Allen Shull reviewed The Game of Sunken Places by M. T. Anderson
Review of 'The Game of Sunken Places' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
I did not set this book down. I read the whole thing—for me, that's what two stars means. However, to Anderson's detriment, I read this at the same time as Daniel Pinkwater's Neddiad. Here's how it happened. On a summer trip my wife and I started reading this book aloud, but didn't finish. On a later car trip with my father along as well, we started the Neddiad because we didn't want him to feel lost. After the trip, my wife and I had two unfinished books and we read that one first, and only now, for the sake of completeness, finished this one.
To avoid repeating myself in both reviews, both books contain a couple of older boys on a supernatural adventure where they constantly demand and are constantly denied any explanation. In both books the characters talk in a fairly quippy way; in Pinkwater's, the narrator is quippiest …
I did not set this book down. I read the whole thing—for me, that's what two stars means. However, to Anderson's detriment, I read this at the same time as Daniel Pinkwater's Neddiad. Here's how it happened. On a summer trip my wife and I started reading this book aloud, but didn't finish. On a later car trip with my father along as well, we started the Neddiad because we didn't want him to feel lost. After the trip, my wife and I had two unfinished books and we read that one first, and only now, for the sake of completeness, finished this one.
To avoid repeating myself in both reviews, both books contain a couple of older boys on a supernatural adventure where they constantly demand and are constantly denied any explanation. In both books the characters talk in a fairly quippy way; in Pinkwater's, the narrator is quippiest of all, but in this book the narrator is bland, blunt, and overbearing. Quippiness can certainly be a fault, but while Anderson constantly distracts from the story to artificially elbow you in the side, Pinkwater writes naturally.
Perhaps it's this: after Anderson won the National Book Award for a book my wife quite loved, Octavian Nothing, he went back to a book he wrote at age 18—this is explained in the afterward, along with the fact that tons of material was excised for being too obvious and longwinded. Perhaps a better choice would have been to abandon the work entirely or at least rewrite it from memory without glancing at the original. I can of imagine a mature writer creating as cloying a character as Gregory, as useless a plot device as his friend Brian, or as needlessly described a setting as Norumbega. The Afterward explains that Anderson loved D&D—I imagine he was a Dungeon Master who kept spiral-bound notebooks filled with material his players never scratched. Perhaps Anderson imagines himself Tolkien—not a wise decision.
At the end of this book, we did not care what happened next. How sad, then, to discover that this is the first of four in a series. The end left a tail open, but so ponderous was the ending that I really couldn't stomach three more books.
Maybe the flaws wouldn't seem as obvious if be hadn't read the book aloud. But isn't that the test of good writing?
