Mark Haddon, 2004, Vintage Press

“The first important book with an autistic hero” trumpets a review on the front jacket of this book. Yet by my reckoning, looking at the story from that standpoint would make it too easy to dismiss the book as a gimic. Hey — there haven’t been any popular novels told from the perspective of an autistic kid — what a niche! While this may have come into Haddon’s mind at some point, it would be missing the point to summarize the book thusly.
This is a story of discovery from the viewpoint of an unreliable narrator. The narrator is a boy discovering the circumstances of his parents’ marital troubles. That he is an autistic boy, and that his autism contributes to the tension and events, just makes the journey of discovery more complicated and more involved. That he’s high-functioning (as autistic boys go) makes the story tellable, and reduces the requirements for suspension of disbeleief; yet it could just have well been told from the perspective of some other clueless kid of around the same age, and still been a good story.
It’s an easy book to read, and has the added educational benefits of describing some of the characteristics of autism in a way that’s accessible and comprehensible. I found myself sympathetic to the narrator, even to the extent of his hatred of the color brown (which, after all, is too close to the dreaded color yellow).

Sue Monk Kidd, 2002, Penguin Books

I found this to be a strangely beautiful book, less for the larger plot arc, which was a little too pat for my taste, but for the richness of the characters and their indiosyncracies.
Kidd has a really good eye for ritual and people’s relationship to traditions. Some of the beekeeping rituals, like the draping of the hives in black after a death, seemed too natural to not be old traditions.

Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler),1999-2004, Harper Collins Publisher.

The Lemony Snicket books have an amusing premise: in an over-the-top, affected voice, we hear of the terrible, horrible privations that befall and the evil, malevolent conspiracies that threaten three peculiarly-talented orphaned siblings. The narrative falls into entertaining repetitive patterns: we quickly learn that Violet ties up her hair before coming up with brilliant inventions, that Klaus will know key facts, no matter how obscure, and that Sunny will crawl into inaccessible places and babble non-nonsense, and together they save the day for a brief moment. We also quickly become accustomed to the voice of our narrator, who happily mis-defines words for us, who advises us to read happier books, and who laments vaguely-defined tragic events in his own story.
Repetition is a powerful tool in all literature — but in “kidlit” it’s nothing short of a juggernaut. Kids can watch Aladdin five hundred times, and tend to enjoy it more each time. Other kids want the same story read to them each night, and will correct you if you misread a single word. Clearly, the power of repetition and playing to a successful theme fuels these books. Yet, even with a good formula, familiarity breeds contempt. As the books progress, the problems and the solutions to the problems get less and less plausible (not that they were ever realistic to begin with). Yet we know in advance how the problems will be solved, more or less, and the steps that be taken to get there. Maybe because my brain has gotten older and less pliable, the repetition in this series started to get tiresome. I found myself wanting something new to happen, something unexpected. Well, maybe in the next book…

Booth Tarkington, 1914. Read as an e-Book from the Gutenberg Project by way of BlackMask.com

This collection of stories of the eponymous eleven year old and his misadventures feels in places like a much more precious version of Tom Sawyer. Like Twain, Tarkington seems to have a convincing memory for what it’s like to be a boy. The preciousness, however, is cloying in places; the flights of exaggerated description are a little too much. Coupled with the overt use of racism for a laugh, there is a lot in these stories that is offputting to today’s reader.
Yet … Tarkington gets some things just right. The pecking-order battles of the children, the coping with boredom, the dealing with adult expectations, and the ability to cause great disruption by not understanding social formalities all read quite true. And Penrod’s birthday meeting with his Great Aunt Sarah Crim near the end is an enormously satisfying payoff. Her cynical wisdom makes it possible to overlook many of the other negatives.

Booth Tarkington, 1909. Read as an e-Book from the Gutenberg Project by way of BlackMask.com

This is a sweet, mostly predictable story. The plot itself is not particularly notable, but, for some strange reason, what makes the whole thing worthwhile are the obvious mistakes in perception on the part of our very unreliable narrator.