David Patneaude's Blog: Different Worlds - Posts Tagged "mystery"
Mystery Mystery
There at least a couple different kinds of mysteries. There's the obvious one--the body on the floor and everybody including the reader wondering for the entire length of the story whodunit. Then there's the kind where there's a mystery but nobody including the protagonist and the reader knows there's a mystery until the solution appears. There's stuff going on, some of which may be puzzling or even mysterious, but there's also other stuff going on that seems to be more significant, so everybody gets distracted with what apparently is the main question/conflict/story.
Louis Sachar did this brilliantly a few decades ago with HOLES. Rebecca Stead did it just as brilliantly a few years ago with WHEN YOU REACH ME. And in LIAR AND SPY, she takes that route, albeit less dramatically, once more. So if you've read WHEN YOU REACH ME, or even her earlier FIRST LIGHT, and you start reading LIAR AND SPY, you begin looking for pieces of a puzzle early on, even before, under ordinary circumstances, you'd suspect there was one. Which doesn't detract much from the story, really. In fact, even when you're sure something is going on under the surface stuff, you don't know exactly what it is, and you don't know how many "its" there are.
The author's writing is economical and engaging. The characters are likeable or not, but consistently believable. The adults aren't fools, and they don't get in the way of the young protagonist and his buddies working things out for themselves. The book has gotten a lot of praise, and I can certainly see why. I would definitely recommend it, especially to someone who hasn't read Rebecca Stead's earlier books. It would be fun to jump into this story unencumbered by experience and without being nagged by that little feeling of deja vu.
Louis Sachar did this brilliantly a few decades ago with HOLES. Rebecca Stead did it just as brilliantly a few years ago with WHEN YOU REACH ME. And in LIAR AND SPY, she takes that route, albeit less dramatically, once more. So if you've read WHEN YOU REACH ME, or even her earlier FIRST LIGHT, and you start reading LIAR AND SPY, you begin looking for pieces of a puzzle early on, even before, under ordinary circumstances, you'd suspect there was one. Which doesn't detract much from the story, really. In fact, even when you're sure something is going on under the surface stuff, you don't know exactly what it is, and you don't know how many "its" there are.
The author's writing is economical and engaging. The characters are likeable or not, but consistently believable. The adults aren't fools, and they don't get in the way of the young protagonist and his buddies working things out for themselves. The book has gotten a lot of praise, and I can certainly see why. I would definitely recommend it, especially to someone who hasn't read Rebecca Stead's earlier books. It would be fun to jump into this story unencumbered by experience and without being nagged by that little feeling of deja vu.
