The Charlatan's Boy - Day 3

** Once again, a late entry. I do apologize for the tardiness. Life and all that, y'know. **

This is the third and final day of the December CSFF Blog Tour featuring Jonathan Rogers' excellent new novel, The Charlatan's Boy.

This post could be called "About a Boy", but that title is already taken, and there aren't any stutter-prone British actors playing roles opposite a quirky kid who just needs encouragement to participate in the school talent show. (That's about all I recall of the movie by that name, and shall never watch it again.). Therefore, "The Charlatan's Boy - Day 3."

Grady ain't pretty.

I could stop there, because his exterior ugliness is central to the story, but it doesn't begin to tell the truth of the tale.

Here's a kid who wants to know where he came from, who looks into the faces of passing strangers, trying to see if they recognize him as their son. He is used as the main attraction in a huckster's traveling road show -- ahem, con game -- and that fraud, Floyd, is the closest thing to a father Grady has known. Grady's ugliness is only skin deep; Floyd can't see his own ugliness, buried as it is underneath pride and a fairly normal appearance.

Grady wants to be honest. He wants to live a steady life, maybe as a farmer or a villager. He's even given a chance to become so when Short Fronie, the proprietress of a public house, offers to be his sort-of mother since all her children are grown and gone. But, even though Grady knows Floyd isn't good for him, even though he really likes Short Fronie and wants to stay, as soon as Floyd tosses a kind word his way, Grady jumps up and follows him, this time into a new scheme to cheat coins from gullible crowds.

As I read the book, I was reminded of my own childhood spent on the fringes of normal. I was that chubby kid who was rarely picked for a team until the pickings were pretty slim. Agility was not my strength; I lost count of how many times I fell down because ankles simply refused to hold me upright. (I even broke an ankle and never knew it until damaging it again as an adult, and the doctor found the old break. Go figure.) Acceptance was a rare thing. Respect? Only for my mind -- I was "the smart kid" in the class, and the jocks would ask for my help with their homework, but I was never invited to be part of the group. The nerds and the geeks were my crew, and I was a little strange even among them.

A year away from 40, I still recall being on the outside, wondering if I really belonged in this world, always on the lookout for a face that told me I was all right.

Grady does indeed find his origins and where he belongs.

Small spoiler (run cursor over this paragraph to read): Readers who recall a favorite character from the preceding three books (The Wilderking Trilogy) will very likely enjoy knowing that a family member appears at the end of The Charlatan's Boy, someone with the last name of Turtlebane. And that's all I'm gonna say! 

I highly recommend this book to young and old alike, and encourage everyone who hasn't done so already to catch the previous books: The Bark of the Bog Owl, The Secret of the Swamp King, and The Way of the Wilderking. Happy Reading!

Meantime, check out other stops on the blog tour by accessing the list here.

The Charlatan's Boy - Day 2

As mentioned in my post about reaching the end of The Wilderking Trilogy in the weekly Story Time at the Boys & Girls Club where I work, Jonathan Rogers' work is excellent read-out-loud material. And the kids there -- especially middle-grade and junior high listeners -- connected with the stories so much that they acted out the scenes with me, joined the yodeling, and even cried once I read that last sentence of the The Way of the Wilderking.

And I already have plans to make The Charlatan's Boy our next project, which should be good news to the kids who last year really enjoyed meeting all the feechies and civilizers in the original three Corenwald books.

In addition to the rich story and the action, the read-out-loud-ability of the novels comes from the vernacular in which many of the characters speak, reminiscent of the American South, though with some phrases and words that I've encountered nowhere else: civilizer, for instance.

When I read The Charlatan's Boy, I "heard" Uncle Brascal (rhymes with "rascal", and very apt) or Grandpa or Uncle Roger (who wasn't even born in the South) or Uncle Doyle, even Dad, with their Arkansas accents and dry delivery of punchlines, albeit with a twinkle in their eyes, though they were just as apt to laugh before reaching the end of the story. Not gentle laughter, but knee-slapping, foot-stomping, lean forward in the chair, all over the body, tear-crying kind of laughter. So, for me, reading Rogers' work is almost like sitting in the family tall-tale circle on the porch and hearing someone conjure a fable on the spot or embellish a well-known "true" story.

Just as each of the family storytellers had his own style and voice, Rogers imbues his characters with distinctive characteristics: for instance, Short Fronie is warm, snappish, energetic, and caring; Grady is earthy, deep, honest, and a real boy (no relation to Pinocchio); Floyd is flamboyant, creative, dishonest, and abusive.

Rabbit trail: Ever notice how hard con-men and hucksters work in their efforts to make a dishonest living? Intelligent individuals will go out of their way and misuse their minds in order to scalp money from honest folks. It just plain boggles me.

Okay, back to the main path.

Here's an excerpt that has a tall-tale quality:

"You've seen miners. Miners is a heap uglier than farmers. I got a bad feeling, Floyd."

"Well, I don't. Do you know what I see when I look at you?"

"What?"

"The ugliest boy in the world."

"You just saying that."

...When we got to Greasy Cave the next day, Floyd took enough bets to double our stake if we won -- or ruin us if we lost. I give the Greasy Cavers every bit of ugly I had.

It just wasn't enough.

When Floyd let me out of the box, I was face to face with the ugliest boy I ever seen in my life. How can I describe how ugly this boy was? I might as well describe how wet water is.

His ears was like plates glommed onto the sides of his head, and his teeth stuck out in every direction except straight. His nose must have been six inches long, but it curled up at the end like a pig snout. His eyes was two or three different colors, and his eyebrows met up with the hair on his head, which had so many cowlicks that no two hairs pointed in the same direction. On top of that, he was covered in coal dust. It made your eyes water to look at him.

That boy, Melvern, shows up later:

"So what you been doing since I defeated you last year?" Melvern asked. Besides squinting the one eye, now he was sucking his bottom lip back so it looked like he was more bucktoothed than he really was. I'll say this for the boy: he was making the most of his God-given ugliness.

But Grady's physical ugliness is not only a key to his origins but also a misleading face that hides the beauty of the person inside.

More about Grady and his compatriots tomorrow. Meantime, read more reviews of The Charlatan's Boy by visiting the other stops on the blog tour (list found here).

The Charlatan's Boy - Day 1

** This post is rather late. I usually have these CSFF tour posts ready early in the day, but life had other plans. **

The Charlatan's Boy is Jonathan Rogers' latest novel set in Corenwald, the same island kingdom where The Wilderking Trilogy is set. There is a strange but delightful mix of Europe, ancient Israel, and American Frontier in the trilogy's influences, but this novel has less of an Old World feel and more of the Old West (although the trilogy does have some frontiersman types).

I don't care who you are -- when it comes to knowing where you come from, you got to take somebody else's word for it. That's where things always got ticklish for me. I only know one man who might be able to tell me where I come from, and that man is a liar and a fraud.

So speaks Grady, THE WILD MAN OF THE FEECHIEFEN SWAMP! (according to the words painted on the side of a box by Floyd, the aforementioned charlatan) and later THE UGLIEST BOY IN THE WORLD! (until they met a boy who was even uglier).

Over the next couple of days, I'll discuss the story and its unique vernacular, the depth and honesty of the main character and how he sees his world and the people around him, and the family tall-tale spinners that captured my imagination as a kid.

Meantime, check out these other stops on the CSFF Blog Tour:
Sally Apokedak
Amy Bissell
Red Bissell
Jennifer Bogart
Thomas Clayton Booher
Beckie Burnham
Jeff Chapman
Valerie Comer
CSFF Blog Tour
D. G. D. Davidson
April Erwin
Andrea Graham
Tori Greene
Katie Hart
Bruce Hennigan
Christopher Hopper
Becky Jesse
Cris Jesse
Jason Joyner
Julie
Carol Keen
Shannon McDermott
Allen McGraw
Matt Mikalatos
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Nissa
Donita K. Paul
SarahFlan
Sarah Sawyer
Chawna Schroeder
Tammy Shelnut
Kathleen Smith
James Somers
Donna Swanson
Robert Treskillard
Fred Warren
Phyllis Wheeler
Nicole White
Elizabeth Williams
Dave Wilson

Hallelujah Chorus at the Mall

I received the following video in an e-mail earlier today, and so am sharing the awesomeness. Merry Christmas!

The Skin Map - Day 3

All good things, as they say, must come to an end. Why, I don't know. It's just what "they" say. So, alas, this marks the final day of the CSFF Blog Tour for Stephen R. Lawhead's new novel, The Skin Map, first in the Bright Empires series.

Sometimes, the final day of a tour is for discussing the things I didn't like about a particular book. Well, just doing that would make this a very short post indeed.

The one thing that dampened the reading experience was the mention, by Cosimo, of evolution as if it were fact. This occurred early on in the book, when he was telling Kit about cave lions, the creatures used by the Burley Men. I am one of those Christians who doesn't believe that the theory of evolution can coexist with biblical Christianity. It's not considered intelligent to reject evolutionary theory as valid science, but I'm not interested in other people's opinions of my intelligence, and I might question whether or not they remember some of their basic school science i.e. the laws of thermodynamics, which present obstacles to the theory. (Just a reminder: laws trump theories.)

A literary aside: The word evolution means change, and is generally used to denote change for the better, just as progress is also often used as a positive word, even though progress is really just movement forward along a particular line, whether going in such a direction is good or bad. While writing or reading, we take the word out of its neutral state and assign it positive or negative connotations. That's what I love about language, how symbols (letters) are assigned sounds, how those sounds are strung into words, and how words can express ideas, those speechless things that dwell in our minds. How cool is that?

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

The Skin Map is an enjoyable read, easy to follow, intriguing, humorous, and just downright fun.

My intelligence wasn't insulted by over-explaining; ever read those books where you're talking to the page, "Yeah, yeah, I get it. Move on"? This is not one of those.

Some readers have found the storyline hard to comprehend, because it moves from one time to another and there is more than one set of characters to follow, but that was not a problem for me. The characters may end up in various places in time, but their story is always moving forward. As Kit says early in the book, easy peasy.

As for the issue of messing with history by changing it, well, that is addressed, too, as is the idea of whether or not it's possible for the characters to move forward in time. Although the intellectual side of me is interested in those questions, the little-kid-dreaming-of-adventure side of me doesn't really care. Remember those halcyon days of youth when anything was possible, and the more outlandish the tale, the better you liked it? The Skin Map works, I think, because Lawhead handles the wildly impossible as if it were absolutely possible, and he does it with excellent craft. Readers can trust the storyteller to not only tell a great tale, but tell it well.

I highly recommend this book. For other reviews, click here to access a list of more stops on the tour.

*  In conjunction with the CSFF Blog Tour, I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

The Skin Map - Day 2

Welcome, welcome, welcome to the otherworldly  -- other-dimensionly? -- realm of The Skin Map, first in the Bright Empires series by Stephen R. Lawhead.

This series has the makings of a ripping good yarn. With titles like The Skin Map and The Bone House (just the first two in the series), and then old-fashioned chapter headings, such as "In Which Old Ghosts Meet" and "In Which Dragons Are Not Confined to Statues", Lawhead has created an old-time classic literature feel and welded it to an almost futuristic tale. I'm digging it.

One of the first thoughts that crossed my mind as Kit first joined Cosimo in a new dimension: "Wow. It's like I'm reading the new Treasure Island."

Yup. You read that right. The new Treasure Island.

After all, there's a map -- a tattoed human skin, to boot -- and a treasure hunt of sorts; a young man on a wild and unexpected adventure; a villain able to wear a friendly face (remember how friendly yet how treacherous Long John Silver could be?); exotic settings, even if "exotic" is only in the eye of a bewildered beholder; and then, of course, tall ships and tattoo parlors, though I don't recall any such parlors in Treasure Island, but who cares? It's all in the vibe.

I often skip description because either 1) it bores me, or 2) it's too clunky to read. Not so for The Skin Map. Lawhead writes the descriptive passages well, taking the reader to different times and places with such ease that it's almost as if he's actually been there and is just reporting his travels back to the reader. The story could not exist apart from those details, because the setting and the time periods and the people who inhabit them are integral to the tale. Take this passage, for instance:

Macau sweltered beneath an unforgiving August sun, and the Mirror Sea was calm. The tall ships in Oyster Bay, the few wispy clouds in the sky, the lazily circling seabirds -- all were faithfully replicated in precise detail in their liquid reflections. And none of it evaded the hooded gaze of Wu Chen Hu as he sat on his low stool before the entrance of his small shop on White Lotus Street, above the harbour.

Almost drowsing in his doorway on a hot day, Chen Hu is not just a character inserted into the landscape as a prop. His craftsmanship creates the skin map. That humid, lazy day is important. Something happens to break the stillness.

Earlier in the story -- in Chapter 6, "In Which Kit Acquires an Apostle Spoon" -- three of the main characters share a meal at The Pope's Nose. Kit has never eaten many of the dishes with which he is presented, and some he likes more than others, as Lawhead takes the reader on a gastronomic trip back in time. I confess, as I started that chapter, I had been contemplating what to make for supper; by the time I finished reading it, I'd forgotten about my hunger, and didn't actually get around to eating anything until a few chapters later, when my stomach reminded me there's a difference between imagination and reality.

By the time Kit pushed himself away, his bowl was a slaughterhouse tangle of bones and gristle, and his cheeks, chin, and hands were dripping with grease. He felt as if he might possibly explode from internal pressure, and that, all things considered, this would probably be for the best.

Yeah, we've all been there, some time or another, probably right after a traditional Thanksgiving meal.

Interspersed with the well-written descriptions are historical references that also help ground the reader into whichever time and place a particular scene is set: Oliver Cromwell, for instance, or London's Pudding Lane in 1666. Such details lend reality and concreteness to an otherwise fantastical tale, and they also act as a kind of shorthand, implying much about the setting and providing opportunity to further the story.

And I wasn't bored once!

Click here to access the list of other stops on the tour.

* In conjunction with the CSFF Blog Tour, I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

The Skin Map - Day 1

Had he but known that before the day was over he would discover the dimensions of the universe, Kit might have been better prepared. At least, he would have brought an umbrella.

An excellent beginning -- intriguing and humorous -- and the opening lines of Stephen R. Lawhead's The Skin Map. As for the dimensions of the universe, well, that's the story. And, as it turns out, there's more than one.

While rushing to meet his girlfriend but encountering obstacles at (literally) every turn, Kit -- or, Cosimo Christopher Livingstone, to be more precise -- is forced to abandon motorized forms of travel and use his feet instead. In the rain.

The storm begins after he enters an old street in modern London. The street goes on and on, and he is already late, so Kit turns back. It is then that he meets a man who should be dead -- well over one hundred years ago.

And then there is, of course, the one thing the Questors and their adversaries, the Burley Men, are trying to find, if only they can piece it together: a map of all the ley lines, the places where dimensions touch, tattooed on human skin.

The Skin Map draws the reader in with excellent writing, an intriguing premise, gentle and intelligent humor, historical references, appealing characters, detailed settings, and an interesting yarn. And did I mention excellent writing?

Over the remaining two days of the CSFF Blog Tour, I'll discuss other aspects of the novel, the first in Lawhead's new series, Bright Empires. Meantime, check out other stops on the tour:
Red Bissell
Thomas Clayton Booher
Grace Bridges
Beckie Burnham
Morgan L. Busse
Jeff Chapman
Christian Fiction Book Reviews
Valerie Comer
Karri Compton
Amy Cruson
CSFF Blog Tour
Stacey Dale
D. G. D. Davidson
George Duncan
April Erwin
Tori Greene
Ryan Heart
Bruce Hennigan
Timothy Hicks
Christopher Hopper
Becky Jesse
Cris Jesse
Becca Johnson
Jason Joyner
Julie
Carol Keen
Krystine Kercher
Shannon McDermott
Allen McGraw
Matt Mikalatos
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Nissa
John W. Otte
Gavin Patchett
Sarah Sawyer
Chawna Schroeder
Kathleen Smith
Rachel Starr Thomson
Donna Swanson
Robert Treskillard
Steve Trower
Fred Warren
Dona Watson
Phyllis Wheeler
Nicole White
Elizabeth Williams
Dave Wilson