Recommendations for my 12-year-old nephew, Part 1.5, a few more classics

Sorry, Stacey, I meant to get this post up last week, but I have a good excuse: I've been volunteering at the Red Cross call centre helping evacuees from the Fort McMurray fire. It's the biggest (and most logistically challenging) Red Cross relief effort in Canadian history. They've been out of their homes for a month now; here's hoping everyone can go home soon.

Here's my first post with some of my favourite classic books I thought a 12-year-old boy might like. Now here are a few more ideas from the comments that I really should have thought of myself:

The Dark is Rising series, by Susan Cooper: more well-loved British fantasy, with an Arthurian flavour.

The Blue Sword, by Robin McKinley: magic and swords and horses; what more do you want? One of my favourite books of all time. For a slightly older reader, I would say, but not because of anything inappropriate.

The Lemony Snickett books, for a slightly younger reader. I haven't actually read these, believe it or not, but I hear they're pretty funny, if you like your humour black.

The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness, by Michelle Paver: Stone Age setting and bonding with a baby wolf. Great story.

So You Want To Be A Wizard, by Diane Duane.* There are nine books so far in this series about two ordinary teens who stumble across wizardry and choose to take the Wizard's Oath to fight against the Lone Power. It's fantasy with a science-fictiony feel, because they get to go to other planets and meet aliens, and wizardry has lots of technical aspects (like temporal-spatial claudications). Great details like the spell to make your fridge door open into your friend's much better-stocked fridge. Plus cool philosophizing and amusing family members. I love these books.




This was going to be the beginning of Part 2: more recent books, but it's getting late and this is already pretty long! Part 2 will be coming soon, I promise!

*I was intending to include this series in my post of contemporary choices, but indeed the books have been out for longer than my nephew has been alive, so they probably count as classics! They've just been released in new editions (as e-books, at any rate) that have been updated so the technology doesn't seem dated. (Am I feeling old right now? Heavens, no!)

Omnitopia Dawn, by Diane Duane

I really must stop reading the first books of series when the second books aren't out yet! But this one's safe: no cliffhanger ending.

Omnitopia Dawn is the first book in a series of unspecified length about the creator of a massively multiplayer online game and his fight to save his creation from evil hackers and underhanded corporate competition. Have I lost you yet? It's an adult book, and I was worried when a lot of scenes were set in boardrooms and offices and characters were Chief Financial Officers and suchlike. But not to fear: the true setting is Omnitopia itself, every gamer's perfect fantasy, every fantasy-reader's dream made real. Dev Logan's genius is that he's created a game platform that can be anything, any world you can imagine populated with any characters you can think up. And with his new RealFeel game controller, you can enter the world and feel as though you are there, complete with smelly griffin poop to step in.

It's not an original idea--how can it be, when it's what every video game aspires to--but Duane makes it convincing and oh-so-appealing. So when we find out about the former-friend-turned-corporate-rival who has hired some criminal hackers to bring down Logan's system right when he's rolling out a new expansion, we're invested, we care, we start cheering for the CFO and the programmers and various other employees who rally to face down the threat. And the battle is conducted within Omnitopia, so Dev gets to wield a convincing Sword of Truth, and shutting down attackers' IPOs is rendered as bashing them with clubs etc. (There is definitely some hero/king imagery going on that translates back into the real world in interesting ways. Dev Logan is perhaps a bit too Good to be entirely convincing, but in the end you swallow it because you really want to.)

I'm no computer geek, but Diane Duane seems to know what she's talking about when it comes to the science behind Omnitopia (apparently she once developed a game for Electronic Arts, so she does know whereof she speaks). At any rate, all the programming-speak was realistic enough to fool me. I suspect that if you really enjoy stories about corporate espionage and financial finagling then you'll find this one a little thin, because Omnitopia is all about the magic. Thank goodness!

The story ends satisfactorily (no cliffhangers=much happiness!), but there are intriguing sequel possibilities. In the meantime, if someone would actually develop something like Omnitopia, I would definitely want to play! Guess I'll just have to keep reading fantasy.

Omnitopia Dawn is like chocolate ice cream: fun and satisfying and sweet and you'll definitely want more.