Kat’s Film and Book Reviews

Code Orange

By Caroline Cooney

Delacourt Press, 2005

Some people are better researchers than fiction writers. We get the feeling that what they really want is to show the reader how interesting their topic is—and it usually is interesting. But that’s not what we go to fiction for. We read fiction because we want to learn about people, others experiencing things that we find connections to. The best fictional characters, like the Velveteen Rabbit, become real simply because we believe in them so completely.

Caroline Cooney understands the difference. Each of her novels centers around a certain theme—forgiveness, sundered families, identity—and you know that she’s done her research. But that’s not why you read. You read because the main character—always a teenager—grabs your attention and your heart from the first words.

That’s exactly what’s going on in her gripping novel, Code Orange. The title refers to the Homeland Security danger alert codes implemented after 9/11, and hints at the sort of danger that will be encountered in the book. The main character, 16-year-old Mitty Blake, accidentally comes across an envelope full of smallpox scabs, and from there we follow his journey into fear and paranoia, illness, bioterrorism, and worse. It’s utterly compelling, and incredibly suspenseful; as Cooney counts off the days from exposure to infectiousness, we are as impatient and fearful as Mitty is. And she cuts us no slack—is that headache just a headache, or is it the onset of smallpox? Is Mitty chilled because it’s February in New York, or is it a symptom of smallpox? She won’t tell Mitty, and she won’t tell us.

Cooney uses Mitty’s science research paper as a way of feeding us the information we need to have to become as scared as Mitty is. Mitty writes in his own words about the symptoms and development of smallpox, how it is passed from person to person, how it was eradicated and how it might return, and chillingly, about its potential uses as a weapon of bioterrorism. It never feels too farfetched, especially since Mitty can come up with a million reasons why this couldn’t really be happening. We know the incredible odds as well as he does. But we are still as afraid as he is.

Even more interesting than the smallpox storyline is Mitty’s character development. When we first meet him he is the ultimate teenage boy slacker. He cares for nothing but music and the girl he’s crushing on, and he’s filling a seat in an advanced biology class that his parents paid the school to put him in. But through his research and the fear that he might contract smallpox—and even worse, give it to others—we see him grow up. He realizes what’s important, and he learns how to act on his newly discovered feelings of love and loyalty. In the end, Mitty is no longer a slacker in any sense. Mitty knows what the right thing to do is, and he acts on it.

I would recommend this book for middle school age and up (including adults). The terrorism theme might be scary for the younger kids in this age group, but in my experience it’s better for them to be a little bit afraid and to ask their parents or teachers about it, than to hear something on the radio or TV and be terrified. Much as adults might hate it, terrorism is now a part of our children’s lives, and like all difficult subjects, kids must be exposed to it in controlled amounts. Since the book has no violence, only the threat of violence, I think that even pre-adolescent kids can handle it. And adults will find that they can’t put it down, and don’t want to, until they know how it ends.

New Moon

Stephenie Meyer

Little, Brown and Company

2006

New Moon is the sequel to Stephenie Meyer’s 2005 novel, Twilight. Like many in fandom, I’ve read New Moon several times now, which makes it easier in some ways and harder in others to review it.

At the end of the first book, Twilight, Edward and Bella reach an impasse. Bella wishes for Edward to change her into a vampire, and Edward refuses to do it. He doesn’t think she understands how difficult the life of a vampire is, and he doesn’t want to condemn her to that. Bella doesn’t really care about the technicalities; she just wants to be with Edward forever, and the immortality conferred by vampirism is an obvious way to do that.

New Moon starts out in September of Bella and Edward’s senior year of high school. Bella wakes upon the morning of her 18^th birthday and is depressed that she is now older than Edward ever would be, since Edward is not aging. The Cullens, spurred on by the irrepressible Alice, throw Bella a party that she doesn’t want, and at this party, the tragedy Edward has been fearing nearly occurs.

Knowing that Bella nearly came to irreversible harm because of what Edward and his family are is too much for Edward, and he resolves to leave her. This will come as no surprise to anyone who read Midnight Sun, the partial manuscript for the Twilight story as told from Edward’s point of view. Edward is convinced he’s not good for Bella, and has always intended to leave her when he was strong enough, or when he loved her enough to put her safety over his own happiness.

He finally reaches that point in New Moon. And amazingly, to the first time reader at least, he does it. He leaves. If the book is divided into quarters, the middle two are spent entirely without Edward.

So, if we have no Edward, what’s left? Bella’s left, on her own, and her mental stability seems to have left with her vampire lover. She enters a state of near total dissociation, in which she physically moves through her days, but emotionally is completely absent from her own life.

It’s not a healthy state of being, but in this story, the reader really has to make allowances for the strong supernatural element involved in the relationship. If a real teenage girl were this destroyed by a break-up, she would require hospitalization. But real teenage girls do not have the hand of destiny guiding their relationships with their vampire boyfriends.

Bella soon finds solace in her friend Jacob Black, and comes to depend heavily on his friendship. Jacob helps her begin to heal and encourages her in some of her more irresponsible activities. As Bella puts it,

Only a teenage boy would agree to this: deceiving both our parents while repairing dangerous vehicles using money meant for my college education. He didn’t see anything wrong with that picture. Jacob was a gift from the gods.

Jacob gives her space for a while, but she senses his growing attraction to her. And she starts to wonder what it would be like, to be with someone who made her feel better, even if that someone could never be the one she lost.

And then we discover that Jacob has a secret, too. The supernatural is exploding all over the rainy green state of Washington, and old legends, once thought to just be fairy tales, come to life on the Quileute reservation. Jacob is right in the middle of it, and it alters his relationship with Bella in ways that both help and hurt them both.

It takes a while for Bella and Jacob to find their footing as friends in this new situation (I don’t like to spoil it, but is there anyone in the world who doesn’t know what’s going on with Jacob and the Quileutes?). So now Bella, still on the fine edge of mental health, still dealing with losing Edward, has to work to preserve her relationship with Jacob, too.

And just when Bella starts to think that maybe life could go on—a wounded, partial life, maybe, but still a life—a vampire shows up at her house. It’s not Edward, but Alice, and we discover that through a misunderstanding, Edward now thinks that Bella is dead, and has gone to Italy to request execution from the vampire world’s royal family. He intends to commit suicide by Volturi. Only Bella can save him, and she doesn’t hesitate to jump on a plane with Alice and go, despite Jacob’s pleas for her to stay.

For the reader, part of us wants to cheer that we get more Edward, truly one of the most compelling characters in contemporary fiction. But it hardly seems fair to Jacob, for Bella to drop him the minute Edward needs her. And it’s not fair, of course. It leaves Bella feeling guilty and Jacob feeling resentful and bitter.

Those feelings will carry into the next book. New Moon and its sequel, Eclipse, are the two most intimately connected books in the series, and in that one, everyone will have a high price to pay for the choices they all made in New Moon. So if you’re one of those readers who gets frustrated by the lack of Edward in New Moon, just remember, it’s in service of the greater good. There’s a lot more Edward coming up, and since Jacob isn’t going anywhere, there’s a lot of angry, arrogant, intense and suffering Edward coming up.

That’s how we like him best.

King of Shadows

By Susan Cooper

Aladdin Press, 1999

Image courtesy of FantasticFiction.com

Nat Fields is a boy searching for his place in the world. After the painful deaths of his parents, which he deals with by denying and suppressing his grief, Nat finds that he has a talent for acting, and is accepted into an elite theater group, The American Company of Boys. He is under the direction of the enigmatic director, “Arby,” whose odd name will have significance near the end of the book. Arby has taken the boys to perform in London at the newly rebuilt Globe Theater.

Due to some unexplained time-travel, which we begin to understand is more common in the world than we might have thought, Nat Fields switches places with another Nat Fields in 1599. The Elizabethan Nat is one of the St. Paul’s Boys, players who serve the choir of St. Paul‘s Cathedral. He has been lent to Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the company of William Shakespeare himself, to substitute in the role of Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His disorientation at being found in a time four hundred years before he was born is mercifully short-lived, perhaps unrealistically so…but then, Nat is a boy who is used to being alone and dealing with whatever comes his way. So much has happened to him that he has no control over; perhaps waking up in another century is just one more thing.

Nat performs beautifully as Puck opposite Shakespeare’s Oberon, and the theatrical antics of the whole company are interesting and entertaining. In the course of the play, Nat and Shakespeare form a bond; the one grieving a dead father, and the other a dead son, they become fast and affectionate friends. For the first time since his parents’ deaths, Nat feels he has found his true place in the world.

Of course, Nat must return to his own time in the end. The lessons learned are about finding one’s place, making the most of what one is given, and learning to grieve without judgment or resentment. Nat has some very realistic trouble adjusting to all of the things that happen to him, both in the course of the unfolding story and in the backstory. Cooper offers us his tender feelings with compassion and without sentimentality; children are not idealized, but are treated with respect. Nat is a troubled hero with whom the reader empathizes.

The only bits that might be confusing concern the technical jargon of theater, especially where it applies to the original Globe. Young readers who aren’t familiar with names such as Burbage, Marlowe, Essex and Cecil might find themselves as lost in history as Nat initially was. Nonetheless, the life of the theater is described in such a lively way that I wouldn’t be surprised if readers’ minds are opened to learning more. Nat’s healing and coming into his own are reasons enough to read Cooper’s delightful book. If her book encourages anyone to learn more about Shakespeare or the theater, even better.