Children's Books: The Bailey School Kids
Nov. 19th, 2005 12:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsOmaha recently bought Kouryou-chan the first three books in The Bailey School Kids, a pseudo-supernatural series in which first-graders with over-active imaginations deal with the "presence" of vampires, werewolves, and so forth. The first book has a cutesy premise: a new teacher with green eyes (that apparently really do glow when she's angry) and a green brooch she wears around her neck at all times (ditto) and a Romanian accent (oh, and an allergic reaction to garlic) comes to school, and the class bully sets out to make her life miserable, while the other kids set out to make sure he doesn't get exsanguinated by her because they're all convinced she's a vampire.
The book ends well enough, and it sets the theme of the series: she restores order to the class by on off-stage deus ex machina. This is a let-down: the main tension of the story (about whether or not she's a vampire) is never resolved, which is fine-- but it also never resolves whether or not the students' concerns about her are valid.
What bugs me most about the book is that the writers have no ear at all for dialogue. Every paragraph is a tongue-blocking clunker; this book was never read aloud, by anyone, before it reached the printer, and that's a fatal mistake for a children's author. None of the characters actually stands out: the bully speaks in the same vocabulary as the class brain, and the class fashion plate, and so on. You couldn't tell them apart except for the "X said" at the beginning of the line.
Kouryou-chan seems to like them, but I think she's just in a holding pattern until the next Magic Treehouse book comes out. It's a shame, too; there's so much potential there. Maybe the later ones get better.
The book ends well enough, and it sets the theme of the series: she restores order to the class by on off-stage deus ex machina. This is a let-down: the main tension of the story (about whether or not she's a vampire) is never resolved, which is fine-- but it also never resolves whether or not the students' concerns about her are valid.
What bugs me most about the book is that the writers have no ear at all for dialogue. Every paragraph is a tongue-blocking clunker; this book was never read aloud, by anyone, before it reached the printer, and that's a fatal mistake for a children's author. None of the characters actually stands out: the bully speaks in the same vocabulary as the class brain, and the class fashion plate, and so on. You couldn't tell them apart except for the "X said" at the beginning of the line.
Kouryou-chan seems to like them, but I think she's just in a holding pattern until the next Magic Treehouse book comes out. It's a shame, too; there's so much potential there. Maybe the later ones get better.
