The Candy Shop War
by Brandon Mull
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Shadow Mountain (Salt Lake City): 11 September 2007. Hardcover: 358 pages. ISBN-10: 1-59038-783-X ISBN-13: 978-1590387832 Suggested retail price: $17.95 (US) Tags: bullies; California; candy; cemeteries; elementary schools; Fantasy; good vs. evil; hidden treasure; magic; museums; time travel; Youth Tactical strength: [6/10] |
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Ten year old Nate and his family have just moved into a new home in Colson, California. He has a few days before school starts, and he has the usual fears about finding friends and going to a new school. He sees some neighborhood kids riding bikes, and at his mother's prompting, Nate goes out to meet the kids, Summer, Travis, and Pigeon -- all fifth graders like Nate. After a brief initiation where Nate stands up to a sixth grade bully, Summer announces that Nate can join their adventuring club, the Blue Falcons.
About the same time Nate moved into Colson, a woman named Belinda White opens a candy shop on Main street. The kids don't have to go far out of their way to visit the candy shop on the way home. The kids find the candy more delicious than anything they have every had before. They want more candy, but Mrs. White has very high prices. Mrs. White offers to trade candy for work, and the kids scrub and polish the store after school for their candy rewards. One of the special rewards Mrs. White calls Moon Rocks. When the kids eat the candy, the effects of gravity reduce, enabling the kids to leap over trees and streams. Intrigued by the magical candy, the kids go back asking about more magical candy.
Mrs. White agrees to give them more magical candy, but the kids have to perform certain tasks, which include stealing items from the local museum and exhuming a coffin to retrieve a buried artifact. When Mrs. White wants the kids to erase the memory of another local magician, Mr. Stott, the kids conclude that Mrs. White probably has evil intentions. The kids go to Mr. Stott and tell him everything. He arms the kids with additional magical candy, and they start the race to acquire a powerful artifact that would give the holder enormous magical power. The kids must battle against Mrs. White's new band of candy enhanced kids (the bullies from sixth grade) and her henchmen. In addition, a magical law enforcement agent has come to town with orders to stop anyone from retrieving the artifact hidden somewhere inColson.
As Mull has demonstrated in his Fablehaven books, he knows how to tell a compelling story. And he seems to have mastered the skill of foreshadowing everything and tie absolutely every loose end up into a neat package. With every object or piece of information introduced early coming to play in the conclusion of the book, if you kept careful track of everything he mentions and knowing that everything will get used at some point in the plot, you could easily figure out much of the plot. While I appreciate theMull's careful construction, I think he could enhance his stories by introducing red herrings -- facts that mislead the characters, questions that don't get answered, and objects that get mentioned but don't play a key role in the denouement. ToMull's credit, the story pulls you along so quickly, that you put off analyzing the details you have read for finding out what will happen next, so the events still produce a surprise, even though a pause for analysis earlier would have led you to several obvious, plot spoiling conclusions.
I do have several problems with The Candy Shop War. First, in spite of Mull's usually well crafted storytelling, he resorts at one point to a five page information dump as Pigeon relates some events to Nate. Mull frequently changes the point of view from Nate to the other kids, so showing Pigeon experiencing the events rather than having him relate the events would have better matched the rest of the storytelling in the book. And I found that the ending came somewhat abruptly. I felt like Mull built up to a feverish pitch, and then the climax happens and even leaves his own characters just blinking with the sudden conclusion to the battle.
On to some character problems. First, we don't have much more than stereotypes: Nate, the new kid; Summer, the daredevil leader; Pigeon, the brain; Denny, the bully; Eric and Kyle, the bully's lackeys. At the end of the story, the characters have a strong bond of friendship, but no great changes in personality. Next, even though the four point-of-view characters represent some of the smartest fifth-graders in the school, they talk and act more like 12- or 13-year-old kids. The story would have worked just as well with seventh graders (and their eighth-grade nemeses). The dialog would have more plausibly fit in the mouths of older kids. And even though a 13-year-old would still have problems driving a car, I can more easily see that than 10-year-old Nate successfully driving a Ford Explorer without incident. Beyond that, I thought the story had too many characters.Ok , so it's not as bad as War and Peace, but while reading through the final chapters, several times I had to stop to remember who was who, especially when you start introducing pets as characters.
Mull has created a fun, compelling story that in spite of some
characterization problems provides an adventure that both kids and
adults can enjoy. I find the
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