The Cardturner

Seeing as how he's my favorite writer, I was really excited to read Louis Sachar's new book, The Cardturner. My wife even ordered it for me in advance and I eagerly awaited its arrival for several weeks. To my disappointment, the book was not all I'd hoped for. Don't get me wrong, it's still quite good, but it doesn't measure up to some of Sachar's other classics like Holes or the Wayside School books. For the most part, it follows a somewhat conventional plot structure, something that Sachar has often successfully avoided.
The story is about a teenager named Alton Richards who gets roped into being the "cardturner" for his bridge-obsessed, blind uncle. Alton's parents want him to make a good impression on the old man because he is extremely wealthy and they'd like to be included in his will, although they never directly say that. This part is responsible for a lot of the humor in the book, which is successful most the time. In my opinion, Sachar has always been able to deliver the laughs.
As he gets to know his uncle better, Alton also learns more about himself and his family history. He also learns some new things from his eccentric uncle. You get the idea.
The story focuses a lot on the card game bridge, something I know next to nothing about. I like that Sachar chose to write about something so unhip and uncool. As I read in an interview with him, every other teen author right now is writing about vampires so writing about an ancient card game for old people is like career suicide. Well, he didn't quite use those words, but something like that anyway. And I agree, at this time when it seems that every author is writing the same stories, it's refreshing to find a story with no pretensions and no attempts to be trendy or cool. My problem was that I just felt like Sachar didn't reach his potential. To borrow an analogy my friend once used, The Cardturner is like vanilla ice cream: it's good because it's ice cream, but it lacks something and fails to reach its full potential of awesomeness.

Freak the Mighty

This book by Rodman Philbrick has several elements of a traditional young adult novel, but also contains elements that make it unique. For me, stories about kids with rare diseases can be bad, but in this case it worked well. What I mean with the diseases is that sometimes an author can try too hard to be different, but I didn’t get that feeling from Philbrick. Everything he put in there added to the story and seemed unforced.
The story is about a huge kid named Max who feels like he is slow and dumb. He becomes friends with his new neighbor, Freak, who is extremely intelligent and suffers from a growth disease that has left him only a few feet tall. As you may expect, they learn from each other and "grow" and stuff because of their unique friendship.
I like that the two main characters aren't super likable all the time. Freak is kind of snotty sometimes and Max can be sarcastic and rude. Max’s voice reminded me of a lot of kids I knew in high school, myself included.
This book raises interesting questions about judging people. For the most part, of course, judgments tend to be wrong. But this book also contains an instance where Max's grandparent's judgment of his father is correct. They say he's a good-for-nothing criminal and that pretty much ends up being true.
The ending is sad, I guess, although quite predictable. That’s one criticism I have with the book. Sometimes I just feel like the death of someone close is too common a theme in adolescent literature. Sometimes it can be the cop out way of adding drama to a story. I know authors are trying to stray away from stuff that’s unrealistically chipper, but it’s not like everyone around dying is always the best way to do that. But besides that, I did like this book a lot.
P.S. I saw a few minutes of the movie adaptation of this book, The Mighty. From what I saw, it looked bad. Like with most movies, it looked like they took a good story and made it really corny and sentimental.