Mad Times

This was a long time ago in the house we called “Swamp Castle”. I’d forgotten about this habit of Alice’s until I saw the picture as I was moving everything from iPhoto into Lightroom this weekend.

Book 1 of his Midnighters series. I got this out of the library after hearing Westerfeld say interesting things on an episode of the Tor Podcast. (Just in case anyone at Tor is wondering if those things lead people to their books. In this case, at least, yes.)

Jessica Day is a teenager who has moved with her family from Chicago to the small town of Bixby, Oklahoma. Shortly after starting school she discovers that something strange happens to the world every night in Bixby but she and a few other kids in the town are the only ones who can perceive it.

One of the things I liked about it is that the strangeness has been going on for a long time prior to the arrival of the protagonist. While this is a handy storytelling device, allowing lots of plausible info-dumps, it also nicely defuses most of the aura of “chosen one” about Jessica since she has peers who have spent years working to make sense of their world.

The book is a quick read and the setting is intriguing enough I may pick up the next couple books.

Subtitled “The nice and accurate prophecies of Agnes Nutter, witch.” Good Omens is about the end times. Only in this version things don’t go entirely as planned. It’s really hard to say too much more about it than that without spewing spoilers in all directions. But the central screwup is that the antichrist and a regular human baby get switched in the confusion of their birthing.

From that beginning things proceed in a manner consistent with the tendencies of its two authors in a very silly mood. Indeed, the book seems to have taken Steven Brust’s “cool theory” (whenever you’re stuck for what happens next in a book you are writing you should ask yourself “what is the coolest thing that could happen next?”) and interpreted it with a very British slant toward the absurd. Not to say that the book is all goofiness. It is the end of the world in the offing and some of that takes forms very nasty indeed.

What kept me turning the pages was the way all the characters reacted to the lunacy around and among them just as real people would. A little agog, but trying to make sense of it all and trying to do the right thing in the face of it.