Book review: The Explorers: The Reckless Rescue by Adrienne Kress

The twentieth book I read in 2018 was the second book in the Explorers series by Adrienne Kress, The Reckless Rescue.  The kids and I greatly enjoyed the first book in the series, The Door in the Alley, so my hopes were high for this sophomore effort.

Unfortunately, this installment of the story left me fairly flat.  Picking up right where the first book left off (literally mid-sentence, which is good for a chuckle), the narrative sees Sebastian and Evie separated, and they stay separated for the majority of the book.  This might have been okay, except the bulk of the plot seems to be filler, desperately vamping to keep the pair apart until the Exciting Conclusion.  There's an interminable K-pop storyline that seems to go next to nowhere -- except that I'm sure that in the final volume all the friends the pair have made along the way will show up to help save the day.  It's that kind of story.

Kress seems to have committed herself to the pair discovering a new member of the disbanded Filipendulous Five in each installment, which means we're looking at two more books before Evie finds her grandfather in the fifth book.  She is going to have to come up with some more interesting adventures to keep me reading that long.

Book review: The Glass Forest by Cynthia Swanson

The nineteenth book I read in 2018 was The Glass Forest by Cynthia Swanson.  I loved her debut novel, The Bookseller, and was excited to read her sophomore try. Unfortunately, I didn't find that lightning struck twice with this particular author.

Like The Bookseller, The Glass Forest is set in the past: the "present day" portion of the novel in 1960, with flashbacks covering the previous twenty years.  It is told from the point of view of three women, whose lives are affected by a pair of handsome and charming brothers, Paul and Henry Glass.  The book opens with Angie, Paul's  young wife, answering a long-distance call from Ruby, Henry's teenaged daughter, delivering the message that Henry is dead and her mother, Henry's wife Silja, is missing.

The book is a definite page-turner -- I started and finished it on the same day -- but I wasn't far into it before I had the suspicion that this was one of those books, like Wuthering Heights, where everything interesting has already happened before the narrative began but everyone's life is going to end up ruined in a delayed reaction anyway. 

Apart from Angie and Silja, the characters are rather flat and two-dimensional.  Ruby is something of an enigma to the very end, undoubtedly a conscious choice by the author to build tension, but the pay-off falls flat to me.  The Glass brothers, too are opaque: Henry goes off to war and comes back utterly changed: why exactly?  Never explained.  Paul has an affair with a woman demonstrated by every other part of the story to be not at all his type: why?  Likewise no explanation of his behavior.  The bad guys are of the black-hatted, moustache-twirling variety.  Why do they do the awful things they do?  Apparently just because they're bad guys.  I kept expecting some sort of revelation in backstory or explanation of their motives that would elucidate their character, but they stubbornly remained cardboard cut-outs with no apparent goal other than sociopathy. 

Book review: Hidden in Plain View by Lydia McGrew

The eighteenth book I read in 2018 was Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts by Lydia McGrew.  This book argues for the reliability of the New Testament by comparing accounts between the books.  The four gospels famously tell the same story, and many of the epistles overlap with the events of Acts; McGrew believes that, by examining the same events as recorded at different times by different authors, we can be reassured that the events in question actually happened and are not a fictional account.

I found the first section, covering the gospels, a little dry, perhaps because I am already very familiar with the story, but the second part, which covers Acts and the epistles, was full of details I hadn't noticed before, probably because, in the church, we tend to treat Acts and the various epistles separately.  When I hear a sermon on part of Jesus's life, it will almost always reference the same event as recounted in the other gospels, but a sermon from an epistle tends to treat the letter as a discrete literary whole and almost never refers back to Acts for the context in which it was written.

This is an extremely valuable resource that has added multiple notes to my Bible.

Book review: The Self-Driven Child by William Stixrud & Ned Johnson

The seventeenth book I read in 2018 was The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives by William Stixrud, PhD, and Ned Johnson.  Stixrud, a neuropsychologist, and Johnson, a tutor, encourage parents to back off and let their kids take responsibility for their own choices in life.

It's a positive message, no doubt, but the book is crippled by the authors' blindness to the upper-middle-class bubble in which they live and move and have their being.  I'm sure the upwardly-mobile professionals of Washington, D.C. must find their advice helpful, but I can't be the only parent in flyover country who reads tips like "let your child call an Uber to get around" or "if he's not into team sports, suggest fencing lessons" and wonders what planet they're living on.  It's a planet where Duke is a second-tier school where you can be assured your child can get a perfectly fine education even if they aren't accepted at an Ivy, I'll tell you that much.

It's also not a planet where homeschooling exists.  Their emphatic advice to parents is never to mention school or homework and make the home a safe haven where academics don't intrude.  The clear message is that a child's education is a matter best left to the experts and upon which a parent shouldn't trespass.  They evenly approvingly quote a mom who wrote a letter to her daughter abjectly apologizing for asking what grade she got on a math test and promising to throw her report card away unopened because it's none of her business how her child is doing in school!  Even if I weren't homeschooling, I'd find that notion appalling.  The reason it's called a report card is to report a child's academic progress to his or her parents or guardians.

The overall impression with which I came away from this book was a feeling of extreme gratitude that I am not an upwardly-mobile professional in D.C.  They all sound miserable, stressing out about whether a poor grade or the fact he doesn't play sports or a musical instrument will mean their child will suffer the ignominy of having to attend a state school and, thus, being relegated to failure and shame for the rest of his life.  The authors repeatedly stress how unhealthy an atmosphere is cultivated in many schools, how bad it is for children and teenagers to be under constant pressure to succeed while simultaneously failing to get necessary sleep, and yet the one piece of advice that never seems to occur to them is to step off the treadmill.