Alchemy

Rating:
Summary: Close to Her Best
Review: Alchemy is another unusual thriller from Margaret Mahy. My personal favourite of hers is The Changeover, followed by The Catalogue of the Universe, but this one is pretty close behind. Like Diana Wynne Jones, Margaret Mahy writes strikingly original and very intelligent fantasy. At one breath I am wondering how they get away with some of the things they write, at the next I'm very glad they do... and long may they continue to do so.

Rating:
Summary: Sorry to see so few reviews on this book
Review: I was hoping to see how others responded too it. This book has been nominated for the American Library Association's Best Books for Young Adults -- a list that will be whittled down to ten books soon and several honorable mentions.

For those of you who don't know much about Mahy, she is an Australian fantasy writer who has been writing picture books, middle grade novels and short story collections for quite sometime. S Odgers, the reviewer from Tasmania, is dead on in mentioning Diana Wynne-Jones and Mahy together. They are definitely kindred spirits.

Mahy's strong suit is an ability to move from reality into fantasy so smoothly that the fantasy part just makes sense. Of course that would happen. She can also be very funny, and often her books/characters engage in wonderful word play. This book is no exception. Jess Ferret, the mysterious center of Alchemy, is always playing with Spoonerisms, switched words, witched swords you know.

In this book, a teacher (well-meaning???) blackmails a popular perfect student, Roland, into striking up a friendship with the school outcast, Jess Ferret, to find out what is troubling her. Jess doesn't particularly want this attention, and can take care of herself thank you very much. But there are several things odd about her. Her outside of school and at school personalities are very different, and her parents' whereabouts are unknown. Her house is frozen, not temperature-wise. And Roland, is struggling with some side of himself that he would prefer not to acknowledge -- and Jess has something to do with that side of himself.

Doing a reverse Mahy thing, walking her fantasy back to real life -- yes, there are people who collect other people's power. They diminish others to make themselves strong. You don't have to look too far to find someone like that. And this kind of person is very much a part of what is happening in this book.

What bothers me about this book though is her treatment of the bad guy. He is very very much an unarguable bad guy. More subtlety may have been more interesting. He has enough irreconcilable points of difference with Jess in particular, and Roland as well, to be a bad guy simply because his view of what should be doesn't work with their view. Not necessarily because he is evil. Mahy could have found a lot of ideas to play with if she were to take that approach, but she also would have had to abandon some of the ideas she did explore in this book.

Like a lot of Mahy's work, I don't think it's really fair to judge on one reading. The second reading is usually much more fun and much richer, because you can see where she is going with things. You are in on it. I've read her books and thought they were blah the first time, and just loved them the second time. I suspect when I read this book again, I'll love it rather than like it.

Rating:
Summary: Mahy at her very best
Review: I've found myself rather disappointed in Mahy's recent books--until this one came along. The plot is as complex as anything from Diana Wynne Jones. Susan Price describes the book as "a sinister story of a conjurer and his mysterious cabinet'. The cabinet concerned is one of those boxes into which someone (ostensibly from the audience) climbs and seems to disappear.

Margaret Mahy doesn't need a gloomy castle to create a creepy, amazingly scary atmosphere. She manages it in an ordinary urban New Zealand house. My home will never seem the same now. :-)

I'm amazed that both of the reviews posted here so far are so bad. I can only assume the readers are unimaginative adults or young readers not yet ready for the complexities of a plot like that of Alchemy.