The Mysterious Benedict Society, by Trenton Lee Stewart

It's been a little while since I've done a children's book. This was one I got on a whim. I think I had seen it on bookstore shelves before, but I knew very little about it. I was in the Philadelphia airport on a long layover, very tired, and in need of a book that wouldn't take too much out of me for the rest of my trip home. So I checked out the Young Adult section of the little airport bookstore, thought this one looked promising, and decided to give it a try.

The premise, more or less, is this. Reynie, Kate, Constance, and Sticky have been hand-picked by the mysterious and benevolent Mr. Benedict to save the world from an impending disaster that he and his assistants do not yet fully understand. To do this, they must go undercover to Nomansan Island and enroll in the school there, where children are being trained to broadcast cryptic messages by the sinister Mr. Curtain.

I'm not quite sure how to review this book. I think books for younger readers fall into three categories. There are the books that are really just meant for the kids to read on their own and would bore or baffle most adults (The Babysitter's Club series comes to mind), books that are great reads for adults and kids alike (like Harry Potter), and books that are fun books for adults to read to their children. Since I have no kids to read to at this time in my life, I'm most interested in the second category, and I feel a little bit like The Mysterious Benedict Society should have been in the second category, but was actually in the third. I enjoyed it, it was entertaining, and sort of clever. But reading it with my adult eyes made me feel skeptical.

The problem was that I could never completely buy into the story, and could never completely believe the characters - that is, with the exception of the four children at the center of the plot. I thought they were excellently developed and endearing. The book, however, seemed stuck between reality and strangeness. Children's books don't have to be realistic. Exaggeration and absurdity work wonderfully well in, say, The Phantom Tollbooth, or Alice in Wonderland, or A Series of Unfortunate Events. But even fantastical books often benefit from a sense of reality. I think of Harry Potter, or A Wrinkle in Time, or the John Bellairs books I used to devour when I was younger. I felt like The Mysterious Benedict Society struggled to be one or the other, a little to absurd to be real, and a little too real to fully accept the absurdity.

It wasn't a bad read, just one I would have enjoyed more if I were reading it to a child. It's the first in a series (the third comes out soon), but I'm not particularly inspired to continue on. At least not yet.