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Jan. 13th, 2012 11:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsThis Yuletide I read a pretty excellent, novella-length Blossom Culp fic that, among other things, managed to send the kid who sees ghosts to WWI, and make it both plausible and not awesomely depressing. It's called As Our Roads Converge and if you have some time to kill, you should read it! I barely remembered the Blossom Culp books and I enjoyed it a lot.
Anyway, because I did in fact barely remember the Blossom Culp books, I was sort of thinking about rereading, and thengenarti and I happened across one of the books on sale for a quarter at a grocery-store book sale and I decided that a reread was clearly in my destiny.
. . . but I have to wait for the first one to come in at the library, so while I was waiting instead I read the one other Richard Peck book I did own, Voices After Midnight.
Voices After Midnight is a weird, matter-of-fact little ghost story. It starts with our fourteen-year-old protagonist's family -- including boy-crazy big sister Heidi and weird and eerily self-possessed little brother Luke -- moving to New York for a two-week vacation.
(Our protagonist's name is Chad, but fortunately, since it was a first-person story, I was able to forget that mostly.)
Anyway, the book would be worth reading for me just from the suburban California family's hilarious culture shock at their visit to eighties New York; it's all "OMG THERE ARE NO SUPERMARKETS, JUST BODEGAS, HOW WEIRD" and "WE HAVE NEVER TAKEN A WALK AS A FAMILY ON SIDEWALKS BEFORE." However, the kids are also running into a bigger problem, which is that New York is full of history and all of them keep accidentally time-slipping into it.
CHAD: Maybe this is just a dietary thing! Maybe it's a chemical imbalance. MAYBE IT'S PUBERTY.
LUKE: Obviously we have some business in the past we need to fix.
CHAD: How do you know this! You're EIGHT!
LUKE: Have I not mentioned this has been happening to me all my life? I mean, did the fact that I have always been a weird and and eerily self-possessed child not give you any signs? Seriously, I'm curious.
HEIDI: So, uh . . . who's the hot Gilded Age guy hanging out in my bedroom?
Heidi is kind of a caricature of an eighties teenaged girl, but she does get her moments of awesome. The ghost story, meanwhile, is actually pretty creepy, and turns out to be the reason I always get vague premonitions of doom every time I get into the hand-cranked old elevator at Housing Works.
I also spent the whole book trying to think of other examples of eerie and otherworldly younger brothers in YA fiction. (I find it such a weird trope because it is so not my experience of having a little brother!) I mean, Charles Wallace is a gimme, and I know there are more, but I'm drawing a blank. Help me out? (Moril from the Dalemark Quartet might also count, if the story weren't told from inside his own head.)
Anyway, because I did in fact barely remember the Blossom Culp books, I was sort of thinking about rereading, and then
genarti and I happened across one of the books on sale for a quarter at a grocery-store book sale and I decided that a reread was clearly in my destiny.. . . but I have to wait for the first one to come in at the library, so while I was waiting instead I read the one other Richard Peck book I did own, Voices After Midnight.
Voices After Midnight is a weird, matter-of-fact little ghost story. It starts with our fourteen-year-old protagonist's family -- including boy-crazy big sister Heidi and weird and eerily self-possessed little brother Luke -- moving to New York for a two-week vacation.
(Our protagonist's name is Chad, but fortunately, since it was a first-person story, I was able to forget that mostly.)
Anyway, the book would be worth reading for me just from the suburban California family's hilarious culture shock at their visit to eighties New York; it's all "OMG THERE ARE NO SUPERMARKETS, JUST BODEGAS, HOW WEIRD" and "WE HAVE NEVER TAKEN A WALK AS A FAMILY ON SIDEWALKS BEFORE." However, the kids are also running into a bigger problem, which is that New York is full of history and all of them keep accidentally time-slipping into it.
CHAD: Maybe this is just a dietary thing! Maybe it's a chemical imbalance. MAYBE IT'S PUBERTY.
LUKE: Obviously we have some business in the past we need to fix.
CHAD: How do you know this! You're EIGHT!
LUKE: Have I not mentioned this has been happening to me all my life? I mean, did the fact that I have always been a weird and and eerily self-possessed child not give you any signs? Seriously, I'm curious.
HEIDI: So, uh . . . who's the hot Gilded Age guy hanging out in my bedroom?
Heidi is kind of a caricature of an eighties teenaged girl, but she does get her moments of awesome. The ghost story, meanwhile, is actually pretty creepy, and turns out to be the reason I always get vague premonitions of doom every time I get into the hand-cranked old elevator at Housing Works.
I also spent the whole book trying to think of other examples of eerie and otherworldly younger brothers in YA fiction. (I find it such a weird trope because it is so not my experience of having a little brother!) I mean, Charles Wallace is a gimme, and I know there are more, but I'm drawing a blank. Help me out? (Moril from the Dalemark Quartet might also count, if the story weren't told from inside his own head.)
