fantasy and science fiction book reviewsGoblin Secrets by William AlexanderGoblin Secrets by William Alexander

My family and I were just quasi-playing a game called Booktastic the other night (quasi as in just reading questions from the cards rather than actually playing the game), when the question came up to name an award-winning book whose awarding you just didn’t get. I believe I chose an entire year of finalists one year for the National Book Award (All five. Every one.). Now though, I’d have to add this year’s winner for Young People:  William Alexander’s Goblin Secrets. Alexander’s debut novel isn’t by any stretch a bad book, but it is, in my mind, under-developed and unfocused and in the end, unsatisfying.

Goblin Secrets (2012) is set in Zombey, a beguiling creation of a city split into two parts:  upper class, clean Northside, with its straight streets laid out in a grid, and lower-class, cluttered and crowded Southside, full of winding, twisting lanes and alleys. Both have powerful (and adversarial) figures:  the Mayor for Northside and Graba the Baba Yaga-like witch for Southside. Between the two and spanning the always-threatening-to-flood river lies the Fiddleway Bridge, a sort of no-man’s land and considered a kind of sanctuary. Steampunk permeates the setting — the Guards have clockwork legs (their Captain also has clockwork eyes), Graba has clockwork chicken legs (like Baba Yaga’s hut), and various geared creations come and go. The humans and quasi-human share the city with goblins, known to themselves as The Tamlin, and also referred to as the Changed, as they are former humans who have gone through some kind of transformation.

The protagonist is Rownie, a young boy who, like other street urchins, has been collected by Graba to run errands. His brother, Rowan, has been missing for some time, ever since he was nearly arrested for defying the Mayor’s ban on acting and performing plays. Rownie’s story begins when he gets caught up with a performing troupe of goblins (being non-citizens they aren’t tightly bound by the ban). It turns out that the goblins, and nearly everyone else, are also looking for Rowan, and soon Rownie is caught up in trying to find his brother, elude the angry Graba, and save the city from the devastating flood to come.

Ghoulish Song Hardcover – March 5, 2013 by William Alexander  (Author)

Sequel

Alexander presents a lot to like here: the clockwork elements, Graba’s Baba Yaga echo, the way theater and masks work their way through the story, how nature/myth/magic intertwine in the form of the river and its floods, the idea of goblins as “changed” humans, the manner in which magic permeates the action via sung charms, living masks, etc.

My problem, though, is that many of these concepts were just presented, with none of them really delved into enough or shown in full enough fashion to really compel. How do humans change into goblins? We don’t know. How does magic work, who can work it, what can it do?  We don’t know. Why does Rownie have “some talent for masks” and what does that mean and why not others and how does Graba know that?  We don’t know.

It isn’t so much that everything needs to be wholly explained, magic can be somewhat of a mystery, one can have a fabulist sort of story where the strange is just presented as simply existent, but it’s a fine line in fantasy sometimes between creating a sense of ambiguity and wonder and just leaving things a bit of a muddle. And because all of these aspects play such key roles in terms of plot here that it was hard to enjoy the story without a nagging sense of thinness and arbitrariness throughout. The thin presentation also means that it lacks a certain richness, the kind that allows ideas that have at their base a sense of familiarity — clockwork men, masks as metaphor — don’t feel fully owned as original creations save for a few fleeting moments (such as an absolutely wonderful and poetically original puppet show).

This same thinness diluted the emotional impact of both plot and character. I can’t say I ever felt much of anything for Rownie — partly because he is passively reacting much of the time, partly because his interior is a bit flat. And the same can be said of the side characters — none of whom really came alive for me.

Because I didn’t get grabbed by the characters, the story developed a bit too slowly for my liking, leaving me impatient as to where it was going. Things began to pick up around the time of the aforementioned puppet show, and once we had a sense of how the goblins and the floods meshed. But then, just as one felt the story was getting more focused and more fully developed, it became too abrupt.

In the end, while the underlying ideas were charming, there were too many missed opportunities. As one example, after a fight with a number of suddenly embodied masks, one of the goblins says: “That was very strange. I got a little bit in character whenever one of my masks came close to me, and that made it really hard to fight when they were the weepy kinds of characters who made me feel like swooning.”  And I thought how better it would have been had we actually seen the goblins dipping in and out of character depending on the mask they were fending off, rather than having a relatively non-descript character tell us after the fact what we could have been seeing.

I did enjoy Alexander’s writing, which can be both economical and poetic in turn or simultaneously. Another 50-70 pages of development, a better balance of scene and summary, a bit more world-building, and a stronger connection to character, and I could see Goblin Secrets becoming an enchantingly quirky and captivating story I’d enthusiastically recommend. But as is — a solid but frustrating work — it’s more a tease of what could have been.

Release date: March 6, 2012 | Age Range: 8 and up | Grade Level: 3 – 7 | Series: Alexander, William | Lexile Measure: 710L. In the National Book Award–winning Goblin Secrets, a boy joins a theatrical troupe of goblins to find his missing brother. In the town of Zombay, there is a witch named Graba who has clockwork chicken legs and moves her house around—much like the fairy tale figure of Baba Yaga. Graba takes in stray children, and Rownie is the youngest boy in her household. Rownie’s only real relative is his older brother Rowan, who is an actor. But acting is outlawed in Zombay, and Rowan has disappeared. Desperate to find him, Rownie joins up with a troupe of goblins who skirt the law to put on plays. But their plays are not only for entertainment, and the masks they use are for more than make-believe. The goblins also want to find Rowan—because Rowan might be the only person who can save the town from being flooded by a mighty river. This accessible, atmospheric fantasy takes a gentle look at love, loss, and family while delivering a fast-paced adventure that is sure to satisfy.

Author

  • Bill Capossere

    BILL CAPOSSERE, who's been with us since June 2007, lives in Rochester NY, where he is an English adjunct by day and a writer by night. His essays and stories have appeared in Colorado Review, Rosebud, Alaska Quarterly, and other literary journals, along with a few anthologies, and been recognized in the "Notable Essays" section of Best American Essays. His children's work has appeared in several magazines, while his plays have been given stage readings at GEVA Theatre and Bristol Valley Playhouse. When he's not writing, reading, reviewing, or teaching, he can usually be found with his wife and son on the frisbee golf course or the ultimate frisbee field.