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Adaptation-ready fantasy
By Dana Steven |
April 10, 2011, Sunday
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Print Edition
THE rest of book publishing may be tottering on the brink, but the market for young adult fantasy seems as difficult to destroy as, well, a vampire. Series about children learning to harness otherworldly powers to vanquish cosmic evil - Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight," Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" and, of course, J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter - have a powerful archetypal appeal, with each iteration attracting young readers afresh.
What from an adult perspective may seem a crushing sameness - how many orphans must battle how many dragons before the world is saved already? - only speaks to the universality of fantasy. Poised between the powerless dependence of childhood and the frighteningly unmoored freedom of adult life, preteen and teenage readers understandably want books that address their most urgent and open-ended questions: What is my destiny? How can I know the extent, and limit, of my powers? Do the moral choices I make really matter? Fantasy literature provides these anxieties a cosmological stage on which to play out.
"The Emerald Atlas," written by John Stephens, a television writer and producer, has a targeted readership between the ages of eight and 12, but like C.S. Lewis's Narnia epic (which it closely resembles in story, if not style), it can be read aloud by a parent at bedtime or enjoyed independently by an older reader.
Also like "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," "The Emerald Atlas" features displaced siblings who discover a fantastical alternate world hidden inside their prosaic one. Fourteen-year-old Kate, 12-year-old Michael and 11-year-old Emma have been bounced from one miserable orphanage to the next since their parents' mysterious disappearance 10 years before. When they reach their latest unpromising abode - a dusty, near-empty manor in the upstate New York town of Cambridge Falls - the children stumble upon a strange blank book, which functions as a kind of portal to an alternate reality. The book whisks them back 15 years earlier to a time when Cambridge Falls was the site of a high-stakes battle between a beautiful but malevolent witch named the Countess and a kindly, pipe-smoking wizard, Stanislaus Pym.
Gradually the children realize they have the power to change history and discover their parents' fate. Along the way, there are descents into glittering underground caverns, breathless escapes from black-clad, shrieking beasts known as the morum cadi (shades of Harry Potter's Death Eaters), and a memorably repulsive banquet with a corrupt and gluttonous dwarf king. Stephens spins a tightly paced, engaging yarn, even if his prose can be lurchingly expository.
"The Emerald Atlas" feels adaptation-ready to a degree that may strike some as cynical. The action sequences read like padded script, and the detailed but flat descriptions of characters and scenery could double as memos to the casting and production departments. The end of this installment leaves the ultimate fate of the magic book in suspense, but the destiny of "The Emerald Atlas" is never in doubt: It's in development.
What from an adult perspective may seem a crushing sameness - how many orphans must battle how many dragons before the world is saved already? - only speaks to the universality of fantasy. Poised between the powerless dependence of childhood and the frighteningly unmoored freedom of adult life, preteen and teenage readers understandably want books that address their most urgent and open-ended questions: What is my destiny? How can I know the extent, and limit, of my powers? Do the moral choices I make really matter? Fantasy literature provides these anxieties a cosmological stage on which to play out.
"The Emerald Atlas," written by John Stephens, a television writer and producer, has a targeted readership between the ages of eight and 12, but like C.S. Lewis's Narnia epic (which it closely resembles in story, if not style), it can be read aloud by a parent at bedtime or enjoyed independently by an older reader.
Also like "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," "The Emerald Atlas" features displaced siblings who discover a fantastical alternate world hidden inside their prosaic one. Fourteen-year-old Kate, 12-year-old Michael and 11-year-old Emma have been bounced from one miserable orphanage to the next since their parents' mysterious disappearance 10 years before. When they reach their latest unpromising abode - a dusty, near-empty manor in the upstate New York town of Cambridge Falls - the children stumble upon a strange blank book, which functions as a kind of portal to an alternate reality. The book whisks them back 15 years earlier to a time when Cambridge Falls was the site of a high-stakes battle between a beautiful but malevolent witch named the Countess and a kindly, pipe-smoking wizard, Stanislaus Pym.
Gradually the children realize they have the power to change history and discover their parents' fate. Along the way, there are descents into glittering underground caverns, breathless escapes from black-clad, shrieking beasts known as the morum cadi (shades of Harry Potter's Death Eaters), and a memorably repulsive banquet with a corrupt and gluttonous dwarf king. Stephens spins a tightly paced, engaging yarn, even if his prose can be lurchingly expository.
"The Emerald Atlas" feels adaptation-ready to a degree that may strike some as cynical. The action sequences read like padded script, and the detailed but flat descriptions of characters and scenery could double as memos to the casting and production departments. The end of this installment leaves the ultimate fate of the magic book in suspense, but the destiny of "The Emerald Atlas" is never in doubt: It's in development.
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