The peaceful civilization of Valorim is under siege…It’s
about to fall to the dark Lord Mondus. In a panic, a few heroes bind all their
world’s beauty into one precious necklace and send it across the cosmos,
hurling past a trillion lighted stars…all the way into the lunch box of
sixth-grader Tommy Pepper of Plymouth, Massachusetts.
Tommy puts it on, and soon he starts doodling pictures of
the twin suns of Valorim and hearing strange music. But at first, he is too
preoccupied to notice; his mother died recently, and his sister isn’t speaking,
and his father is fighting a real-estate agency to keep their home. But when
strange minions of Lord Mondus begin ransacking Plymouth, Tommy realizes he
must protect his family from villains more dangerous than a vengeful realtor
and her bus-stop-bully daughter. Gary D. Schmidt masterfully presents the epic
story of a family trying to redefine itself in the wake of tragedy.
So…this was an interesting turn for this author, and while
at first I was wondering about his choice of fantasy interwoven with real-life,
I think I got it by halfway through the book.
Part of this book is the perspective of the different Valorim on the far
away planet, and another part is in the much easier to understand perspective
of Tommy Pepper. At the beginning of the
novel there was so much name dropping of alien people that I couldn’t tell left
from right and wondered how a seasoned writer could make that mistake, and as I
kept reading it kept niggling at me, but then I realized that this book really
isn’t about the Valorim…it’s about Tommy and everything that happens with the
Valorim, the monsters, the necklace, is a way to tell a story about loss and
love and family. After I realized that, I also began to understand how cool it
was that Mr. Schmidt tried this. Using the fantastical to approach well-known
themes and problems is a great technique, and I enjoyed the book a lot more
once I was focusing on what I knew I was supposed to. It’s actually a really
symbolic book with a lot of poetic pieces to it. He’s a really talented author,
and I’d recommend this to anybody who likes his other books. Nice job.
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