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3.72 AVERAGE
3.72 AVERAGE
Why I picked it up: Cool cover (which depicts very relevant scenes from the novel instead of something abstract), even cooler premise. They had me at crossroads demon.
What I thought: This was a top 2010 read for me. Good and evil battle for human souls in a dusty, rural, close-knit Midwestern town in the early 1900s. A crossroads demon, a doctor who sold his soul to save lives but winded up cursing those he helped, a musician who once beat the devil in a fiddle contest, and an ambiguous larger-than-life trickster all converge around 13-year-old Natalie, who is the key to ending the holding pattern all these figures have been in for 100 years. Natalie's combination of innocence, bluntness, and quick-thinking make her the perfect heroine for this tale of outwitting the devil. This book melds real aspects of Americana -- Jack tall tales, clockwork automata, traveling medicine shows and snake-oil salesmen -- with a supernatural premise, and it all comes together perfectly.
What I thought: This was a top 2010 read for me. Good and evil battle for human souls in a dusty, rural, close-knit Midwestern town in the early 1900s. A crossroads demon, a doctor who sold his soul to save lives but winded up cursing those he helped, a musician who once beat the devil in a fiddle contest, and an ambiguous larger-than-life trickster all converge around 13-year-old Natalie, who is the key to ending the holding pattern all these figures have been in for 100 years. Natalie's combination of innocence, bluntness, and quick-thinking make her the perfect heroine for this tale of outwitting the devil. This book melds real aspects of Americana -- Jack tall tales, clockwork automata, traveling medicine shows and snake-oil salesmen -- with a supernatural premise, and it all comes together perfectly.
I really loved this book - it made me think if a steampunk Stephen King for middle schoolers. Great creepy devils, automatons, a traveling medicine carnival show... All cool elements, and then a tough spunky lovable heroine to boot. I hope the author writes more books soon!
"Strange things can happen at a corssroads" . . . thirteen-year-old Natalie learns to overcome her timidity and ask the questions that need answers to save her family and her town from the dark medicine of Limberleg's Nostrum Fair and Technological Medicine Show. With strange automotans lurking about this is almost a steampunk novel but not quite. Would be a good book for someone who loves to read, doesn't mind books on the darker side (but it's not too dark), wants to read a quirky mystery boardering on fantasy with realistic characters set in the early years of the 20th Century.
It seems that no successful book is an island. Or, to put it another way, no successful genre of book. In the children’s book world Harry Potter does well and suddenly the market is flooded with wizard tales. Twilight stars vampires, so now you can’t walk down the teen aisle in a bookstore without fifty different kind of knock-offs. [b:The Hunger Games|2767052|The Hunger Games (Hunger Games, #1)|Suzanne Collins|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1267255754s/2767052.jpg|2792775] sells relatively well and now dystopian fiction is the buzzword of the day. That’s all well and good, but to the victor go the spoils of establishing a new genre. There have been varied attempts at this. There was some brief thought that maybe zombies would supplant vampires in teens minds, until it became clear that no matter how you slice it, zombies ain’t sexy. What about angels then? No go. Immortals? Pass. Which brings us to the strangest attempt at luring in the middle reader and teen readers of all: Steampunk. Now I don’t know how much you know about the Steampunk genre. Think of it this way: A man in Victorian garb wearing a brass plated jet pack. It’s a combination of historical settings meeting science fiction concepts. Lots of gears. Steampunk is entirely an adult genre, but recently folks in the publishing industry have been trying to push it on teens and kids with mixed results. Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan is the closest we’ve come to a Steampunk hit with kids, and even that was only a mild success. Now first time middle grade novelist Kate Milford debuts with The Boneshaker. And finally, kids are about to understand what all the fuss is about.
You wouldn’t expect all that much to happen on a summer’s day in 1913 Arcane, Missouri. Aside from its close proximity to a crossroads and the dilapidated remains of a long dead town, the people of Arcane aren’t privy to a lot of excitement. But that’s before Doc Fitzwater takes off for a couple days to visit a distant town. It’s before thirteen-year-old Natalie Minks has mastered riding her beautiful and temperamental boneshaker (also known as a bicycle). And it’s before Doctor Jake Limberleg’s Nostrum Fair and Technological Medicine Show comes to town by accident. Natalie knows that there’s something she doesn’t trust about Limberleg and his amazing if creepy cadre of fellow experts. It’s hard to put her finger on. But when she finds herself researching the past of her region and the stories that have been told there, Natalie realizes that she alone can save her town from a destruction brought about by powers of the darkest sort.
This book is inspired, sayeth the author, by three things. #1: Her research into archaic medicines of the past. #2: [a:Ray Bradbury|1630|Ray Bradbury|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1190744775p2/1630.jpg]. #3: The Jake Leg or Jake Walk scandal of the Prohibition Era. Both #1 and #3 are pretty much one and the same. The nice thing about this book is that it doesn’t require kids to have a historical knowledge of this era in American history. Even if they do know about it, though, they’ll only find its incorporation into the text to be delightfully creepy. You see, back during Prohibition some folks produced something called Jamaican ginger. To cover up the alcohol content (alcohol was illegal, after all) they added a phosphate ester with TOCP in it to mislead tests done on the liquid. Folks thought that it was harmless, but then the symptoms began. The concoction caused serious neurological damage, affecting some 50,000 folks. What happened to them? In this book, folks suffer something similar, if even worse. The sentence describing them is particularly memorable. “The ones who could still move . . . flung themselves about like the clumsiest of machines.” Fun Fact: The disease was sometimes also known as Limberleg. Sound familiar?
That kind of horror is only partly what reminded me of the work of Ray Bradbury. If you’ve ever read and enjoyed Bradbury’s [b:Dandelion Wine|50033|Dandelion Wine|Ray Bradbury|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170366282s/50033.jpg|1627774] or (much closer to this book) [b:Something Wicked This Way Comes|248596|Something Wicked This Way Comes|Ray Bradbury|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255682215s/248596.jpg|1183550], Milford acts like a natural successor to the man. Her characters are believable and sympathetic, even some of the villains. And I’ve never read prose that traipsed so effortlessly along the path of Bradbury’s storytelling as this author's. Milford’s great at bringing together disparate elements into a tale so that they fit together beautifully with one another. Bicycles with personalities, bee sellers, Jack tales, crossroads, music, automatons, perpetual motion machines . . . this book is a veritable curiosity closet of ephemera.
The writing itself is worth examining. There are riddles in common speech in this book. Sentences that will have some young readers poring over those words again and again. Lines like, “Most things cost something you can give up, but they aren’t worth anything – not really, not in the end. But some things . . . some have to be given free, because if you had to put a price on them, their true value would be too great for any one person to afford.” Puzzle over that one a spell. As for the story itself, a lot of exposition comes in the form of someone telling you a story, or the heroine having magical flashbacks. It’s not the cleanest device, but it also doesn’t feel forced upon the narrative. I might have wished for a little less story to flashback to story to flashbacking, but you can’t say that those stories and visions aren’t gripping.
The sheer Americana of the book is yet another one of its charms. In some ways the book feels like the middle grade equivalent to the film Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?. In both cases, the music of the American South plays a part, and in both you’ve a Robert Johnsonlike guitar player who had to battle the devil himself in a musical contest. There’s no other nation on earth where this could take place. Even the names feel like they could only have been birthed in the U.S. Monikers like Pulvermacher, Addison, Abrams, Sanche, and Bellinspire.
I’m reviewing off of a galley, so it’s difficult for me to give the illustrations in this book proper consideration. One Andrea Offermann, an American transplanted to Germany, is the artist here and her pictures consist of perfectly thin lines filled in with meticulous little details. Precisely the kind of thing you’d want for this book. My only real gripe, then, is that sometimes Milford will describe a person or an object and you’ll wish that Offermann had made it understandable. For example, at one point we hear about a man riding a high-wheeler that has had a piano mounted on it. Kids may not understand what a high-wheeler is, even with the description about the size of its wheels, so that’s at least one moment a picture would have been apropos. Still and all, generally speaking Offermann pinpoints just the right moments to bring to life.
The Boneshaker is without a doubt Steampunk’s best bet at making headway into the juvenile reader genre. However, above and beyond this rote category, the book’s just a damn good bit of writing. Once you pick it up you’ll be hard pressed to set it down again. Keep your vampires, angels, and dystopian worlds for yourself. I’m a fan of the girl on the bike going head to head with the master of hell himself.
Ages 10 and up.
You wouldn’t expect all that much to happen on a summer’s day in 1913 Arcane, Missouri. Aside from its close proximity to a crossroads and the dilapidated remains of a long dead town, the people of Arcane aren’t privy to a lot of excitement. But that’s before Doc Fitzwater takes off for a couple days to visit a distant town. It’s before thirteen-year-old Natalie Minks has mastered riding her beautiful and temperamental boneshaker (also known as a bicycle). And it’s before Doctor Jake Limberleg’s Nostrum Fair and Technological Medicine Show comes to town by accident. Natalie knows that there’s something she doesn’t trust about Limberleg and his amazing if creepy cadre of fellow experts. It’s hard to put her finger on. But when she finds herself researching the past of her region and the stories that have been told there, Natalie realizes that she alone can save her town from a destruction brought about by powers of the darkest sort.
This book is inspired, sayeth the author, by three things. #1: Her research into archaic medicines of the past. #2: [a:Ray Bradbury|1630|Ray Bradbury|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1190744775p2/1630.jpg]. #3: The Jake Leg or Jake Walk scandal of the Prohibition Era. Both #1 and #3 are pretty much one and the same. The nice thing about this book is that it doesn’t require kids to have a historical knowledge of this era in American history. Even if they do know about it, though, they’ll only find its incorporation into the text to be delightfully creepy. You see, back during Prohibition some folks produced something called Jamaican ginger. To cover up the alcohol content (alcohol was illegal, after all) they added a phosphate ester with TOCP in it to mislead tests done on the liquid. Folks thought that it was harmless, but then the symptoms began. The concoction caused serious neurological damage, affecting some 50,000 folks. What happened to them? In this book, folks suffer something similar, if even worse. The sentence describing them is particularly memorable. “The ones who could still move . . . flung themselves about like the clumsiest of machines.” Fun Fact: The disease was sometimes also known as Limberleg. Sound familiar?
That kind of horror is only partly what reminded me of the work of Ray Bradbury. If you’ve ever read and enjoyed Bradbury’s [b:Dandelion Wine|50033|Dandelion Wine|Ray Bradbury|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170366282s/50033.jpg|1627774] or (much closer to this book) [b:Something Wicked This Way Comes|248596|Something Wicked This Way Comes|Ray Bradbury|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255682215s/248596.jpg|1183550], Milford acts like a natural successor to the man. Her characters are believable and sympathetic, even some of the villains. And I’ve never read prose that traipsed so effortlessly along the path of Bradbury’s storytelling as this author's. Milford’s great at bringing together disparate elements into a tale so that they fit together beautifully with one another. Bicycles with personalities, bee sellers, Jack tales, crossroads, music, automatons, perpetual motion machines . . . this book is a veritable curiosity closet of ephemera.
The writing itself is worth examining. There are riddles in common speech in this book. Sentences that will have some young readers poring over those words again and again. Lines like, “Most things cost something you can give up, but they aren’t worth anything – not really, not in the end. But some things . . . some have to be given free, because if you had to put a price on them, their true value would be too great for any one person to afford.” Puzzle over that one a spell. As for the story itself, a lot of exposition comes in the form of someone telling you a story, or the heroine having magical flashbacks. It’s not the cleanest device, but it also doesn’t feel forced upon the narrative. I might have wished for a little less story to flashback to story to flashbacking, but you can’t say that those stories and visions aren’t gripping.
The sheer Americana of the book is yet another one of its charms. In some ways the book feels like the middle grade equivalent to the film Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?. In both cases, the music of the American South plays a part, and in both you’ve a Robert Johnsonlike guitar player who had to battle the devil himself in a musical contest. There’s no other nation on earth where this could take place. Even the names feel like they could only have been birthed in the U.S. Monikers like Pulvermacher, Addison, Abrams, Sanche, and Bellinspire.
I’m reviewing off of a galley, so it’s difficult for me to give the illustrations in this book proper consideration. One Andrea Offermann, an American transplanted to Germany, is the artist here and her pictures consist of perfectly thin lines filled in with meticulous little details. Precisely the kind of thing you’d want for this book. My only real gripe, then, is that sometimes Milford will describe a person or an object and you’ll wish that Offermann had made it understandable. For example, at one point we hear about a man riding a high-wheeler that has had a piano mounted on it. Kids may not understand what a high-wheeler is, even with the description about the size of its wheels, so that’s at least one moment a picture would have been apropos. Still and all, generally speaking Offermann pinpoints just the right moments to bring to life.
The Boneshaker is without a doubt Steampunk’s best bet at making headway into the juvenile reader genre. However, above and beyond this rote category, the book’s just a damn good bit of writing. Once you pick it up you’ll be hard pressed to set it down again. Keep your vampires, angels, and dystopian worlds for yourself. I’m a fan of the girl on the bike going head to head with the master of hell himself.
Ages 10 and up.
This book was a seriously slow starter for me - it took me quite awhile to be engaged in the story. But all of that slow build is worth it, because once the story gets going, the payoff is huge. Full review up at slatebreakers: http://slatebreakers.com/2013/04/22/review-the-boneshaker-by-kate-milford/
4.25 A tight little story with beautiful illustrations. It is not as dense as most of the Greenglass House series and the pacing is much faster. Milford manages to convey the 1910 sensibilities of small-town America quite well and experiencing this lost world with its travelling shows and quirky characters is a large part of the enjoyment. Like Bluecrowne this is more overtly mythical than Greenglass House, but in this case I feel it fits better (or maybe I am just better prepared for it). The author thankfully does not explain everything, nor wrap up everything neatly with a bow. Very interested in reading another part of the Greenglass House world.
So far not liking this as much as the rest of you guys (Betsy Bird, Jenny Schwartzberg)...It seems to combine Marie Rutkowski's Cabinet of Wonders with Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. I give up. So many books, so little time.
This was a re-read for me, but it turns out I'd forgotten many of the finer points of it. It's quirky and enjoyable, and Kate Milford's impressive vocabulary always delights me. I wanted a little bit more discernible logic, though, behind some of the mythic elements -- do the automata control their human counterparts or vice versa? What is Simon's true role in this whole drama? etc. -- and the lack of that is what kept it from being a 5 star book.
Interesting but definitely creepy/scary. Probably too much for most elementary kids.
I have put off reviewing The Boneshaker for some time now because it leaves me feeling absolutely inadequate to the task. It is quite possibly one of the best books I have ever read.
The Boneshaker is the story of Natalie Minks, a young tomboy with a passionate love of all things mechanical. Few things give her more pleasure than tinkering with her father on their automata, unless it is perhaps her red Chesterlane, a beautiful boneshaker of a bicycle he built for her. Except that she cannot ride it just yet. She has grown up in a small Missouri town near a crossroads, listening to her mother's fantastical stories of the town and it's people, because all things are possible at a crossroad. And it is in this way that The Boneshaker becomes a story of stories. Tom Guyot's victory over the devil with a guitar that can talk. The mysterious drifter. Simon Cofferett's frightening jump, and his uncanny youth for one who has lived just outside town as long as anyone can remember. When 'Dr. Limberleg's Nostrum Fair and Technological Medicine Show' comes into town with intricate automata, fantastic healing machines and miraculous cures, Natalie begins to realize there is more truth in her mother's stories than she previously suspected.
Though a steampunk novel (for kids!), The Boneshaker is so much more. There are layers upon layers to it. The language is so evocative of the region and time about which she writes that her fantasy feels like truth. This absolutely could have been Missouri in 1914, it just wasn't. It makes me think of my Grandmother, and the way she would say, "sometimes it's easier to see the truth when it's in a story." Everything about it feels real from the dusty roads under her bicycle tires to the taunting boys down the lane. You can hear the music as Tom Guyot plays. No, really. You can.
It is like Milford lifted the essence, the very life force, of the folklore of an entire region, and slipped it into her novel. I could feel my grandparents in it. I could hear the echos or their parents. I caught myself, over and over again, stopping to savor something I had just read. As soon as I finished the book, I immediately read it again, only out load to my husband and son. We spent weeks lingering over it, bellowing to sell wares or whispering in fear. It almost feels wrong to NOT have the Boneshaker become the very oral history it describes.
The Boneshaker is the kind of book that will grow with you. A mid-grade reader could pick it up and be entranced by the mystery, captivated by Natalie's courage. A few years later, they may better understand the fear motivating the choices Natalie's father and brother made about her mother; grasp the deeper, darker elements of the story that are always running just under the surface. It talks about darkness and light, good and bad, courage and weakness in a way that just leaves me breathless at times for its beauty. The different meanings of this book are so multilayerd that different readers of different ages will experience what is happening in very different ways, none of them wrong. If I could, I would give a copy of this book to every boy or girl I know. Adults, too.
The Boneshaker is the story of Natalie Minks, a young tomboy with a passionate love of all things mechanical. Few things give her more pleasure than tinkering with her father on their automata, unless it is perhaps her red Chesterlane, a beautiful boneshaker of a bicycle he built for her. Except that she cannot ride it just yet. She has grown up in a small Missouri town near a crossroads, listening to her mother's fantastical stories of the town and it's people, because all things are possible at a crossroad. And it is in this way that The Boneshaker becomes a story of stories. Tom Guyot's victory over the devil with a guitar that can talk. The mysterious drifter. Simon Cofferett's frightening jump, and his uncanny youth for one who has lived just outside town as long as anyone can remember. When 'Dr. Limberleg's Nostrum Fair and Technological Medicine Show' comes into town with intricate automata, fantastic healing machines and miraculous cures, Natalie begins to realize there is more truth in her mother's stories than she previously suspected.
Though a steampunk novel (for kids!), The Boneshaker is so much more. There are layers upon layers to it. The language is so evocative of the region and time about which she writes that her fantasy feels like truth. This absolutely could have been Missouri in 1914, it just wasn't. It makes me think of my Grandmother, and the way she would say, "sometimes it's easier to see the truth when it's in a story." Everything about it feels real from the dusty roads under her bicycle tires to the taunting boys down the lane. You can hear the music as Tom Guyot plays. No, really. You can.
"Tom's humming turned into strange syllables, sounds that weren't words but sort of broken pieces of words, bits and bobs of song dodging and darting over and around and under the music of the guitar, rising and falling and ducking, and every once in a while climbing sharp and clear and plaintive...
It made a strange tableau, and plenty of people paused to look: the old black man singing blissfully with the guitar flashing sunset colors on his knees; and the sweaty, bruised, and scraped girl, unmoving and rapt, absently holding on to a bizarre bicycle with her head cocked like a bird's. Neither of them noticed anyone else's stares." (p32-33)
It is like Milford lifted the essence, the very life force, of the folklore of an entire region, and slipped it into her novel. I could feel my grandparents in it. I could hear the echos or their parents. I caught myself, over and over again, stopping to savor something I had just read. As soon as I finished the book, I immediately read it again, only out load to my husband and son. We spent weeks lingering over it, bellowing to sell wares or whispering in fear. It almost feels wrong to NOT have the Boneshaker become the very oral history it describes.
The Boneshaker is the kind of book that will grow with you. A mid-grade reader could pick it up and be entranced by the mystery, captivated by Natalie's courage. A few years later, they may better understand the fear motivating the choices Natalie's father and brother made about her mother; grasp the deeper, darker elements of the story that are always running just under the surface. It talks about darkness and light, good and bad, courage and weakness in a way that just leaves me breathless at times for its beauty. The different meanings of this book are so multilayerd that different readers of different ages will experience what is happening in very different ways, none of them wrong. If I could, I would give a copy of this book to every boy or girl I know. Adults, too.