Dear TBR,
I’ve been looking at gaming books, and thinking a lot about games, game theory, and what we reveal when we play – and why. I keep intending to try and revisit THE WESTING GAME but that book for me hasn’t aged well. Here’s another interesting one I found instead:
Click Here To Play: Denis Markell, 2017
12 year old Ted Gerson is definitely a gamer – much to his English professor father and his voracious novel-reading mother’s dismay. Ted unwillingly leaves the house and his computer when his Great-Uncle Ted calls him to his bedside as he’s dying. Like few other adults in Ted Jr’s life, his great uncle wants to talk to him about gaming and the stuff he likes. Uncle Ted warmly encourages his namesake to always dig deep into the questions of life – and never stop looking for answers. “Go for broke,” he encourages him. Later that day, Ted learns that the old man has died… and a subsequent reading of the will leaves all of the contents of his apartment to him “and the treasures it contains” to young Ted.
Ted, who loves a good mystery, is over the moon. His mother, who knows her uncle had become somewhat of a hoarder, is far less so. She gives her son ONE week to go through the apartment and find things of value, and then she’s going to call Goodwill to take the old man’s things away. Enlisting the help of his best friend, Caleb, who is an artist and superhero fan, and convinced that shadowy forces and ‘enemies’ are behind every corner – a result of reading a lot of comic books, the boys are ready to dig into whatever mysteries and treasures clearly await them. Unfortunately for their hopes of just diving in, the boys get saddled with new-in-town Isabel Archer who is a smarty pants know-it-all – but also the daughter of Ted’s new boss at the college. Awkwardness abounds, as Ted is torn between disliking and impressing Isabel, and Caleb settles simply on disliking her and arguing with her every word. It takes some time, but the three of them form a team, and, as it turns out, there IS some kind of mystery in that apartment… and there’s also a mystery of why this man is following them around, and why the apartment gets trashed, and why a man who claimed to be a reporter …isn’t…
This is fantasy fiction with a touch of history, as Ted learns a bit about Japanese internment camps, Nazi looted treasure and World War II – things his Great Uncle Ted lived through, and didn’t often talk about. The puzzles in this book are exceptionally hard and complicated, and some of the fantastical elements remain unexplained at the end of the book, but it was arresting, with subtle humor and fun.
I’ve had this one on hold since I read the description. Talk about an adventure! An unusual graphic novel that is both historical fiction and biography.
SEA LEGS, Jules Bakes & Niki Smith, 2025
Janey’s on the road – again. Well, not the road, actually – her family’s lived on a bus-sized schooner since she was six years old, and though they’ve been stopped for a few years stateside to make money, Janey’s adventure-loving parents are once more yearning for the high seas.
It’s hard being a fourth grader who just wants to make friends and go to school with actual people, though. Janey’s best friend writes her copious letters, and they try to continue their fantasy game on paper, but it’s really not the same. Janey – for the first time – really doesn’t want to be on the boat doing home schooling with her mother all day… they’re starting to get on each other’s nerves. When Janey meets Astrid, though, everything changes. Astrid is a fifth grader, and she’s amazing. She knows things, and she’s super mature. She takes care of her toddler siblings like a grown woman, and lives with her fun, funny dad. Sure, he drinks a lot, and he doesn’t even know how to sail, so living on a boat is a little weird, but Astrid likes Janey for the same reason that Janey likes Astrid – their adventures together represent a break from their real lives.
Sometimes, though, the comparisons Janey makes between her life and Astrid’s are oblivious and hurtful. Those times, it seems like Astrid really, really, REALLY hates Janey. She takes her on adventures, sure – adventures that Janey’s mother would be horrified by if she knew where the girls were going, and what dangerous things they were getting up to, but sometimes, even mid-adventure, it stops being fun. They explore broken down buildings, old hurricane damaged hideouts and underground cisterns. Astrid stops …challenging Janey to keep up so much as daring her to do, and mocking her for failing to want to do things that are more and more dangerous. The sneering and name-calling from Astrid, claiming that Janey is an entitled baby is only half the truth, though — the real truth is that Astrid has had to grow up far too quickly, and is hanging out and trying to do “normal” things with a girl her age in a vain attempt to grab a piece of childhood for herself. Things come to a head at last, and as the girls finally air their feelings, both of them confront the struggles they’ve been having.
There is no happily-ever-after here, however. This book is biographical for author Niki Smith, and covers the events of September 15-16, 1995, when Hurricane Marilyn struck the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Dominica, Bermuda, and Barbados. In the lead up to the storm, Janey’s parents send her to their grandmother in Connecticut, and in the ensuing destruction of their schooner and of Astrid’s father’s boat, the girls are separated – without forwarding addresses, last names, phones, social media, or any of the details that would make someone easy to find in 1995. The girl who made Janey both doubt and dare herself to grow up is lost to her forever. The things Janey learns from Astrid stick, however, and the reader is left with a sense of hopefulness at the discovery that Astrid not only survived the storm but has been sent, with her myriad smaller siblings, to their “mothers.” Maybe Astrid’s life improves. The reader is left with the knowledge that Janey will always remember the part she played in her growing up journey.
I enjoyed the adventure of this novel, the real life conflict that one can encounter being around how other people live, the graphic novel illustrations, and the sense of the bigness of the world contrasted with the perspective of the minuscule things that bother us in elementary and middle school. This was a truly unusual book, and I would love to see more books featuring kids with unusual living experiences.
Fresh onto the TBR:
- Gamelit, MCA Hogarth/li>
- On the Hippie Trail, Rich Steves
- The King’s Captive, KM Shea
The word is loud, star bits, and getting louder. It may feel difficult to ignore the hurricane outside, but all weather systems pass, and communities have, since time immemorial, gathered to clear away the wreckage after devastation. We will survive. Stay reading!
📚 Still A Constant Reader
