In Which Rick Riordan Attempts
Another
Harry Potteresque Cash Cow.
Good God, is this man the most shameless author currently working in children's literature? First the highly derivative (but at least marginally entertaining) Percy Jackson, and now this - a hokey National Treasure meets Amazing Race mash-up? 10 books, each written by a different author, that follow a sibling duo as they globetrot, attempting to piece together the titular clues in order to reveal a single earth-shattering prize that will restore the power of their family name? Come. On. I'm all on board for books that tantalize reluctant readers, but this is just one more poorly executed, paper-thin Money Train that sacrifices excellent ideas and promises of excitement for soulless character building and trite, episodic adventures.
For the sake of arguing about plausibility, I'm going to suspend all disbelief at the patently absurd plot, and pay attention to the most egregious errors - errors that cannot be cast aside simply because the book will appeal to many children. Reluctant readers aren't stupid. Aliteracy isn't the product of stupidity. But this book treats its readers like they're stupid and that's what I resent more than anything else.
The one dimensionality of Dan and Amy is insulting enough; they should have more development than Good At Math And Typical Male Impulsiveness (Dan!) and Loves To Read And Is Scared But Determined (Amy!). What's even more repulsive is the 'development' of the secondary and tertiary characters. Nellie, the au pair, is a lazy, iPod-attached twenty-something who suddenly starts speaking Spanish. Is it an attempt for Riordan to show off some of his linguistic know-how? Is it an attempt to create a multicultural character? Who knows? Nellie argues on the phone with her father in Spanish and then it's never brought up again, except for her to admit quite casually that she also speaks French, which comes in handy when the kids go to France. In Nellie's words: "Duh. My mom taught French. She was, like, French."
Perhaps the most insulting endeavor to add a 'multicultural' spin to the book is the character Jonah Wizard. A swaggering reality television star, Wizard is a crass attempt to create a thuggish, streetwise black character who plays up his "cultural identity" to the cameras, but is actually much less "black" around people he knows. Witness as he says, in front of the paparazzi, "Yo! My peeps!" and then, inside a car without the flashing bulbs of the press, speaks without any vernacular whatsoever. Even when the reader is first introduced to Jonah Wizard, we are told that he tries to act like a 'street punk', which makes his patois even more caricature-like. "Hand me the clue, homes!" he demands to the executor of the will. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? And then we learn his reality show is called Who Wants To Be A Gangsta?, that he has an album called Gangsta Life, and that France has just released his pop-up children's book called... you guessed it... Le... Li'l Gangsta Livre Instantané. Jonah Wizard is a disgusting stock character who is one freshly-rolled joint shy of being completely racist. The fact that author is a middle-aged white man makes the character even more insulting and less authentic. Riordan should be ashamed of himself.
Want more bad character development? Meet the pumped-up Holt family (who wear matching athletic gear and whose patriarch shouts ridiculous things like, "Company, FALL IN!"), the Kardashian-like Kabras who jetset around and smuggle weapons onto planes, and Irina, the former KGB spy who hides poison-tipped needles in her fingernails. It's like Riordan sat down and pulled together every single unlikely but cliched character possible and thought, "But how can I cram them all into one book?" It would be a satire if it weren't written so damned seriously, which is a problem in itself.
The writing. Oy. The plot-driven storyline, filled with the typical "I-don't-know-how-to-write-a-mystery-so-I'm-just-going-to-have-the-characters-make-silly-guesses", is so ludicrously bad that it feels like it's been cobbled together by eight different ghost writers and smooshed into perfectly contained danger-filled episodes. During a house fire, Amy and Dan are crawling on their hands and knees below the smoke line (yay, fire safety!) when Amy notices ornate dragon carvings on the wall that all seem to be leading to an exit. They are. A secret passageway that leads the duo to safety. Seriously? Even Dan Brown, Grand Poobah Of Bad Action-Oriented Writing, would call shenanigans on that. Then there's the bombing of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia that decimates one team but leaves Dan and Amy curiously unscathed, even though they were inches from the detonation. Add to this that book is insanely predictable. Every time Amy and David find a clue or a scrap of information that will lead to a clue, one of the other teams has sneaked up on them and either hears the clue or steals it. Then there's a fight, both physical and vocal. That plot contrivance doesn't get old at all.
Riordan's final failure is his inability to capture a solid tone, which gives the book a truly obnoxious inconsistency. Panicky episodes are carelessly turned around with unbelievable sibling banter that paints Dan as a goofball and Amy as a shrill harpy (after being told that sedan chairs are not meant to be occupied by his scrawny 90-pound frame, Dan proclaims, "RESOLUTION: Start eating more ice cream.") Riordan must think that reluctant readers like corny humor because his misunderstanding of what young adults believe is funny is peppered throughout the book: a dog that rolls over and plays dead when commanded to pay attention, a hotel in Paris whose name translates into House of Roaches, and Dan's incessant ADD-laden distractions and quips will only provoke eye-rolling from much of its intended audience. It all smacks of Trying Too Hard.
Also Trying Too Hard? The heavy-handed Harry Potter copping. First in Percy (where the similarities were so obvious that even the names had the identical number of letters - Harry/Percy, Ronald/Grover, Annabeth/Hermione), now in The 39 Clues, where we read about a House divided into quarters, with each house representing a particular archetype. The houses are governed by a dying-then-dead figurehead whose encyclopedic knowledge is cherished by some and scorned by others. Additionally, the protagonists are reluctant heroes who realize their fate is to protect the world from falling in the hands of ne'er-do-wellers.
The fact that Gordon Korman, another author of dubious talents, writes the follow-up guarantees that I will definitely not continue with the series.