Framed! A T.O.A.S.T. Mystery, by James Ponti (2016)

For anyone actively engaged with children’s literature and Young Adult fiction like Your Correspondent, the challenge isn’t in finding the good, but in keeping up with all that is good (and great).  I am constantly amazed at the high quality of the books that come across my desk, and marvel at what a Golden Age this is for the medium.

Case in point – Framed! A T.O.A.S.T. Mystery by James Ponti.  I approached this book with trepidation, expecting just another juvenile mystery in the Hardy Boys vein.  What I found instead was a novel that is smart, beautifully constructed, and often screamingly funny.  Framed! ranks as one of the best books I’ve read this year – either for adults or young readers. 

Framed! is all about Florian Bates, a 12 year old who recently moved to Washington, DC, with his art conservator mother and museum-security specialist father.  Bates is an extraordinary boy in that he has an uncanny knack for noticing things, and making educated suppositions based on tiny facts.  He calls his method TOAST, or the Theory Of All Small Things.

He meets his neighbor, Margaret, and promises to teach her the TOAST technique.  She is a more than adept pupil, and is quickly matching Florian deduction-for-deduction.  While providing her with TOAST training at DC’s National Gallery, their observations lead them to believe that something shifty is afoot.  When key Impressionist paintings are stolen from the museum, his deductions bring him to the attention of the FBI, who, realizing themselves how outlandish it all is, bring Florian onto the case.

Framed! often reads like a Young Adult version of the popular series Sherlock; and it shares with that series an almost beatific regard for the lead’s deductive powers, and the comedic interplay between the lead characters.  Author Ponti really makes the entire notion of TOAST come alive.  It is essentially a riff on Sherlock Holmes’ famed powers of observation and deduction, but Ponti makes a point of walking us through Florian’s mental gymnastics as they occur, rather than explaining afterwards.  It is an effective twist.

The novel begins with Florian kidnapped by the Romanian mafia, and then trying to remember the lessons of his hostage survival course provided by the FBI.  When he comes face to face with the criminal kingpin, Florian makes another key deduction, which then leads to a book-long flashback explaining how he got into this fix.

Perhaps one of the most fascinating things about the book is Ponti’s regard for Florian’s intellectual prowess.  There are many (many!) books where young protagonists rely upon magic or science fictional ideas to succeed; Florian is a creature of the mind and exults in his intelligence.  More, please!

One minor quibble, not that any of the younger readers would make note, is that in Ponti’s world, the FBI is a benevolent entity filled with agents of real integrity who are focused on justice, rather than a highly politicized entity spying on innocent Americans.  Given a tracking chip by the bureau (with a promise never to spy on him), I feared that young Florian would grow up to spend his adulthood in hiding with Edward Snowden…

But real-life disappointments have little to do with this marvelously realized book.  It is fabulously addictive from the very opening.  For example, here is Florian talking to his Romanian kidnapper (with a very uncertain grasp of English) while trying to ply his hostage training:

Survival Step 2 – Disrupt Your Captor’s Train of Thought

“Do you mean ‘not wrong’ as in I’m not wrong in what I’m saying?  Or ‘not wrong’ as in you’re not wrong in whom you kidnapped?”

I waited for a response, but all I heard was a low, frustrated growl.  I assumed this was his deep-thinking noise.

“If you don’t use pronouns, it really makes the conversation hard to follow.  You need to say ‘You’re not wrong’ or ‘I’m not wrong.’  Especially in a situation like this with threats and demands.  The wrong pronoun could have someone else ending up with your ransom money, and that wouldn’t be good for either one of us.”

“Not wrong!” he barked again as if saying it louder suddenly solved the grammar issues.  Just then he swerved to avoid another car, blasted his horn, and yelled what I assumed were choice Romanian curse words.  I figured he was distracted enough for me to start inching toward my backpack.

“Don’t feel bad,” I continued.  “I understand how hard it is to learn a new language.  My family moves all the time.  I’ve had to learn French and Italian.  It’s molto difficile.  That’s Italian for ‘very difficult.’”

“Stop talk!”

“That’s a perfect example of what I mean.  You said ‘stop talk’ but it should be ‘stop talking.’  English is so complicated.  But let’s forget about grammar and get back to you kidnapping the wrong person.  Like I said, it’s an easy mistake and easy to fix.  If you let me go, I promise not to tell anyone.  Just drop me off at the nearest Metro station.”

“Shut mouth or else!”

The “or else” was ominous, and combined with the continued lack of pronouns it reminded me of the third step from my training.

Survival Step 3 – Do Not Antagonize Your Captor

(When I told Margaret about the steps, she couldn’t believe this wasn’t first.)

This is a delightful book and comes highly recommended.

Truth or Dare: Five Girls, One Summer, Many Secrets, by Barbara Dee

We are starting a two-week long look at children’s books here at The Jade Sphinx, which seems especially pertinent now that the Christmas holidays are upon us.  What astonishes us is not the sheer fecundity of new books hitting the shelves this season, but the extremely high quality of the offerings.

We start with the newest by Barbara Dee, author of The (Almost) Perfect Guide to Imperfect Boys and Drama Queen.  When not writing Young Adult novels (her next, Star-Crossed, is slated to appear in spring 2017), she directs the Chappaqua Children’s Book Festival.  She lives in Westchester County, and you can dip into her blog at Fromthemixedupfiles.com. 

Her latest, Truth or Dare: Five Girls, One Summer, Many Secrets, Dee tells a story that is touching and remarkably real.  The novel tells of Lia, who manages to overcome the grief of losing her mother in a car crash, thanks to her friendship with four other girls.  The girls – Marley, Abi, Makayla and Jules – and Lia return from vacation on the cusp of seventh grade and find that their relationships have subtly altered.  They have become competitive and mistrustful of one another; and after a prolonged game of Truth or Dare, Lia finds herself lying to keep up with them.

Her lies are the result of many things: creeping peer pressure, dissatisfaction with herself, and the need (so vital to young people) to define who she is.  On top of all that, Lia must deal with the many people who try to help her now that her mother is gone, and reconcile her feelings for her aunt, who has come to the family’s aid, but who many disregard as slightly crazy.

Dee includes touches that work wonderfully well.  The aunt, for example, is pretty ‘out there.’  But Lia learns that her eccentricities do not mean she isn’t a valuable member of the family, or that she doesn’t have a lot to contribute.  An interesting twist on this all is a neighboring Mom (mother of one of the girls who bullies Lia), who coordinates the neighbors in helping care for Lia’s family.  The neighbor is engaged and actively kind, but over-bearing and difficult.  In fact, she bullied Lia’s aunt when they were children, and young Lia sees how this behavior can be inherited, and how it affects generations.

Dee’s novel is not a big book in that it does not deal with huge events or earth-shattering crises.  But the smaller, intimate vibe of the tale is its greatest strength: this is a slice of life that all of us have experienced in one way or another.

Dee writes of the disorientation that comes with puberty, peer pressure, lying to ourselves (and others) to create a persona, and, most importantly, finding friends who like us for how we are, and not what we seem or wish to be.  Dee’s novel is wise in its simplicity, penetrating in its psychology, and engrossing in its raw emotion.  This is a model Young Adult novel.

Here is Lia, after concocting her first lie:  I’d like to tell you that I didn’t sleep that night, and that all of Sunday I squirmed and blushed when I thought about the lie I’d told my friends.  But here’s the truth – by the next morning I felt proud of myself.  The tiny green bud of the lie – I kissed Tanner – had bloomed into a gorgeous pink flower overnight, a great big peony I could keep in a vase in front of me and take whiffs of whenever I felt left out of the conversation.  I kissed Tanner wasn’t the truth as a statement of What Actually Happened to Me That Summer, but it was a different kind of truth – a statement of What Was Going on Inside My Brain, how all of a sudden I could come up with the details (the walk on the beach, the fifteen-second kiss, the closed eyes).  I mean, I’d never even thought of stuff like that before, ever.  Not about myself, anyway.  So I felt excited, and maybe a little bit scared, about my new power.

If you know young people who are putting together the narrative of their lives, Barbara Dee’s Truth or Dare would make a wonderful addition to their book shelves.

Maybe a Fox, by Kathi Appelt and Alison McGhee (2016)

It’s understandable that so many have soured on adult fiction and are finding greater rewards in Young Adult novels.  It seems that contemporary adult novelists devote themselves to a minimalist approach, stripping life of its mystery, its romance and its quality of transcendence.  This reductive quality in contemporary fiction – shorn of story, shorn of suspense, shorn of purpose – is perhaps the greatest threat to contemporary engagement with reading.

Many novels targeted towards Young Adults, however, have evaded this post modern rot.  This is largely because the fodder of so much bad contemporary fiction – failed relationships, unsatisfying sex, career depression – still lie ahead for many young adult readers.  Also, Young Adult novels drive in an engine powered by plot; and plot is something much contemporary fiction ignores.

There is also a quality of fearlessness in Young Adult fiction that contemporary adult fiction lacks.  It can take risks, go for the big effect, approach realms of magical realism.  And certainly few new Young Adult novels go for the big effect more ambitiously than Maybe a Fox, by Kathi Appelt and Alison McGhee.

Maybe a Fox is about two sisters, Sylvie and Jules.  Both girls live with their widowed father in rural Vermont.  When Sylvie, a runner, disappears and is presumed dead, Jules must cope with her feelings of loss and guilt.  She must also try to find a greater, more deep understanding of her sister, their relationship, and reconcile them to memories of their late mother.

Also going on, her friend Sam is dealing with the return of his brother, Elk, who is back from active service in Afghanistan and dealing with the loss of his own dear friend, Zeke. 

The novel shifts from its realist roots with sequences involving Senna, a new-born fox who feels a strange affinity for Jules.  Is this, in some way, the returning spirit of Sylvie, or something more mundane?

Appelt and McGhee are to be given kudos for their remarkable evocation of grief.  For readers (young or old) who have had to deal with loss and its resultant pain, the taste of this peculiar agony is palpable on the page.  Here is a good sample, where Jules realizes that her life can be divided into her earlier life, and “after Sylvie:”

After Sylvie, Dad laced and then untied, then relaced his boots, and then sat there staring at them as if he didn’t know whether to relace them once more.

After Sylvie, Jules caught Dad more than once pouring two glasses of milk, then pouring the second one back in the carton.  Her dad didn’t drink milk.

After Sylvie, Jules poured the rest of Sylvie’s coconut shampoo down the drain of the shower.  Even though there was no trace of the shampoo, Sylvie’s signature scent lingered in the bathroom, clung to the shower curtain, hung there in the steamy air.  Jules used her dad’s Old Spice shampoo when she took a shower.  It didn’t smell like coconut.

After Sylvie, Jules stood in the kitchen and watched Dad stir a pot of spaghetti sauce.  It was the first time since … It was the first time they were eating something besides Mrs. Harless’s soups.  She was sick of Mrs. Harless’s soup, even though she knew that Mrs. Harless was just trying to be nice to them.

The sauce bubbled, thick and spicy.  Jules made a salad and her dad dished up the spaghetti and they sat down and ate it at the table where Jules had set down three plates before she remembered.

Again.

Every day she forgot and then every day she remembered.

And that’s how it was After Sylvie.

Forget.

Remember.

Forget.

Remember.

Forget.

Remember.

Remember.

Remember.

After Sylvie.

That plaintive style reminiscent of incantation is extremely powerful and the book has many strong passages like this.  There are also several surprisingly clumsy passages, as if the co-writers were unsure of the dominant authorial voice.  Because of this, Maybe a Fox gets off to a slow and unsure start; but readers are encouraged to stay with it for the greater rewards.

The supernatural or preternatural aspects of the book will move you or not, according to taste.  It is a bold gambit on behalf of Appelt and McGhee because it mitigates, to some degree, the pain at the loss of Sylvie.  The pain of the void is great material for a novelist; for novelists to fill that void is courageous, but not always successful.  However, Appelt and McGhee do a wonderful job with their central story conceit, and it’s impossible to read Maybe a Fox and remain unmoved.

Maybe a Fox comes highly recommended to readers young and old alike.  It is deeply affecting, emotionally demanding and eminently rewarding.