Flashback

by Simon Rose
Tyche Books
978-1-928025-23-8
155 pp.
Ages 8-12
2015

Max seems like a typical fourteen-year-old boy: he hangs out with his friends; he has to endure parenting, or lack thereof, from his father; and he keeps secrets, especially the one that would make him look like he was going crazy.  You see, Max keeps seeing this boy, about his age, with a thick mop of black hair watching him and then disappearing.  And Max continues getting these bizarre images of being restrained on an operating table and a hypodermic needle and a girl with green hair.  It’s all very weird and frightening.

Since the images began at the cemetery when he’d stood beside the stones of Jonathan Dexter and his son David, Max does a little research.  He meets a man named John Carrington, a retired private investigator, who had been involved in a case twenty years earlier when the fourteen-year-old son, David, of politician Jonathan Dexter went missing.  With the tip from a psychic, the boy’s remains were found a few years later, just prior to Jonathan Dexter’s own death in a fire.  But just when Carrington found a connection to other missing persons’ cases, the whole investigation was shut down.

The next day, Max is shocked to learn that Carrington has been found dead in the park.  Slipping into the private investigator’s office while renovations are being done, Max uncovers documents and photos related to the Dexter case, including a connection to a researcher named Aleksander Kovac. Following the clues revealed within, Max makes the acquaintance of the psychic named Deanna Hastings and the teen bizarrely time slips into David’s life twenty years earlier.  And from there and then, Max tries to solve the mystery of David and Kovac and a weird headache-causing young man named Kane.

Flashback is an action-packed adventure perfect for middle grade readers.  Young readers will enjoy the plot-driven story rife with the supernatural, bad guys, evil experimentation, and time slip. While I found some of the plot progressions to be a little contrived, I think younger readers will appreciate the fast pace and suspenseful thrill of learning what really happened to David Dexter courtesy of a middle-grade sleuth.

The Hypnotists

Written by Gordon Korman

Scholastic

978-0-545-50322-8 (hardcover)

978-0-545-60272-3 (audiobook)

240 pp.

Ages 8-14

August 2013

Reviewed from audiobook

Just like his earlier series—Macdonald Hall, On the Run, Everest, Island, Dive, Kidnapped and most recently Swindle—Gordon Korman will easily snag young readers with The Hypnotists if they're looking for his characteristic droll humour, kids vs. adult conflict, suspenseful thrills and unique plotting. 

Jackson Opus, 12, has always known that his eyes change extraordinarily from violet to blue then green, but it takes a few perplexing interactions with a bus driver, a basketball rival, his ophthamologist, a psychiatrist and a hypnotist at a vaudeville show for Jax to have his hypnotic ability identified.  (Come on, that's not really a spoiler.  What did you think The Hypnotists was going to be about?)

Selected to attend the Sentia institution of Dr. Elias Mako who,

"has devoted his life to New York City education and is an inspiration to every single one of us" (pg. 34)

Jax is taught how to control his ability to mind-bend (i.e., hypnotize) and challenged to mesmerize volunteers.  As an Opus, a family line well-known for its mind-bending talent, Jax is taken under Dr. Mako's personal tutelage, attempting greater challenges than ever imagined, including attempting post-hypnotic suggestion (i.e., producing a specific action after waking from hypnosis) via video.  But after making the acquaintance of the elderly, hippie-esque Axel Braintree, the head of the Sandman's Guild, a guild of "reformed" mind-benders, Jax learns more about his heritage and the extent of his own ability, as well as about Dr. Mako's true reputation.

It can't be surprising to readers of Gordon Korman's middle grade books that The Hypnotists has a couple of boy in their tweens trying to make sense of bizarre circumstances and erroneously interpreting others' actions, embedding laughs and dynamic surprises with each new development.  Imagine making a passing comment to a bus driver that "You have to get us to Ninety-Sixth Street as soon as possible" (pg. 3) and transforming the transit man into an Indy driver who refuses to stop for passengers, lights and traffic!  Or mesmerizing the lunch lady to provide more gravy for his friend Tommy's Salisbury steak ("Make sure you give him as much as you can" pg. 68) resulting in enough gravy to create a hazard on the floor and Tommy being stalked by the lunch lady.

With the pen (word processor?) in Gordon Korman's control, the main plot of The Hypnotists–Jax attempting to thwart an evil mastermind–is embedded with the boy's introspection of his conscience and motives while others are drawn in, demonstrating their own views on hypnotism and its uses, good or evil. Always enhancing the action with a peppering of pre-teen humour

"Aw, I don't want to see inside my mother's brain.  All those private thoughts and lady stuff.  I get skeeved out just looking at her eyelash curler" (pg. 186)

Gordon Korman will have readers anticipating Book 2 in this series, undeniably set up with Jax's final thought and the last eleven words of The Hypnotists.

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Author Gordon Korman will be attending the International Festival of Authors (IFOA) on Saturday October 26, 2013 at 11:00 a.m. at Toronto's Harbourfront.  Don't miss this opportunity to see one of Canada's legendary youngCanLit authors.

All Good Children

by Catherine Austen

Orca Book Publishers

978-1-55469-824-0

300 pp.

Ages 14+

2011

Here's a way to start out 2012: read about a future that is so terrifyingly probable that you wonder how we're ever going to stop it from happening.  Catherine Austen's All Good Children may be science fiction but it certainly alludes to the direction we may be heading.  How many readers have heard a teacher, librarian, parent or any adult who works with young people declare repeatedly about young troublemakers taking all of their time and efforts?  If you have, then All Good Children could be our future, sadly.

Max Connors and his best friend, Dallas Richmond, would both consider themselves fifteen-year-old troublemakers and smile at that label.  In their gated community of New Middleton, owned by Chemrose International, they pull a lot of pranks, don't hold back their opinions of others, live for their RIGs (Realtime Integrated Gateways) and religiously follow Freakshow, an "entertaining" reality show in which deformed adults (as a result of chemical contamination) compete against each other.  The boys and their families are actually very fortunate: first, by living in a region devoid of environmental disasters such the drowning of New York City or desiccation of Phoenix; second, by living in homes in New Middleton, rather than the tents or shanties of the forests outside the gates; and, third, by attending academic schools because of their genetic status (Dallas is an ultimate, and Max a best-of-three) and not being the throwaway kids of the trade schools. 

In fact, Max's little sister, Ally, a six-year-old, has been very fortunate having missed the first week of school when the family (Mom, Max and herself) attended a funeral in Atlanta.  Upon their return, Ally notes that all the Grade 1 and 2 students are acting kind of slow and fuzzy, emoting very little, repeatedly using phrases about being lucky to be in school and that all their teachers deserve respect.  Consequently Ally is cited as not fitting in at her academic school and transferred to a trade school.  With a bit of investigating at the middle school, Max, his brilliant but quirky neighbour, Xavier, and Dallas learn of a new motivational leadership program called NEST (New Education Support Treatment) being delivered to all students, youngest first, via vaccination.  Max's mother, a nurse at a geriatric facility where patients are subjected to a similar treatment,  is determined not to allow her children to be vaccinated and initiates plans to evade the mandatory program.

While the plot keeps the reader on edge, anticipating exposure of Max and Dallas' deception and the family's plan for evasion, the moral dilemma of identifying children as "good" or not and consequent programs to improve their status was far more compelling to me.  Skillfully, Catherine Austen ensures that Max is seen as a smart aleck kid who has moments of brilliance and compassion, helping the readers clarify their own perspectives on this new world and its way of doing things.  Does Max need to be turned into a "good" child or is he already such a child, just an individual?  Who is able to judge a child's "goodness": a parent/guardian, a principal, a teacher, the child?  Think about the number of mothers of criminals who will claim that their children have good hearts or would never have done anything like that.  Really?  Should I trust their assessment or look to the evidence?  Having seen enough students similar to Max in my classes, I would never classify him as a "good child" but I would surely support his right to be an individual.

Moreover, while mass vaccination of a population is not unusual (e.g., against polio and small pox), their use to ensure compliance and the lack of opportunity to decline treatment is more akin to forced psychiatric drugging than "motivational leadership".  A rose by any other name?  Be the child or the parent/guardian and the perspectives may be very different, whether it is called nesting or psychiatric treatment.  Dallas' father certainly has a different perspective than his son and Max's mom.

As in her first book, Walking Backward (Orca, 2009), which was shortlisted for the Canadian Library Association's 2010 Book of the Year for Children Award, in which a family comes to terms with the mother's death, Catherine Austen poignantly reveals the psychological workings of a family under duress with parent and children all searching for clarity and understanding and always hope.  Charmingly, hope is offered in a country called Canada.