Book of the Week: THE CLOCKWORK DARK: THE NINE POUND HAMMER by John Claude Bemis

The Nine Pound Hammer is a fun and exciting steampunk adventure that is equal parts funny, scary, and awesome—especially the many action sequences sure to keep readers on the edge of their seat. Full confession: the Ninja is old and out of touch and has never read steampunk before now. Yes, you are right to condemn me, Esteemed Reader. But if the rest of steampunk is anywhere near as good as this book, you can bet I will be reading more.

It’s a little bit difficult for me to review this book as a story because it’s the first in a trilogy and though I’ve started reading the second, the third isn’t out yet and until it is, it’s hard for me to judge the plot as it is incomplete. But The Nine Pound Hammer certainly gets the series started out on the right track.

Meet twelve-year-old Ray. He’s got a little sister, no mom, and a dad whom he hasn’t seen for years, but who left him a magic lodestone Ray is convinced will lead him to something great, possibly an adventure, and possibly back to dad (the lodestone has magical GPS properties, you see). The novel starts with Ray making the decision to leave little sister to a foster family and to jump off a moving train toward adventure. Writers take note, this is a very exciting way to start a novel: a gut-wrenching decision and an exciting action indicating that Ray is either very brave, or not very bright (he's brave).

Ray has some adventures in the woods with poison acorns—it would take too long to explain—some pirates (poison Arghcorns?), a bear, and then, ironically, he boards another train. This time Ray’s riding a traveling medical show train filled with a cast of marvelous characters we just know are going to accompany Ray for the next two books.

There’s something odd and dare I say magical about this train. One of the performers in the medicine show is a blind sharpshooter and just how does that work without magic? From one of the train cars, Ray hears a song that drives him mad with desire old school Odysseus style. Ray investigates and finds something there that changes everything. I’m not going to tell you what, but if you’ve read your Homer, you can probably guess. And if by Homer, you thought I meant Simpson, this will all come as quite a surprise to you.

Speaking of mythology, The Nine Pound Hammer is all about it. The story takes place at a time in America when folks like Paul Bunion and Johnny Appleseed were about. But in Bemis’s when, these folks aren’t just mythological, but real and acting in the world—and yes, I know Johnny Appleseed was always real, but there’s a more fantastic version of him that never existed and that’s the sort you’ll find roaming the pages of The Nine Pound Hammer. The myth you need to know for sure going in is the myth of John Henry, who might have been real.

Who is John Henry? If you know, skip to the next paragraph, but if you’re like me and it’s been a while, you might need a refresher. For the record, Mrs. Ninja was appalled that I didn’t remember John Henry, but I far prefer modern American mythology in which the heroes sling webs and batarangs. Here is a nice John Henry myth summary from John Bemis you’ll want to know going into The Nine Pound Hammer:

The song’s hero, John Henry, is an ex-slave who works on the railroad, a “steel-drivin’ man” who lays tracks and digs tunnels through the mountains. One day, a steam drill is brought in to replace the men digging the tunnels. In an attempt to save the men’s jobs, John Henry challenges the steam drill to see who is faster: man or machine. With Li’l Bill, his shaker (the man who holds the drill bit for the steel driver to hit with his hammer), John Henry carves out more rock than the steam drill. But as everyone cheers, he collapses with his nine-pound hammer still in his hands. The mighty steel driver’s huge heart bursts from exertion. Whether or not John Henry really existed, he is a powerful symbol of our humanity: the self-sacrificing hero who fights the soulless machine until his heart bursts.

I see I am already going to break my resolution of shorter reviews and we can’t have that. So I’ve got two points for writers this week, an angry rant, and some favorite passages to share, and after that, we’ll call it a review. But first, I must say how much I loved the Hoarhounds, which are ferocious beasts, and they alone are worth reading this book even if it weren’t great in so many other respects. Here is a lovely description of the darling Hoarhounds:

Breaking from the forest, the monster was more terrifying than Ray remembered from his dream. Larger than a bull, the Hound bristled with frost-hardened spikes of fur. Long, terrible fangs crowded its mouth, and as it swung its head, the deathly, bitter cold breath whipped out from its snout.

My first point for writers comes not from the text, but from the acknowledgements that follow the book: Enormous thanks go out to my critique group—Jennier Harrod, Stephen Messer, and Jen Wichman—talented writers who helped shape this book in so many ways. You remember our old friend Stephen Messer, don’t you? The PUBLISHED author of Windblowne. That must have been some critique group! This here point makes itself: if you are serious about your writing, get yourself a critique group. If you don’t have time for one, start a blog, reach out to other amazing bloggers and swap critiques with them:) Speaking of which, Michael, if you’re reading this, I’ve started your manuscript and I will totally have notes for you in a week or two.

My second point to writers is that if racism is required in your story, don’t try to clean it up or airbrush over it. Write the racism. Please note, I am not advising the writing of racists things—you’re on your own if you decide to go there—but if you’re writing about a situation in which racism should be present, leave it in. Here is an example from the text:

Having been introduced to the crowd as the pitchman, Nel began. Ray recognized that, although ceremonial, this gesture by Mister Everett was intended to legitimize Nel to an audience that might not otherwise accept the Negro pitchman.

Ninja, you might ask, in a story about magical rocks and pirates that takes place in a fantastical alternate history that never happened, why not leave out the racism? Excellent question, Esteemed Reader! In an alternate history, it might be okay, but if your novel is going to center around the myth of John Henry, it is not okay. I’m not going to tell you how John Henry plays into the book as that would be spoiling, but trust that the title The Nine Pound Hammer signifies his importance.

John Henry is two things: really strong and a slave. To leave out the slavery part is to betray who he is at his core, and you can’t have American slavery without racism (although corporations and credit card companies are fast figuring out a workaround). Similarly, you can’t have American history without racism as it is who we have been. Never mind that we wish we hadn’t been, we were, and to go forgetting it ensures that we shall be again.

You wouldn’t depict a famous battle without American soldiers dying as to deny that reality denies their sacrifice. Well I say to you that denying a history of disgusting, hideous racism denies the sacrifice of those who have worked to bring us where we are: not an un-racist utopia, but in a spot where with our President and that fact that Mrs. Ninja and I can be married without a hanging posse showing up we can maybe start to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

All this brings me to my angry rant: who the heck thinks they have the right to edit Mark Twain? Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, one of my most favorites, is not a racist book, though it contains racist characters from a racist time. Defending this stance is the subject of another post. I know the N-word is nasty and hard to read, but it’s also a word people actually said the way Twain depicts them saying it in that novel. More, Twain knew it was a nasty and hard-to-read word and used it accordingly. Mark Twain is perfectly capable of making his points about the foolishness and horror of racism within the text itself. His book is its own defense. He doesn’t need us cleaning up his language. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a literary masterpiece, not a Disney Cartoon, and we writers need to protest this affront. If they start editing Twain, what will they take out of your books long after you’re dead or before? We’ll have none of this Orwellian double-speak, thank you very much.

In conclusion, The Nine Pound Hammer is a marvelous book and you should buy yourself a copy:) Be sure to check back Thursday when John Claude Bemis will be here at this very blog to face the 7 Questions and on Saturday when our mystery literary agent will be revealed. And now, as always, I will leave you with some of my favorite passages from the book:

“You’re nuts, Lenny,” his friends laughed and goaded from the crowd.

“Not as batty as him.” Lenny pointed at Buck and sniggered. “Get it? Batty.”

His friends contorted their faces in confusion.

“Bats is blind,” Lenny explained.

His friends howled.

“Come to me, Hoarhound!” he cried. (I have always wanted to cry this myself—MGN)

Si fell at his side, kissing his brow and cheeks and wiping the sweat from his face.

“Conker!” she cried. “Are you alive? Say something!”

He smiled weakly. “I must be dead if you’re kissing on me.”

The locomotive reversed and began to slink away in the dark like a viper curling back into its den.

STANDARD DISCLAIMER: Book of the Week is simply the best book I happened to read in a given week. There are likely other books as good or better that I just didn’t happen to read that week. Also, all reviews here will be written to highlight a book’s positive qualities. It is my policy that if I don’t have something nice to say online, I won’t say anything at all (usually). I’ll leave you to discover the negative qualities of each week’s book on your own.

7 Questions For: Author Stephen Messer

Stephen Messer was born in Maine and grew up there and in lots of other places. As a child he was inspired by the desert skies of Arizona, as well as his many trips to the public library. His debut novel, Windblowne (Random House 2010), is a fantasy adventure about a boy who is blown away from his mountain wind-world of treehouses and kites, and his encounters with a mad genius, mechanical hunters, a missing moon, and the secrets of the powerful night winds. He and his wife live in Durham, North Carolina.

Click here to read my review of Windblowne.

Messer's second book, The Death of Yorik Mortwell will be published by Random House Books for Young Readers in summer 2011. Inspired by the art of Edward Gorey, Yorik is a novel about a servant boy’s ghostly afterlife on a mystical estate where his sister and unusual new friends are imperiled by dark forces from another world.

And now Stephen Messer faces the 7 Questions:

Question Seven: What are your top three favorite books?

There are so many books I love for so many different reasons that it makes this question very hard to answer. How about three new MG/YA books I’ve enjoyed in the last year? Enchanted Glass is the latest fantasy novel from Diana Wynne Jones. She has not been well lately, so it’s a pleasure to see a new book from her. I also loved The Wolf Tree, the second book in John Claude Bemis’s Clockwork Dark series, which is a engrossing work of fantasy Americana. And there was Blue Balliett’s The Calder Game, which took her band of art sleuths from Chicago to England to investigate the disappearance of an Alexander Calder sculpture, which is exactly the sort of thing I wanted to be doing when I was that age.

Question Six: How much time do you spend each week writing? Reading?

This depends on which stage of the process I’m in. If I’m working on a new idea, I spend more time thinking than writing. When I’m revising a finished draft, you can’t tear me away from my desk. I just completed revisions for my upcoming novel, The Death of Yorik Mortwell, a macabre yet whimsical fantasy about a servant boy’s ghostly afterlife on a mystical estate. It has terrifically eerie illustrations by the brilliant Gris Grimly, which I’m very excited about. As for reading, I almost always have a book at hand, so it’s difficult to measure the amount of time, other than to say ‘a lot’.

Question Five: What was the path that led you to publication?

It’s quite boring, but it was a process of networking and meeting other writers and working with them and going to conferences and following up on leads until everything fell into place. I’m fortunate to work with the excellent Adams Literary agency and an intimidatingly smart editorial team at Random House Books for Young Readers. I also lean heavily on my super writing group.

Question Four: Do you believe writers are born, taught or both? Which was true for you?

I don’t know about born, but you certainly have to be taught, at any rate. Or at least teach yourself. It’s a craft like any other, and you have to work and practice to get better at it. Like anyone else, I had to write some bad things before I started writing better things.

Question Three: What is your favorite thing about writing? What is your least favorite thing?

I love creating new worlds and having the opportunity to hear back from readers who have explored those worlds and found things in them that I never knew were there. My least favorite thing, and I’m not sure what it is, would have to pale in comparison to this experience.

Question Two: What one bit of wisdom would you impart to an aspiring writer? (feel free to include as many other bits of wisdom as you like)

Anything I might say would only be stolen from the best book on writing I’ve ever read, “From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction” by Robert Olen Butler. But I would add that there is a great deal of writing advice out there, and I never really understood any of it until I had done the hard work of writing my first “THE END.”

Question One: If you could have lunch with any writer, living or dead, who would it be? Why?

I couldn’t pass up a chance to have lunch with the dead. How about Charles Dickens? I’d like to write a novel in serial form someday, and he might be willing to give me some pointers.

www.stephenmesser.com

Book of the Week: WINDBLOWNE by Stephen Messer

Do you like kites, Esteemed Reader? If I were to say to you: “let’s go fly a kite, up to the highest height. Let’s go, let’s go—” Okay, I’ll stop now. But honestly, I love kite flying on a good windy day in the fall. I realize we’re almost out of those and no one likes to fly kites in the snow, but here’s hoping I’m slipping this review in just under the wire and the wind can still be found for a few more days of kite flying before the bitter cold of winter sets in.
On our most recent vacation, I splurged and bought a stunt kite, which came with not one, but two grips. Through careful maneuvering, the package promised that I, a mild mannered ninja, could perform amazing stunts that would impress professional kite fliers. And so I learned, once again, not to believe everything I read as printed fiction is found in far more locations than just books. With my brother’s assistance, we managed to get the stunt kite into the air for almost three consecutive minutes! Otherwise, I performed the stunt of crashing the kite over and over again until it came apart and was left a ragged wreck of strewn pieces attached to string.

All this to tell you that I fully sympathize with poor Oliver, the young protagonist of this week’s book, Windblowne, the extraordinary debut novel of Stephen Messer. And will Mr. Messer be here on Thursday to face the 7 Questions? Of course he will! So make sure you check back then as you won’t want to miss that. Next week, we’ll be looking at a classic middle grade novel and there will be no interview posts on account of the holiday. But the week after that, Esteemed Reader, we’ll have Ingrid Law, author of Savy! We’ll also have some surprise literary agents drop in to see us, so stick with me, Esteemed Reader, and we’ll chat with some amazing folks and read some amazing books.

Speaking of amazing books, Windblowne isn’t just the title of this week’s book, it’s the name of the fictional town in which our story takes place. Windblowne is on a mountain and the residents live in tree houses—I like to imagine Endor without the Ewoks (it wouldn’t be the same). As their name implies, the winds are plentiful in Windblowne and each year the non-Ewok residents hold the Festival of Kites. There are prizes to be won for events such as distance jumps in which residents leap off a peak of the mountain and fly a distance using their kite. The survival rate is higher than you’d think, the festival provides tourism income, and the residents compete fiercely to build the best and brightest kite.

Enter Oliver, who is about as skilled with his kite as the ninja is with a stunt kite. He hasn’t got a hope of placing in the festival and so he will forever be known as a loser. But, he’s got a great uncle who was a former champion kitesmith, who his parents have never mentioned before because they’re “crackpots.” Great-uncle Gilbert is a bit of a crackpot himself and Oliver worries over his own sanity, which is a point of some importance as the story continues.

Messer never quite comes out and says "here is the deal with Windblowne," and I really admire that choice. Windblowne is not a real place, of course, and there are some almost magical qualities about it that Messer reveals only as they become relevant to the story. There is no chapter detailing that Windblowne exists on another planet or is the home of a magical tribe forgotten by history, only subtle and some not so subtle hints along the way as to what sort of place Windblowne is. For example, Messer nonchalantly drops in lines like, “The two moons gleamed beyond.” Two moons? Gory, what sort of place is this?

Great-uncle Gilbert specializes in kites unlike any ever sold a K-mart. He has fighting kites and a kite with jaws to eat other kites. One kite in particular befriends Oliver and becomes his traveling companion. This plain crimson kite is capable of flying Oliver off to faraway lands—more on that in a moment. But first, from a craft perspective, it’s fascinating to see how Messer is able to give a typically inanimate object such as a kite personality, even though it is incapable of speech. Here are the kite's parts of a conversation held with Oliver, minus Oliver's lines:

The kite hovered warily.
 
The kite buzzed, tail lashing like a whip.

The kite's sails sagged mournfully.

Windblowne is a wonderful adventure and you’re going to love it. It’s a fun yarn that reminded me a bit of A Wrinkle in Time in that it’s great middle grade science fiction. I really can’t tell you anymore about the book without spoiling some of the surprises. If you’ve read the book or you’re willing to put up with a few minor spoilers, read on. Otherwise, your review ends here: Windblowne is one to put at the top of your reading list and make sure you come back around on Thursday to see Stephen Messer face the 7 Questions.

Those of you who are okay with a few spoilers won’t mind knowing that Great-uncle Gilbert’s plain crimson kite is capable of dragging Oliver to another version of Windblown in a parallel dimension. Yes, there are multiple dimensions and multiple versions of Windblown. There are beams that run through all the worlds and in the center of those beams stands a great Dark Tower in a field of roses. Okay, I made that last part up, but give yourself a pat on the back if you’re cool enough to be familiar with the reference from an amazing series of books for adults. You have not forgotten the face of your father.

In another version of Windblowne is another version of Great-uncle Gilbert called Lord Gilbert (way better title), and he explains the situation thusly: "It seems that in his primitive way, he had a kind of native cleverness, and he was able to construct one of these kites"—he spat the word with derision—“in such a way that it could carry someone—only someone small, such as a child—across the Way Between Worlds and between Windblownes, without harming the passenger."

Lord Gilbert busts Oliver’s crimson kite, stranding him in the new world forever to work as a slave repairing kites with another world's less likable version of Oliver. Worse, Lord Gilbert has banished Great-uncle Gilbert on a hell-world. Oliver must fight to save Great-uncle Gilbert and to return to his one true home world. It’s gripping drama and the pages turn themselves. I especially loved all of the different versions of Windblowne Oliver visits. Its fun to imagine how different variables might forever change a world in another dimension. Is it possible there could be a Historical Romance Ninja in a parallel dimension I could meet if only I had a magic kite?

That finishes out the review for everyone. And now, as I do every week, I’ll leave you with a few of my favorite passages from Windblowne:

Vivid banners fluttered in the windows, advertising special Festival discounts. Oliver knew the discounts were a sham. All kiteshops doubled their prices during the Festival.

Oliver began to pound on the door to the beat of I-need-a-kite, I-need-a-kite.

At first he feared that even this book would not be enough to hold down the kite-eater, but no matter how much it twisted and fought and snapped its jaws, it could not escape the sheer weight of The Social and Cultural History of the Lower Wayfeld Valley in Late Mid-Age Macherino. Oliver knew the feeling well.

Oliver had always talked to his kites, but he'd never had the impression that one of them might be listening. Or if they were, it was only so they could do the exact opposite of whatever he asked. For example, "No, please, not in the tree" was interpreted to mean "Please dive directly into the tree," or "Watch out for the crowd of people" meant "Smash into the crowd of people in order to humiliate me as much as possible."


STANDARD DISCLAIMER: Book of the Week is simply the best book I happened to read in a given week. There are likely other books as good or better that I just didn’t happen to read that week. Also, all reviews here will be written to highlight a book’s positive qualities. It is my policy that if I don’t have something nice to say online, I won’t say anything at all (usually). I’ll leave you to discover the negative qualities of each week’s book on your own.