Norumbegan Quartet — (2004-2011) Ages 9-12. Publisher: When Brian and Gregory receive an invitation to stay at a distant relative's strange manse... well, they should know better than to go, since this is a middle-grade adventure novel. But they go anyway. Why not? Once there, they stumble upon The Game of Sunken Places, a board game that mirrors a greater game in which they have suddenly become players. Soon the boys are dealing with attitudinal trolls, warring kingdoms, and some very starchy britches. Luckily, they have wit, deadpan observation, and a keen sense of adventure on their side.
 The Game of Sunken Places
The Game of Sunken Places has at its core several relatively humdrum concepts: a board game that plays for real, a hidden kingdom, two friends (one timid, one outgoing), a race to save the (or a) world. This isn't so bad since so much fantasy works with the same basic materials. The question is whether the author transcends the familiar and here the answer tends to be no.
The story follows a pair of thirteen-year-old friends, Gregory and Brian, as they go up to Vermont to visit Uncle Max (not really related) and cousin Prudence. Tension is set from the start by a surprisingly dark intro piece set at Max's. Once the boys arrive, they become quickly embroiled in playing the game, or, as it's referred to by everyone, The Game, the board version of which they found in the old nursery. The boys must solve riddles; avoid near-fatal run-ins with their seeming opponent Jack; deal with trolls, ogres, elves; explore hidden cities and sunken rivers and so on.
The game play is somewhat jumbled and all too arbitrary, with little sense of import or menace despite the various pronouncements of impending doom. The boys wander from oddly named place to oddly named place with no real sense of meaning, even at the end when all is explained. The two boys are also a bit muddled, not sharply enough defined. The same can be said of all the characters save one, the troll, who stands out as the only character of any depth in the book.
In the end, neither the story nor the characters offer much of a compelling nature and while Game isn't a bad book, it doesn't rise to the level of much that is out there to read. Therefore not recommended.
—Bill Capossere
The Suburb Beyond the Stars
As a reader, I find M.T. Anderson a bit all over the map. I tend to see his strongest work as aimed at the older crowd, while his children’s novels tend to leave me a bit cold. That was the case with The Game of Sunken Places, a children’s fantasy involving two boys playing a Game of high stakes involving trolls, ogres, etc. M.T. Anderson hadn’t done enough with the relatively “humdrum” concepts and his plotting and characters were a bit muddled. I’m sorry to say that I have the same reaction to his second book in the series, The Suburb Beyond the Stars.
The same two boys, Brian and Gregory, are at work designing the next version of the Game (thanks to Brian having won the last time in book one), but their work is interrupted by a murderous attack on Brian by a monster, and by the disappearance of their cousin Prudence, who had been living in Vermont at the scene of the previous game.
When they arrive in Vermont to find out what happened to Prudence, they find the woods of the Game have been turned into a suburban development with quite the dark side: some of the kids are out of Village of the Damned; the real estate agent is dead (but that isn’t stopping him from pushing deals); people are disappearing from their homes; monsters roam the streets; Prudence is nowhere to be found; and the seriously creepy Gelt the Winnower (M.T. Anderson’s best creation in this series, along with Kalgrash the Troll) is adding a sense of the horrific. All of this seems to be leading to what may be the end of the human race.
As with The Game of Sunken Places, the plotting feels a bit disconnected, though not quite as bad. The kids do a lot of wandering around and talking, but there’s little sense of narrative cohesion to much of what they do. At one point, for instance, they struggle mightily to get somewhere, then don’t and just end up back where they were, making the whole scene feel a bit arbitrary. Also, the balance between humor and darkness never quite gels, and as with The Game of Sunken Places, the sense of menace and doom that is mentioned via the language is never really felt in the gut (save for the scenes with Gelt, though that ends a bit anti-climactically). The language itself doesn’t help, as the sentences are pretty simple, sometimes too much so in a row.
The characters aren’t particularly rich either. Gregory especially is a bit one-note and starts to wear on the reader (at least this one) by the end. In neither book did I find myself particularly concerned about what would happen to them. On the other hand, ironically, the two not-quite-living characters are livelier. Kalgrash the Troll is more fully realized and more fully alive, while the seeming-zombie of a real estate agent adds a wonderful and too-short bit of humor (his pamphlet on moving into the new development is the best part of the book). Some of the other humor falls flat or is a bit too obvious (the suburban stuff, even for kids, might be a bit trite).
The lack of rich or fully-dimensional characters and the streamlined quick plot pace are pretty common attributes of lesser books aimed at younger readers, but this series just isn’t compelling enough plot- or character-wise to compensate for its weaknesses, and with the suburban humor and Gelt’s tinge of horror, I’m not sure M.T. Anderson is really aiming at that younger set anyway (say, 4th or 5th graders). For those reasons, and because there is so much good children’s fantasy out there (including Anderson’s own OCTAVIAN NOTHING novels, which are absolutely stunning), The Suburb Beyond the Stars hasn’t changed my recommendation to skip this series. Perhaps he’ll win me over with book three, the beginning of which is where Suburb ends. —Bill Capossere
The Empire of Gut and Bone
The Empire of Gut and Bone is the third book of the Norumbegan Quartet by M.T. Anderson, coming after The Game of Sunken Places and its sequel The Suburb Beyond the Stars. Unfortunately, it has many of the same problems as those first two books, which led to my ranking them relatively poorly. Which is a shame, because there are some good ideas at the core of this series, such as this book’s setting, and Anderson has shown himself to be capable of simply great work in the Octavian Nothing books.
At the end of The Suburb Beyond the Stars, the two main characters, Brian and Gregory — along with the automaton troll named Kalgrash whom Brian has befriended and Gregory hates — had stepped through a portal to find the Norumbegans, who had left Earth for New Norumbega. And here is the best part of Empire of Gut and Bone for the New Norumbega is apparently inside a strange and huge body. It appears to have the equivalent of organs and blood and veins, etc., though everything is different and so the equivalents are referred to as the familiar parts of a body though the characters are never quite sure that’s really what they are (there seem to be multiple hearts, for instance). This makes for some good travel methods and some great geographic names, such as a young female Norumbegan who is the “Daughter of the Duke of the Globular Colon.”
Soon after entering this strange new world, Brian and Gregory meet a group of automatons who have left the service of the Norumbegans and are trying to live their own lives. A nice touch is that the automatons are programmed never to say anything bad about the Norumbegans and so their rebellion is the politest ever on record. The boys then journey to the capital where they try and convince the Norumbegans to return to Earth and get rid of the evil Thussers who are taking over. Their presence in New Norumbega, though, soon sparks an actual war of rebellion between the automatons and their former masters, as well as deadly palatial infighting among the aristocrats of the Norumbegan hierarchy.
As mentioned, there are some good core ideas. The setting is ingenious and interesting, but it doesn’t really match its potential. The rebellion is funny due to the automatons having to work around their programming, but there are problems with consistency within their reactions. There are some funny lines throughout, more so via the omniscient narrator than Gregory’s purposeful humor, which seemed forced or overly scripted at times. It does move along quickly, though I wouldn’t say smoothly. And those areas, flawed as they are, would be the strengths.
The characters, as has been the case throughout, are pretty one-note. Gregory is meant to be annoying, but he needs to be annoying to the characters, not the reader (or at least, not simply annoying). Maybe the YA audience won’t find him so bad, but he wore on me quite quickly. Worse than annoying, he’s unlikable.
Brian, though his one note is understandable (convincing the Norumbegans to return to save Earth), he remains monotone and gets a bit dull. It’s a complaint his best friend Gregory makes, but again, it shouldn’t be dull or annoying to the reader as well.
The Norumbegans have basically degenerated to idiocy, which has a point, but here again, the author has to somehow make us care anyway and has to also find a way to not let the plot turn on their idiocy. I’d say Anderson fails in both cases — I couldn't have cared less if they were wiped out by either the automatons or the Thussers and their stupidity just became annoyingly frustrating as so much of the plot was predicated on it — scene after scene. Again, maybe a YA reader will find it more funny than frustrating, but usually I can relate much better than this to a chidren's book even while acknowledging its different focus. Here I just can’t.
The plot is somewhat more focused than those of the earlier books, but still feels somewhat disjointed and overly arbitrary with some internal-consistency problems. As one such example, the automatons, due to their programming, don’t see the capital in the shack-like state is really is. Instead, they see soaring spires, thick walls, huge beautiful buildings, etc. But at one point, they lob a shell right into the palace. The question, of course, is how do they manage to land it so precisely if they’re lobbing it over towering walls and spires that don’t actually exist? It’s a small example, but a representative one.
I will grant that young readers may find the humor — especially the belching or gas jokes — more funny than I do, may find Gregory less annoying, may be bothered less by inconsistencies, and just enjoy the ride. But there is so much good children's fantasy literature out there without those flaws that it’s hard for me to recommend this in the hopes that they just don’t notice them. Instead, I recommend they read some other good children's novels, such as Matthew Kirby’s The Clockwork Three or Suzanne Collins’ Gregor series, or some classics such as Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain series, and when they get to an age where the Norumbegan Quartet is too young for them, they can turn to M.T. Anderson’s Octavian Nothing duology, which is magnificent. —Bill Capossere
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