There are moments when you go to the bookstore with a specific purpose in mind, and you come home with the treasure you set out to find. There are other moments when one can wander around the bookstore experiencing myriad temptations, but nothing speaks to you. And then there are times like I had yesterday afternoon. Times in which you wander quite aimlessly to and fro and then a book catches your eye and you feel its pull and you just know that you will have to leave with that book. Yesterday that book was Freaks by Annette Curtis Klause. The full title of the story is Freaks: Alive, on the Inside, but I prefer the simple title and will thus refer to it in that regard for the remainder of this review.
There is no mystery regarding my initial attraction to this book:
As a child I do not remember having any strong attachment to the story of Alice and her adventures in Wonderland. I am not sure that I was aware of it on any level outside of the Disney version. I do recall, however, a fascination with the idea of a hole in the ground leading to other realms. I remember having daydreams about this idea frequently. Thus I have had a kinship to Alice for years before ever becoming enamored of her story. It wasn’t until Neil Gaiman released the novel Neverwhere that I really started paying attention to Alice in Wonderland and how the ideas in that book are often replicated in other stories. I finally picked up the story when the book The Annotated Alice was published. This book, with its insight into Lewis Carroll’s brilliant use of language and the plethora of Victorian error inside jokes, etc., made my fascination for the stories grow. And the computer game American McGee’s Alice cemented Alice and her cohorts as one of my favorite literary characters. In fact, I have an homage to that world on one wall in my work office:
One of my recent birthday gifts from my friend Pat was the book Grayson by Lynne Cox. It is the story of an event that happened to the award winning author of Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer approximately 30 years previously when she was 17. The story details a routine morning swim off the coast of California that turned into an exciting and potentially dangerous adventure when the author discovered that she was being followed back to shore by a baby gray whale. The whale had been separated from its mother and the bulk of the story revolves around Lynne Cox’s attempt to stay with the whale and help it be reunited with its mother.
Despite my best intentions…who am I kidding, I had no best intentions…it has happened again. I have been caught in the web of temptation that is the book cover.
This is my second reading of Neil Gaiman’s haunting young adult book, Coraline, but I have to admit that I enjoyed it much more than the first time. Perhaps it was because my expectations weren’t at a fever pitch like they are whenever a new Neil Gaiman novel comes out or perhaps it was the fact that I was reading the story under a dull gray September sky. I enjoyed it the first time; I reveled in it this time.
