Charlie Bone and the Beast (Children of the Red King #6)

#67
Title: Charlie Bone and the Beast (Children of the Red King #6)
Author: Jenny Nimmo
Publisher: Orchard Books
Year: 2007
Genre: Children's/young adult, fantasy/science fiction, disappointing
 399 pages

One might ask why I keep reading this series when I find them so disappointing. I suppose that it is a combination of hope and morbid fascination. I keep thinking that Nimmo might do a better job, that her skills at style and plot might develop. Though they don't (the first book in this series was the best), I keep coming back out of a sad astonishment that these books are intended for 9 to 12-year olds, the same range as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. While Rowling has her own writing difficulties at times, they pale beside the issues that plague Nimmo's books. Charlie Bone and the Beast is perhaps the worst yet in this series; not only does the plot not cohere well, but it lacks resolution, clearly serving as part 1 of at least a 2-part story arc. Though the characters are growing older, they demonstrate no psychological or emotional development. That several of them are now dating is perhaps intended to show them maturing, but it is depicted in a very flat and uncomplex way.

Dagbert, the latest in a string of new characters, poses an extreme threat to Charie's parents and to Cook, as well as to his own father. His father is also a threat to Charlie's parents , Cook, and  Dagbert. He appears to have dropped Dagbert at Bloor's in order to control or contain him. Where does any of this go? Absolutely nowhere. Yes, Dagbert presents some threats to Charlie, all of which are easily repulsed by his friends.

Even one of the Bloor's Academy teachers turns out to have the power to resist Dagbert; was that Dr. Deus Ex Machina I just saw in the hallway? Asa's family is present, then gone, serving little to no function in the plot. Somebody is tearing up the Bones' house looking for something. Too bad that nobody in the story can be bothered to try to find out what. Charlie is pulled into traveling (entering into an image), ending a chapter "with a sickening sense of dread...realiz[ing] that...[h]e'd left behind the only thing that could take him back--his white moth" (p. 307), which is really his transformed wand, but as it happens, 4 paragraphs later, he does return--no explanation given. Billy worries about a padlock. Simple solution: Pick it up and hide it or take it with you. No such luck; these middle school-aged children are too dense to think of anything so clever. But it doesn't matter anyway--one of Charlie's friends gets the key from one of his enemies. There's also unresolved business about a will.

I find myself in the strange position of waiting for Book 7 simply to see if all of Book 6 is a set-up for the resolution of these issues, or whether, as in some of Orson Scott Card's worse series, the plot will simply vanish all together.