A Review of ALISTAIR GRIM'S ODDITORIUM

Booklist says it’s “ideal for kids who loved Percy Jackson and Harry Potter”. I say it’s ideal for lining my cats’ litter box. Okay, maybe that’s a bit dramatic, but I was sorely disappointed by Gregory Funaro’s Alistair Grim’s Odditorium. I admit, I was drawn in by the fantastic title and whimsical cover art. I’ve seen it in bookstores for the last couple of years, and each time, I think “That sounds creative. That sounds like a book I might enjoy. That sounds like something I could give my little brother.” Then I found it used. So I got it. Because I liked the cover.

In my defense, that's a pretty cool cover.

I will give credit where credit is due. The prose is not bad. The book starts off with the line “The odd was the ordinary at Alistair Grim’s”, and that’s certainly a promising beginning. However, there were issues—not the least of which was a shady line drawn between good and evil. Alistair Grim had potential to be a magical, Tim Burton-esque story filled with steampunk museums, organ pipes and chimney sweeps, but by Chapter Six, it had fallen flat. Here’s the thing: I’m very picky about character relationships. I liked How to Train Your Dragon 2 (not as much as the books, but I liked it). I liked how Stoick died and didn’t miraculously come back to life, and how Hiccup had to move on and grow because of that. One of the only things I disliked about that movie was his mom. Hiccup reunites with his long-lost mother. Turns out, she abandoned him when he was a baby so that she could run off and live with the dragons. And you know what? Hiccup doesn’t mind! He meets her, he asks her some questions, and then he’s like “Yay, you’re my mom! Yay, we’re best friends! Please give me advice for my life that you were never part of!” And that is my prime example of rushed character relationships. I detest that. Gregory Funaro makes the same mistake. Grubb (the 12-year-old protagonist) runs away from his master when a chimney-sweeping job goes wrong. He somehow ends up in Alistair Grim’s secret Odditorium, where Mr. Grim collects magical objects known as Odditoria. Since Grubb has been exposed to his secrets, Mr. Grim has no choice but to hire Grubb and keep him in the Odditorium (a rule which lasts about one day). Within the next few hours, Grubb becomes familiar and on a first-name basis with everyone in the Odditorium—the witch, the ghost, the fairy, the resuscitated corpse (more on him later). Suddenly Grubb is friends with everyone, and all the inhabitants like him and think that he’s very reliable, even though all he’s done is cause a heap of trouble and point out the obvious fact that there’s an enormous chariot drawn by four horses barreling towards them through the clouds. Also, there’s this ninja we’re supposed to like, and I think her death is supposed to be crushing—only we’ve known her for only about five minutes and are terribly suspicious of her. The fact that she “died” before and then turned out to not be dead makes it harder to believe it when she dies the second time. Do you see my problem? Aside from the characters, the story was a mess. It needed to be stretched out over a longer period of time; the plot is scattered, there’s too much information presented in too short a time, and we don’t care about the characters anyway because we only met them a few hours ago. Plus, the big “plot twist” at the end was ridiculously predictable. For a guy with a name like “Funaro”, his book wasn’t fun at all. The biggest issue I had with this book was the line drawn between good and evil. I get it: in life, there aren’t good guys and bad guys. As Sirius Black says, “the world isn't split into good people and Death Eaters.” There is conflicting good and bad in everyone. Assuming that art imitates life, this would be true of fictional characters. This, I can accept. In fact, I think that one of the marks of a well-written character is that inward struggle. It’s one of the reasons I love Cornelia Funke’s characters so much. Problems arise, however, when characters presented over the course of the story as “good guys” consistently use their power to achieve bad things. Unless there’s some big reveal at the end where a character like this turns out to actually have bad intentions, or they realize the error of their ways, or the protagonist recognizes that this isn’t okay—then the author is condoning these actions. You don’t do that, especially not in a kids’ book. You know that taboo about raising the dead in literature? Yeah, well the bad guys and the good guys do that in this book. Many a time do we see the villain attempt necromancy, but this is portrayed as a purely villainous practice. Every now and then we see the protagonist tempted to resurrect the dead, but they find out that it's not okay to play God; all you get is an empty shell, a zombie, because there is no soul. Well. Not only does Alistair Grim resurrect the dead, fueling them on his magical energy animus stuff, but one of the primary characters is said dead. Both Alistair Grim and Nigel The Dead Guy are portrayed as heroes, yet they engage in dark magic. Not to mention the fact that Nigel clearly has a soul, which suggests that 1) either Mr. Grim is a god, or 2) souls are just another part of the body that can easily be reconstructed. There is something fundamentally wrong with this. There is a sequel, Alistair Grim’s Odd Aquaticum, but I can’t bring myself to read it. Maybe someday I’ll learn not to be drawn in by cover art and creative book titles. Maybe.

Probably not.