Jenny Nimmo

Midnight for Charlie Bone

Any book nowadays that has its main character be a young boy who suddenly discovers he has magical talent is, fair or not, going to be compared to the Harry Potter series. Add in a school for geniuses and those "endowed" with magical talents, a small cadre of mixed (talented and not-talented) friends to aid the main character, suspicious professors, and a missing presumed dead father and you're almost asking for it. It might not be right, but at least so many people have read Harry Potter that it gives us all a solid baseline standard. So let's get to the inevitable, fair or not — how does Charlie Bone stack up against Harry Potter? The answer has to be "not very well," mostly due to the writing rather than the storyline itself — it simply lack the richness of detail, of character, of atmosphere that permeated the Potter books.

The idea of the endowed is interesting enough, and one of the nice touches of originality are some of the talents themselves — which are a bit odd and sometimes even seemingly useless or trivial. Charlie's talent, for instance, is to hear voices from the photographs he looks at; another character can make lights explode. These are more quirky than one might expect, and while some others are more run-of-the-mill (the ability to call the winds or to hypnotize), the quirkiness and "smallness" of some of these is what lends some charm to the book and its larger premise. It's nice to see characters have to work around limitations rather than being able to simply research a specific spell or potion to solve almost any problem.

The background story also adds some interest beyond the ordinary. It seems the endowed are the descendants of the "Red King," who disappeared almost a millennium ago. His children have been at war over the generations, with the added complexity that sometimes the "bad" children gave birth to some "good" ones and vice versa. It's a bit sketchy, but laid out in sufficient detail for this book; clearly there will be more information to come in the sequels. Charlie's family also has potential. A mix of talented and untalented and seemingly a mix too of the opposing sides, the conflict lying under the surface and occasionally rising to the top keeps a nice bit of confused tension around the reader. The aunts and grandmother have a little of Roald Dahl in them, the major problem (here and in the book as a whole) is that they are not developed enough. His uncle, the one talented member of his family on his side, is better developed but still not fully so. The mother, a character that could have added some tonal depth, is almost a complete throwaway character who might not even exist for her place here. And except for his best friend, Charlie's school friends also suffer from a lack of depth or personality.

As mentioned, lack of development is what keeps this an average book rather than allowing it to blossom into a good book. One almost senses that in writing for young adults, the author decided to strip out the "dull" stuff, which of course just bleeds the work of most of its interest. The setting are mostly perfunctory — there's no real sense of place or tone or atmosphere anywhere in the book, whether it be Charlie's home or the school or even the spooky old castle ruins which just cry out for some detailed description. The characters too suffer from some pallidness, including Charlie. We don't see enough of the talents in use nor do we have any sense at all of their place in the larger society or what the "good" and "bad" sides of the Red King Children's war really means. The pace drags a bit here and there and the whole book probably could have done with some cutting of plotline and replacing of some predictable or repetitive story actions with some fuller characterization or description.

In the end, this is a solid book that mostly keeps the reader's attention but doesn't really compel them to keep reading, either due to the gripping storyline or the interesting characters. There is clearly some potential here, however, and I'd give the author's second book a try to see if she makes good on that promise with some fuller detail and better characterization. Though I probably would only give her a few chapters into that second book before making my decision. Midnight for Charlie Bone isn't a bad story, but it isn't quite yet a good one. —Bill Capossere

Charlie Bone and the Time Twister

The first Charlie Bone book had lots of basic flaws in it: lack of story or character development, a sense of arbitrariness, an overly familiar feel to it, etc., but the premise was just interesting enough, and the characters' magical “endowments” just quirky enough that one hoped Jenny Nimmo could improve in book two and start putting together a worthwhile series. Sadly, based on this second effort, that hope isn't borne out.

First, Charlie Bone and the Time Twister simply has a careless feel to it. There are far too many places where the author either contradicts herself or tosses in an out-of-the-blue plot moment or arbitrarily assigns an endowment or task to a character. It's almost as if Nimmo herself doesn't care much about the story or its characters. As two quick examples: in one section Charlie and his friend Fidelio are aware of Billy Raven's “intense stare” while they are plotting something (this after both have spoken of Billy's penchant for spying). Only a paragraph later, Fidelio tells Charlie if they can divert the attention of just Manfred and Asa (two bad students) they'd be fine as nobody else would bother to watch them. Except, perhaps, the kid they've already told us is a spy and who is staring at them right now? In another scene, Charlie is speaking to Cook and trying to keep a secret from two bystanders — “What about you-know-who?” he asks. But literally only a half-dozen lines later he asks her “but what are we going to do about Henry?” So much for not prying any information out of Charlie. There are other examples of this sort of carelessness — even if the author can't be bothered to catch them one would think/hope her editor would.

But there are other problems as well. The characters, including Charlie, are all far too shallow. There is little to no development of any of the major characters. Plot events tumble one over the other with little sense of structure or purpose, and characters perform actions that are seemingly utterly arbitrary, with little sense of motivation save the author's need to move the plot in some direction or other. And plot threads from book one are barely touched upon at all here, adding to the sense of arbitrariness. The settings suffer from a lack of development so that one seldom has any true sense of a real world being created. The book has a sketchy feel all the way through it, as if one pitched a neat idea (the X-men kids meet Harry Potter and Hogwarts) but never filled in the blanks.

In short, there is none of the richness of character, plot, or setting that one sees in other recent works of young adult fantasy, whether it be the Harry Potter books, or Gregor the Overlander or The Water Mirror or more classic works such as the rediscovered Narnia series or Earthsea. There's too much good stuff out there to keep hoping this series will get better so a recommendation to skip Charlie Bone and try something else. —Bill Capossere