Some of the wishes people have might make them happy in the moment but would be terrible for them in the long run, like young Sayley’s wish to never stop eating because she’s enjoying the food so much, and Lenora, in her current state, is unable to think beyond this desperate need to just give everyone whatever they want the moment that they want it. Coren, recognizing the problem, tries to free Lenora from the influence of Hevak but ends up under Lenora’s control himself because he loves even without the telepathic influence and the efforts to please everyone and cannot help being drawn to her.

Fortunately, Lenora, being a human girl even with her extended powers, soon begins to find everyone’s constant demands on her overwhelming. Even in the midst of this unbalanced effort to make everyone happy, no one is ever completely happy. Just like in the last book, where Lenora visited the distant past and witnessed a completely out-of-control world where everyone could do absolutely anything they wanted with their minds, it quickly becomes apparent that getting everything a person can think of instantly doesn’t make them happy. No sooner does someone thing of something they want and get it, they think of something else that they also want. Sometimes, people change their minds about what they want because what they got didn’t make them as happy as they expected it would. Human wants and needs and the imagination to think of new possibilities are never-ending. These are the basic reasons why humans never achieve perfect happiness. Eventually, Lenora snaps under the pressure of trying to keep up this impossible system when Coren, who at first only wanted to love Lenora and seemed like he was the only one truly happy with her, suddenly decides that he needs a glass of water and that it must have a straw. Yep, that’s the last straw that finally annoys Lenora enough to break Hevak’s hold on her.

I already mentioned above that creating a perfect system of anything is difficult, especially when you have many people with competing needs and some with needs that are completely unknown. Throughout the series, both Lenora and Coren have been learning more about the way their world and their powers function, which I think is good because it shows character growth. Usually, it’s Lenora who needs to learn something, but in this book, Coren also learns about sides of his own home country that he never knew existed before. There is an entire group of people in Andilla he knew nothing about, and they’re the only reason why there is “Balance” in Andilla and why the system there keeps working (not to mention their “economy”). The Skwoes and the other Andillans are total opposites in the way they live their lives. While most Andillans live in their imaginations to the point where they have completely lost touch with reality and the state they actually live in, the Skwoes have shunned all imagination and creativity in the name of practical work. Both groups are extreme, and up to this point, they have needed to be extreme in order to maintain a Balance with each other. But, maybe they don’t actually have to be that way because Balance can also mean reaching a happy medium. Lenora comes to realize that the difference between the Gepethian Balance and the Andillan Balance is that the Andillan Balance is more communal (although about half of the community was completely unaware of it up to this point), with one group of extremists balancing another group of extremists. In Gepeth, society focuses more on making individual people behave in a more balanced way. In the past, Lenora has found the enforced individual responsibility in Gepeth repressive, but she actually comes to appreciate it as a more balanced approach than the Andillan extremes.

In the end, the different groups in Andilla (now that they really know about each other), begin building a new form of Balance where some of each of their qualities being rubbing off on each other. The formerly purely imaginative Andillans come to see that they do need to face some parts of reality in order to rebuild their crumbling buildings and society, and they work out new contracts with the Skwoes to help them take care of these practical projects. Meanwhile, the Skwoes, freed from the monotony of just producing blue mush (made from some kind of plant material that’s never fully explained), begin enjoying these new work projects and actually not feeling bad about enjoying something for once. This new variety of work has a creative side that reawakens some of the Skwoes’ latent imaginations, and the book leaves the impression that the different Andillan groups will develop and new Balance of creativity and practicality. Also, Coren, who was troubled before about the way his people lived and even resisted using his powers too much because it felt too out-of-balance to him, comes to realize that using his powers sometimes is also part of the Balance and comes to appreciate his own abilities more.

Even though part of this story really reiterated some of the themes of the last book, I thought that it also did a good job of exploring Andillan, delving into how such a world could actually work, and considering new possibilities for it to change. Lenora also becomes more thoughtful as a person in this book. Some of that was partly from her unnaturally increasing need to be “good” and help people, but the characters also consider that it was partly Lenora’s real desire to make the world better that may have accidentally summoned Hevak back. Lenora and Hevak are two sides of the same person (with Hevak being the more unbalanced one in everything he does), so this desire to be helpful is still a part of Lenora’s personality. Lenora also continues to use the lesson that she learned in the last book about the need to think before she acts (although her thoughts are disrupted due to Hevak’s influence), which I also thought was a nice touch of character development. One of Lenora’s before traits was that she was slow to learn and actually resisted learning when it was offered because she was too absorbed in wanting to do whatever she wanted in the moment, so it’s nice to see her growing out of that.

Posted on by TracyC

In the Circle of Time

In the Circle of Time by Margaret J. Anderson, 1979.

This is the second book in the In the Keep of Time Trilogy. There are a couple of characters from the first book that appear in this one, but most are new.

Robert lives on his family’s farm outside of a small town in Scotland.  He loves to draw, but his father doesn’t think much of Robert’s art.  He wants Robert to take over the family farm when he’s grown, especially since Robert’s older brother, Duncan, disappeared two years earlier.  Everyone assumes that Duncan just got tired of the farm and ran off to the city to find work, but Robert has trouble believing that.  Duncan always loved Robert and looked after him, and Robert can’t believe that Duncan would just run off without even telling him.

One day, Robert goes to the ancient circle of stones that stands near his town, known as the Stones of Arden, to draw before school.  There, he happens to meet Jennifer, an American girl who has recently moved to the area because her father is working in the nearby city.  Jennifer has an interest in archeology, and she points out to Robert that there are depressions where there used to be stones in the middle of the circle that aren’t standing anymore.  She persuades Robert to help her do a little digging to see if they can find them.  As they dig, a strange fog comes in, and Jennifer sees a vision of dark-haired people also digging.  However, no one is really there because the ground where they were digging is undisturbed.  Robert doesn’t see the people, but he believes Jennifer when she tells him what she saw.  There are a lot of strange stories about the stones, and Robert has heard many of them from his grandfather.

Jennifer, although spooked by what she saw, refuses to believe any superstitious stories.  She persuades Robert to come back to the stones with her so that she can take another look at them.  However, when they do, the strange fog comes, and the kids suddenly find themselves many years in the future.

The kids learn where (or when) they are when they meet a boy named Karten, who was digging in the spot where Jennifer had seen him digging in her earlier vision.  He tells them that the year is 2179 (two hundred years after the book was written).  The kids can suddenly hear the sound of the ocean from the stones when they couldn’t before, and when they ask about it, Karten tells them that the polar ice caps melted in the 21st century, raising the level of the ocean and bringing the water much closer to the stones.

The future is a harsh place, and Karten fears the people he calls “the Barbaric Ones.”  The Barbaric Ones are people from “across the sea” who, as Karten and his people explain, “have retained the ways of people who lived long ago. They are interested in wealth and machines and factories.” The problem is that resources are in short supply, so the Barbaric Ones kidnap people to use as slaves, gathering as much of the scarce resources as they can to sustain their standard of living.  Karten and his people don’t want to fight the Barbaric Ones if they can avoid it because they have lost people who tried to fight them and because they believe in the values of love and trust above all.

Jennifer is quick to insist that she and Robert return to the stones where they entered this strange and disturbing future, but Robert persuades her to stay awhile and meet more of Karten’s people. Karten particularly tells them about an older woman who told him before about other people from the past who came to their time (the kids from the first book in the series), and Robert is hopeful that this woman will not only be able to tell them how to get home but maybe also what happened to his brother, Duncan. Robert has started to suspect that when Duncan suddenly disappeared, he may have come to the this time period the same way he and Jennifer did and may still be there.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction:

I don’t generally go in for dystopian novels because I find them depressing. The real world has enough problems without trying to imagine new and worse ones. However, I do find it interesting that this book, which was written a few years before I was born, has a vision of the future that specifically addresses things that are of major concern to people in the early 21st century. It imagines that the polar ice caps have melted and the sea level has risen. Many of the old coastal cities are gone, and there are new cities and communities in areas where there weren’t before.

Because of what’s happened, the world’s population has separated into two parts that have different ways of coping with the situation. The “Barbaric Ones” are much more technology-oriented, but what makes them barbaric is the way they exploit other people to serve their purposes and support the lifestyle that they want to maintain, which is much harder to maintain in this new future. Karten’s people, on the other hand, have developed a more old-fashioned, communal style of living. In fact, it’s unusually communal, to the point where young children are raised collectively by the adults of the community, nobody really knowing or caring about who their birth parents are. When children are nine years old, they select families they want to join, usually because of similar interests they have, and are raised as children of that family. Karten also likes art, and so he joined a family of artists.

These two types of societies are extreme in their views and lifestyles, polar opposites of each other, and neither is really the sort of society that Jennifer or Robert want to be part of. Jennifer is unnerved that people in Karten’s society don’t really know or care who their parents are and just kind of pick families for themselves without attachment to their birth parents. It just seems unnatural to her. Karten explains that their view is that children belong to the community as a whole. If everyone is part of the same big community, what does it matter who they live with? Their concept of marriage or partnership is never fully explained, but there don’t seem to be any rules or even social conventions about who can live with whom. One girl, called Lara Avara, tells Jennifer that her chosen parental figures/mentors are a pair of women, which surprises Jennifer, who thinks of family in terms of mothers and fathers, one of each per family. However, the future people have a different concept of family that seems to be centered more around sharing personal interests, with no particular conventions around how the family should be shaped. The chosen parental figures/mentors raise the younger members who chose to join their family, teaching them skills and professions they have mastered, according to their interests. It is not explained in the story if these older women are or were married or lovers, and it doesn’t seem to be important to any of the characters in the story, either. Lara Avara just tells Jennifer, “There cannot be rules deciding whom you love and from whom you learn.” I see one disadvantage to not knowing who one’s parents and full-blooded siblings are because there would be no way to ensure against incest, which is worrisome because that tends to bring out certain genetic health problems and weakens the genetic pool of the community, especially if it goes on for generations (unless this society has thought of that and just doesn’t mention their solution during the course of the story – maybe the elders of the community who remember who has the same birth parents and who doesn’t will intervene if siblings try to match up with each other). In some ways, Robert is attracted to this style of life because it would make things easier for him. In his own time, his family undervalues his artistic gifts and his unpleasant, temperamental father forces him to do hard physical labor on the family farm. There are times when Robert would love to exchange his problematic family for one that would help him hone his craft and appreciate his personal talents.

For awhile, Jennifer worries that Robert likes these future people so much that he wants to stay there, and she’ll be stuck in the future with him. Unlike Robert, Jennifer is close to her family and happy in their time, and she wants to go home. The two of them are accidentally separated from each other when a character from the previous book in the series (Ollie) brings Robert back to their own time without Jennifer, through the tower that the previous set of characters had used for their time travels. As Robert figures out how to rescue Jennifer from the future, he discovers the truth about Duncan, who has not traveled through time at all (although it looked like that was the way the story was going to go) but really did run away from home, as people thought he did. Like Robert, Duncan was also unhappy about their home life. Although Duncan is better suited to the farm work than Robert, he also found life there stifling, constantly having to work for their father and deal with his angry moods. Their father’s attitude problems are what makes the farm life difficult for both boys, and Duncan also seems to have been feeling overworked and unappreciated. Although life as a teenage runaway has been difficult for Duncan, he has at least managed to find work (paid, unlike the farm work he was doing for his father, and payment is a monetary form of appreciation as well as providing the worker with a living) and the freedom to begin building a life of his own.

Rescuing Jennifer means returning to the stone circle where their time travels began. After Jennifer returns home to their time, she and Robert talk about their experiences. They feel badly that they were not able to help the future people more with their problems and dangers, but Robert says that maybe what’s important is what they’ve learned from the experience themselves and how it’s changed them. Their problems (just like Robert’s brother, Duncan) have always been in their own time, and they have to live their lives in the present. What they do in the present may also change the future and help make it a better place. By the end of the book, Duncan returns to his family’s farm to tell his parents that he’s all right. Duncan will not work on the farm again, as he once did, but he decides to take a new job nearby and help out on the weekends, which will make things easier for Robert. Their family has some healing to do. A talk with Robert’s grandfather also reveals that other members of Robert’s family have traveled through time in the stone circle, and although Robert’s grandfather did his time traveling many years earlier, the vision he got of the future was actually after Robert and Jennifer’s adventures. They can tell that it was further along in time by the people and things he saw, and it reassures them that their future friends will be all right in spite of everything.

Posted on by TracyC

The Lost City of Faar

Pendragon

The Lost City of Faar by D.J. MacHale, 2003.

Press and Bobby have followed Saint Dane to the territory of Cloral, a world completely covered by water and occupied by peaceful people who live in floating cities.  Of course, with Saint Dane on the loose, things aren’t going to stay peaceful for long.  An entire city of people are killed when they eat poisoned food, and it looks like Cloral’s entire food supply may be in danger. 

Saint Dane is commanding a group of pirates raiding cities for their food supplies.  Among the dead is Cloral’s last Traveler, and his successor is his son, Spader, who has no idea what the Travelers are or what kind of dangerous mission awaits him.  Spader takes his father’s dead very hard and vows revenge upon Saint Dane.  As Bobby, Press, and Loor, who Bobby introduces to Spader in order to help explain who Travelers are, acquaint Spader with his new duties as the Traveler of Cloral, they try to convince him that preserving the peace of Cloral is more important than seeking revenge.  Spader is hot tempered, and they try to teach him to use peaceful means to combat Saint Dane, who has superior strength, anyway. 

Before he died, Spader’s father left behind one clue to the solution of their problems: a reference to the lost city of Faar, apparently the last city on dry land on Cloral. According to legend, it sank many years ago, but its advanced civilization may not have been completely destroyed. Centuries ago, the water level of Cloral rose, and the people of Faar realized that their city would soon be underwater.  They built a dome to protect their city, and they have been secretly helping the people in the floating cities by tending to their underwater farms and sharing technology with them.  However, they have been afraid to openly reveal themselves to the rest of Cloral because they were worried about their culture becoming contaminated. 

When Press, Bobby, and Spader tell them that Saint Dane knows where they are and is on his way to destroy them, most of the people flee the city.  The dome is broken, and it looks as though they will be unable to retrieve the equipment that the people of Faar were going to give them to save Cloral’s food supply.  However, the one person who remained in Faar and was killed was talking about making Faar “transpire.” Bobby, wanting to fulfill the dead man’s mission, activates the machinery to make it happen.  It turns out that the people of Faar have made it possible for their city to detach from the ground and float to the surface, like the other cities of Cloral.  Faar and its people have now rejoined the rest of Cloral, and they are able to retrieve the machinery they need.  Sadly, Spader tries to chase down Saint Dane as he escapes through the flume, and Press is killed saving him.  Spader volunteers to accompany Bobby on his mission to stop Saint Dane.

Throughout the books, Bobby, like Spader, has to come to terms with the fact that his life and his entire identity are not what he has always thought they were. Other Travelers also go through the same process as they learn about what it means to be a Traveler and to accept the mission of the Travelers. All through the series, there are other revelations about the nature of the Travelers themselves and how they came to be.

The book is available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

The Merchant of Death

Pendragon

The Merchant of Death by D.J. MacHale, 2002.

Bobby Pendragon is a normal fourteen-year-old boy, or at least he thought he was.  One day, his mysterious Uncle Press shows up at his house right before he’s supposed to leave for an important basketball game at school and tells him that he needs his help and that Bobby must come with him right away. 

Although Bobby doesn’t know what is going on, he goes with his uncle and begins a terrifying journey to another world.  His uncle reveals to him that they are both Travelers, members of a select group of people who can use gateways called flumes to travel across time and space to other worlds.  Worlds everywhere are in chaos, and an evil Traveler called Saint Dane is manipulating events to cause more chaos and destruction.  On the world of Denduron, the decadent Bedoowan society is oppressing the Milago miners, and thanks to Saint Dane, their world is about to erupt in warfare unless Bobby and his uncle can stop it.

Bobby and his uncle are separated for a while when some Bedoowans capture Uncle Press, and Bobby meets up with fellow travelers Osa, Loor, and Alder.  Osa, the most experienced Traveler, is killed trying to protect Bobby, and Bobby makes some mistakes that make the situation worse, including having his friends back home send him some items that are advanced technology to the people of Denduron. 

The Milago have discovered an explosive mineral called Tak, and they are using it to build a super weapon to wipe out the Bedoowan.  Saint Dane is trying to increase tensions between the two groups of people so that they will use this weapon, which will lead to the destruction of their world … unless Bobby and his friends can stop it.

This series reminds me a little of old movie serials, like Flash Gordon, where the good guys must defeat an evil overlord, free people from oppression, and bring peace to warring groups.  However, like with Flash Gordon’s evil nemesis, Ming the Merciless, Saint Dane has a way of escaping even when our heroes have put a stop to his plans. By the time matters are straightened out with the Bedoowans and the Milago, Saint Dane has escaped to another world, and Bobby and his companions must find him and stop him from causing further destruction.

The book is available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

Aria Volume 6

Aria Volume 6 by Kozue Amano, 2005, English Translation 2011.

This is the sixth volume of the second part of a fascinating manga series that combines sci-fi, fantasy, and slice of life. The series takes place about 300 years in the future, when Mars has been terraformed and renamed Aqua (because of all the water on its surface). The human colonies on Aqua are designed to resemble old-fashioned cities on Earth (called Manhome here). The people of Aqua prefer a much slower pace of life than people on Manhome, and aspects of life on Aqua more closely resemble Earth’s past.

The series is divided into two parts. The first two books are the Aqua volumes and introduce Akari Mizunashi, the main character, a young girl who came to Aqua to learn to become a gondolier in the city of Neo Venezia (which resembles Venice). Female gondoliers, called Undines, give tours of the city, giving Akari plenty of time to admire the beauty of her new home and meet interesting people. The two Aqua books are the prequel to the main series, Aria. Aqua covers Akari’s arrival on the planet, her introduction to life on Aqua, and the beginning of her training. The main Aria series show Akari’s continuing training, her progression to becoming a full Undine, her evolving relationships with her friends, and as always, her delight in learning more about her new home and admiring its beauty.

The series has received some criticism for being slow and lacking danger and adventure, but that is not really the point of the series. The main purpose is to show people how to appreciate the small pleasures of life. The sci-fi and fantasy elements (the spaceships, advanced environmental controls, intelligent Martian cats, and even the occasional appearances of the legendary Cait Sith) are mainly background to the stories about the magic of friendship and simple pleasures. Each volume contains a few short stories about Akari and her friends and the little adventures they have on a daily basis and the life lessons they learn. It’s a great series for relaxing when you’re stressed out.

Unfortunately, although this book is only about halfway through the series, this is the last book of the series that I actually own because the others haven’t been printed in English yet, although I think that additional volumes will be published in English.

The stories included in this volume are:

Orange Days

Athena comes to visit Alicia at Aria Company, and the trainees’ mentors reminisce about how they first met when they were trainees.

Akira was just as prickly and competitive when she was young as she is as an adult. Although trainee Akira said that she was just observing the “losers” at Aria Company, she kept coming around and became friends with Alicia. When she heard about a new trainee at Orange Company with an amazing singing voice, Akira wanted to seek her out, worried about the competition.

While she was telling Alicia about it, the two of them accidentally had a collision with young Athena’s gondola, which is the first time either of them had seen her. Athena was knocked over by the collision, so the other two girls treated her to lunch, partly to make it up to her and partly because Akira wanted to pump her for information about the new trainee at Orange Company, not knowing that Athena herself was the new trainee.

However, Athena didn’t answer their questions about the new trainee. Even back then, she was a person of few words, and she just made a drinking straw crawly snake to amuse President Aria. Still, Athena became friends with Alicia and Akira, joining them in their practice sessions, like Akari, Aika, and Alice share their practices together. Alicia and Akira only discovered that Athena was the trainee with the amazing voice when they decided to practice singing canzones one day.

The mentors end their reminiscences by saying that it seems hard to believe that, now that their training is over, they are so busy that they hardly have time to see each other. When they were trainees, it felt like they would always practice together every day, but now, their lives are different. These comments make the present trainees uncomfortable because they realize that the same thing is likely to happen to them when their training is complete. Alice, Aika, and Akari have come to value each other’s friendship and companionship, and they find it difficult to imagine being without each other.

However, Alicia and Athena tell the girls to not worry too much about it. Time is always moving forward, and it’s true that things will change for them, but that’s not entirely a bad thing. Even though they sometimes miss their training days when they spent so much of their time together, they are also happy with their current lives. They enjoy their careers, and they like helping to train new Undines. In fact, helping to train the next generation of Undines helps them to connect to their own pasts because the young Undines remind them of their own training days. Alicia’s advice is to enjoy where you are and what’s currently happening around you as much as you can. Life will eventually move on, and things will change, so you might as well make the most of where you are now and enjoy it to the fullest, so you will be ready to move on to the next stage of your life and enjoy that as well. Athena says, “Fun times really aren’t meant to be compared. Just enjoyed.”

The young trainees are still affected by the story of their mentors’ friendships and the changes in their lives. Aika points out to Akari that their lives aren’t changing just yet, but the girls have come to a greater realization that their lives will eventually change.

It’s just like how, when people are young and in school, surrounded by the same other students every day, it can be hard to imagine that there will come a day after you graduate when you won’t all be working at the same place and you won’t all be eating lunch together every day. As you get busy building careers and families, it will be harder to see each other and keep in touch. However, that’s not entirely a bad thing. As some people like to say, “You can’t begin the next chapter of your life if you keep rereading the last one.” There are many things in life to enjoy and accomplishments to be made, and like Alicia and Athena explain, you might as well enjoy where you are right now and make the most of it so you won’t look back with regret when it’s time to move on.

Venetian Glass

Akatsuki’s elder brother comes to Aria Company to hire Akari to transport some delicate Venetian glass. Akari is excited because this is the first time that anyone has specifically hired her, although, because she isn’t a full Undine yet, Alicia will have to accompany her on her errand.

When they go to pick up the glass, Akari sees glass-blowing and Venetian glass for the first time.

One of the workers from the glass factory seems kind of surly, but he accompanies them while they transport the glass and explains the history of Venetian glass and what makes it so special.

The reason why the glass worker is so surly is that he feels like a lot of people don’t appreciate his craft. He and his master put their heart and soul into their work, but people say that their “Venentian glass” is fake because it’s made in Neo-Venezia, not in the real Venice, which sank beneath the ocean years ago. The worker laments that the craftsmen who left the sinking city were scattered across Earth before making their way to Neo-Venezia and that details of their craft have been lost over time. Neo-Venezian glass will never be quite the same as the original Venetian glass, and people will never look at it the same way, which the worker finds depressing.

However, one of Akari’s great strengths is finding the beauty in everything and bringing it out for other people to see. She tells the worker that the glass is kind of like Neo-Venezia itself. It’s true, it’s not the original Venice, only re-created in its image. Some aspects of it are the same, but it’s also a different place, on another planet. To some people, that might make it seem like a fake city, just an imitation of the original, but Akari doesn’t think that the real vs. fake concept matters because she loves the city for the beautiful treasure it is. Similarly, Akari thinks that Neo-Venezian glass is a treasure by itself and likes it for what it is, regardless of what the original was or what others say about it.

The worker finds Akari’s viewpoint inspirational and is enchanted by Akari herself, remarking that she’s also a unique treasure. Akatsuki’s brother jokes that Akatsuki might have a rival now for his affection for Akari. Akari knows that Akatsuki has had an unrequited crush on Alicia, so she doesn’t think too much about it. Although it’s true that Akatsuki has a crush on Alicia, Akatsuki’s brother is also correct that Akari inspires greater feelings in others than she realizes and Akatsuki values Akari more than he lets on, maybe more than even he realizes himself. Akari is unique because of her unusual way of looking at things, and her optimistic point of view influences others.

Snow White

One day, while they’re practicing together, Akari asks Aika what kind of adult she wanted to be when she was a kid. Aika, who has admired and even hero-worshipped Alicia ever since Alicia was kind to her when she was a young child, says that she’s always wanted to be an elegant woman like Alicia. Akari says that she wants to be like Alicia, too, but Aika criticizes her for wanting to copy her ambition and says that it’s not likely that Akari would ever be as elegant as Alicia because she still does kid-like things, like collecting stuffed animals.

Their discussion causes Akari to wonder what sort of adult Alicia wanted to be when she was a little kid, and she asks Alicia about it while they’re out walking one day. Instead of answering her directly at first, Alicia demonstrates by starting to build a snowman and pointing out how the people around them react to it.

Each time Alicia and Akari start to make a large snowball for the base of the snowman, different adults stop and help them to make it a bit bigger.

Alicia says that she noticed people like this when she was a child. There are always adults who, when seeing a young girl making a snowman, feel compelled to help her because she can make a much bigger snowball with their help. That’s the type of adult Alicia always wanted to be.

Alicia genuinely enjoys not only her career as an Undine but her role as a teacher and mentor in Akari’s life and in the lives of her friends, helping them to develop in their trade and to become better Undines because of her influence.

Stray Cat

Alice finds a tiny stray Martian cat one day while waiting for Akari and Aika to meet her for practice. The cat’s mother doesn’t seem to be around, and Alice doesn’t know whether the little cat is lost, orphaned, or abandoned. When Aika arrives for practice, she finds both Alice and Akari lying on the ground next to the cat because it looks so happy lying in the sun that Alice thinks they should also try it.

Although Aika warns Alice that she won’t be able to keep the cat because she lives in a dorm at Orange Company and isn’t allowed to keep pets, Alice becomes attached to the cat, names it Maa, and hides it in her room.

At first, she is afraid that her mentor, Athena, will be angry with her, and Aika scares her by saying that Athena will probably kill the cat because she doesn’t like cats. However, Alice loves Maa because she misses the previous president cat of Orange Company, who recently passed away, and Maa reminds her a little of him.

When the secret gets out, and Alice is confronted by Athena about the cat, Alice is scared because Athena is holding a knife for slicing fruit and runs away to leave the tiny Maa where she found him, thinking that it might be the only way to save his life. However, she finds herself unable to abandon Maa and returns to get him, only to find him missing from the box where she left him. In a panic, she spends all night searching the city with her friends to try to find Maa.

However, when they finally give up the search, they discover that Athena has Maa. When she had tried to talk to Alice before, she wasn’t angry. She followed Alice to the place where she left Maa and retrieved him and has been waiting for Alice to return to Orange Company. In Alice’s absence, Athena has persuaded Orange Company to keep Maa as their new company president. Like the other cats used as the presidents/mascots of gondola companies, Maa also has blue eyes.

A Night on the Galactic Railroad

When Akari hears the sound of a train at night, she imagines that it’s a magical train like one she read about in a book, A Night on the Galactic Railroad by Kenji Miyazawa.

Aika has a more practical explanation for what it is, that the sounds of freight trains are more noticeable at night, when everything is quiet, but Akari discovers the truth when President Aria gives her a special train ticket.

It turns out that the mysterious train is a train of cats. (Guess who the conductor is?) Akari could use the ticket from President Aria to ride the train, but instead, she gives it to a sad little kitten who lost his ticket.

Because Akari doesn’t board the train, she never finds out where the train was going. The next morning, it all seems like a strange dream, except both Akari and President Aria have the stamps on their foreheads that Cait Sith gave them.

A Parallel World

President Aria accidentally finds a parallel world in which all the people he knows who are girls are boys and vice versa. Frightening!

President Aria has always wanted to find a gateway to another world, but everything seems so strange that all he wants to do is get back to his world.

He ends up returning to the world he knows when someone tosses him too high in the air while playing with him. Did any of it really happen, or was he just dazed from when he fell?

This one isn’t one of my favorite stories in this series because I think that the premise is kind of goofy. The characters don’t really look all that different when their genders are switched. Most of the difference is in hair styles, and the uniforms of the Undines have pants when they’re normally just long dresses.

Posted on by TracyC

Aria Volume 5

Aria Volume 5 by Kozue Amano, 2004, English Translation 2009.

This is the fifth volume of the second part of a fascinating manga series that combines sci-fi, fantasy, and slice of life. The series takes place about 300 years in the future, when Mars has been terraformed and renamed Aqua (because of all the water on its surface). The human colonies on Aqua are designed to resemble old-fashioned cities on Earth (called Manhome here). The people of Aqua prefer a much slower pace of life than people on Manhome, and aspects of life on Aqua more closely resemble Earth’s past.

The series is divided into two parts. The first two books are the Aqua volumes and introduce Akari Mizunashi, the main character, a young girl who came to Aqua to learn to become a gondolier in the city of Neo Venezia (which resembles Venice). Female gondoliers, called Undines, give tours of the city, giving Akari plenty of time to admire the beauty of her new home and meet interesting people. The two Aqua books are the prequel to the main series, Aria. Aqua covers Akari’s arrival on the planet, her introduction to life on Aqua, and the beginning of her training. The main Aria series show Akari’s continuing training, her progression to becoming a full Undine, her evolving relationships with her friends, and as always, her delight in learning more about her new home and admiring its beauty.

The series has received some criticism for being slow and lacking danger and adventure, but that is not really the point of the series. The main purpose is to show people how to appreciate the small pleasures of life. The sci-fi and fantasy elements (the spaceships, advanced environmental controls, intelligent Martian cats, and even the occasional appearances of the legendary Cait Sith) are mainly background to the stories about the magic of friendship and simple pleasures. Each volume contains a few short stories about Akari and her friends and the little adventures they have on a daily basis and the life lessons they learn. It’s a great series for relaxing when you’re stressed out.

The stories included in this volume are:

Mailman-San

When Akari’s mailman friend has a hole in his gondola, he tries to hire Alicia to help him deliver the mail. However, Alicia is busy, so she allows Akari to help him instead, even though she’s only a trainee.

Akari gets to visit the post office and spends the day helping the mailman deliver the mail. During the course of the day, Akari thinks about the number of letters that people in Neo Venezia send and wonders why they send physical letters instead of e-mail. The mailman explains to her that physical letters feel different from e-mail, and Akari understands.

People in Neo Venezia like the feel of doing things the old-fashioned way, often because the old-fashioned ways have more of a personal touch. The mailman tells Akari that she has really become a part of Neo Venezia.

Canzone

Alice’s mentor, Athena, is also one of the three greatest Undines on Aqua, the Three Water Fairies, like Akari’s and Aika’s mentors. However, Alice has little patience for her because she is clumsy outside of a gondola. Alice hates clumsiness and weakness, even punishing her own left hand for not being as strong as her right.

Akari is concerned about Alice when she sees what she’s doing to her left hand, and she has a sleepover with Alice to learn more about what’s happening with her. That’s when she meets Athena for the first time, although she had earlier seen her in her gondola, singing an enchanting canzone. Athena’s singing ability is one of the reasons why she is so famous as an Undine.

Akari observes the little things that Athena does for Alice, like singing to her at night, and points out to Alice that her left hand helps her more than she realizes.

Alice doesn’t believe it at first, but the next day, she begins to notice that Akari is right. While Alice eats with her right hand, her left hand holds her bowl. When she writes with her right hand, her left hand is holding the page. Her left hand isn’t inactive or useless; it’s been providing support that allows the right hand to do its job.

This revelation also causes Alice to see her mentor in a different light. Like her left hand, clumsy Athena has also been giving Alice quiet support that Alice often fails to notice. Alice reflects on how Athena’s singing comforted her when she first arrived at Orange Company and was homesick. Alice asks Athena why she sings to her, and Athena tells her that she’s just singing as she pleases, that she doesn’t need a reason to sing, that songs don’t really need to be noticed or thanked, and that she should just let the song do its work. However, Alice gains a new sense of gratitude toward her mentor and begins to treat her much better.

The Night of the Meteor Shower

Akari and her friends find out that there is going to be a meteor shower, and Aika suggests that they invite Al the Gnome to watch it with them.

Of all the boys the girls know, Aika likes Al the best. Al isn’t temperamental like Akatsuki or spacey like Woody. Aika is kind of fascinated by how he looks younger than they are even though he’s older and also talks like an old man or an old-fashioned gentleman.

Plus, after living in the underground city, Al has really good night vision, which is helpful as the girls search for a good place to view the meteor shower, away from the lights and crowds of the public square.

Aika finally suggests that they go up on the roof of one of the Himeya Company buildings, which has an excellent view.

Akari explores the rooftops a little on her own, leaving Aika and Al alone together. When Al, whose work as a Gnome is managing the gravity of Aqua, talks to Aika about gravity and attraction and how the gravity of Aqua pulls, the meteors in, she understands a little more about the attraction she feels for Al.

Margherita

Aika’s mentor, Akira, is tough, but she genuinely cares about her students. After a day of training in which many things go wrong, she finds a way to show the trainees how much she appreciates their hard work.

Akira has Aika, Akari, and Alice show her how they would handle a real customer, from helping them into the gondola to giving them a pleasant tour with interesting information. However, she is critical of the way they do things and particularly, some of the safety regulations they forget, like speed limits, not warning other approaching boats of their presence, and allowing themselves to be stuck when high tide comes and makes it impossible for them to pass beneath certain bridges.

Akira says that the reason why she’s being tough is that, when the girls become full Undines, they will be completely on their own in their boats with their customers, with no one else to help them. When there’s a problem or when they make a mistake, it will be their job to fix the situation themselves with their own skill and ingenuity.

When they become stuck on a section of canal because of the rising tide, Akira challenges them to find a way to solve the problem themselves. They find a side waterway that’s been closed off, and take the gondola through that way.

Akira rewards the trainees by taking them to a pizza parlor for a Margherita pizza. (Named for a queen, it’s topped with tomatoes, basil, and olive oil.) The trainees ask her why she didn’t punish them for making a serious mistake in their practice, and she tells them that there would be no point in punishing them because they realized what they did wrong and made an effort to improve, learning from their experience.

I quibble a bit with the teaching method just telling the students to find a way to fix the problem themselves without guidance. It kind of works here because Aika and Akari are now journeyman Undines and have had basic training and experience of the waterways of Neo Venezia to call on, but you can’t do this sort of thing with real beginners who haven’t had that grounding. I’ve had teachers who have tried, and I know the frustration of having them expecting me to call on a grounding I hadn’t received. When I was a kid, I felt terrible about those situations, like I was an idiot, but as an adult, who has since had gaps in my early education filled, I’ve come to realize that the fault wasn’t with me but with the teachers who had not taught me what to do but still expected me to somehow already know. I couldn’t figure out what to do because I didn’t know enough about what I could do yet. You can’t progress well in your education or training for anything without having someone explain the basics to give you the right grounding to build on. You can’t do algebra without knowing your basic operations. You can’t understand how to cook from memory or improvise a dish without first learning how to follow basic recipes. Akira’s approach to letting the students figure out the solution to a problem themselves calls attention to what the girls already know and encourages them to use it, but when that doesn’t work in real life, when you just don’t know what to do at all, it’s time to take a step back and reacquaint yourselves with the basics. You can figure out what to do if you know what’s possible to do, but I’d like to point out that if you don’t know what’s possible, you need some help and guidance to learn.

Shadow Chasing

Akari never minds waiting for people because there are always interesting things and people to watch. One day, when Alicia has to attend a Gondola Association meeting at a famous cafe, Akari says that she and President Aria will just wait for her instead of heading home.

Akari drinks lattes and watches the people going by, just enjoying the ambiance of the square.

There is a man there who seems familiar to Akari, and the two of them begin talking to each other about people watching in the square. The man introduces Akari to the custom of “shadow chasing”, where the restaurant employees move the cafe’s tables into the shade as the shadows move.

Akari reflects on the history of the cafe, Caffe Florian, which she says is actually the same cafe that once stood in the original Venice (which, in Akari’s time, is now submerged beneath the ocean), having been dismantled and moved years ago.

It turns out that her new friend is actually the manager of the cafe.