The Mysterious Benedict Society
author: Trenton Lee Stewart
name: Paul
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2012/05/15
date added: 2012/05/15
shelves: childrens, novel
review:
To say that Trenton Lee Stewart‘s The Mysterious Benedict Society is a children’s book is kind of like leveling the same “accusation” at the Harry Potter books. This is a big, grand adventure book featuring remarkable children as protagonists and as such it will appeal to middle-school readers, but I think there is plenty here to draw in adult readers as well.
The story concerns Reynie Muldoon, an exceptionally bright young orphan who really wants nothing more than to fit in. He answers a peculiar ad in the newspaper and finds himself taking a series of curious tests and meeting a small band of other, similarly exceptional kids: Sticky Washington, a nervous, timid boy with an incredible head for knowledge; Kate Weatherall, perhaps the most resourceful bucket-toting girl he’s ever met; and Constance Contraire, a world-class stubborn grouch who completes several of the tests simply by refusing to cooperate.
Thus assembled, the team then meets a strange man named Mr. Benedict, who tells them an alarming tale about the efforts afoot at a secret Institution nearby to control and influence the world via mind-control techniques broadcast through television and radio signals. The kids’ mission then is to infiltrate the Institution, learn what they can, try to stop the plot and keep in contact with Benedict via Morse code signals.
It’s the kind of set up that I think appeals more to the younger audience than the adults, to whom it may sound a little corny and convoluted, but the strength of Stewart’s writing is in his ability to help older readers like myself recapture some of the youthful wonder of storytelling, back when every plot contrivance was fresh and new. I found myself not dismissing the notion of a hastily-assembled team of children secret agents as implausible, but embracing them the way I might have when I was ten or eleven years old. This is the same effect that J.K. Rowling achieved in the early Potter books, to force suspension of disbelief through the power of imagination.
Despite drawing two parallels to Rowling now in four paragraphs, I do want to point out that The Mysterious Benedict Society may feel at times like a gadgety/spy analog to the high fantasy of Harry Potter, this book isn’t quite as good as the early books in that other series. Part of it is that Stewart needs his action to take place predominantly at The Learning Institute for the Very Enlightened, but, frankly, the Institute (and even the mission) isn’t as interesting as the recruitment and the hideout of Mr. Benedict. One thing that Harry Potter’s stories did was make the principal setting—Hogwarts—this amazing place that you really wanted to visit. Having Benedict Society’s action take place in a mostly unpleasant place that the characters don’t want to be means the middle (once they begin their mission) drags in comparison to the beginning. Eventually the pace picks up around the two-thirds mark and the book becomes much better toward the end, but there is a reason everyone and their pet hamster has read Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone but this book is far less well known.
Still, I really enjoyed the book. It’s big and meaty (and probably could have been even bigger, if Stewart had wanted it to be so), it has extraordinarily likable characters, crisp pacing, some fun nods to puzzle solving and love of obscure trivia. In fact, this is a book that very much celebrates the cerebral; unlike a lot of hero tales aimed at kids, the protagonists in Benedict Society survive and thrive by their wits far more than their hits, and I like the focus there.
I also can’t get through this review without mentioning the absolutely wonderful cover and chapter art by Carson Ellis. Her work and style will be familiar to those who have enjoyed artwork done for the band The Decemberists, but the distinctive, whimsically old-fashioned feel to the art gives the book just the right touch of tone and really helped propel an already swift read even faster toward the back cover.