This was one of those tricky books to decide if I should spotlight or not.  Truth, I often found it tricky to decide if I should finish it or not.  In the end, the book continued to pull me forward and I was glad I didn’t give up on it, when the final pages flipped.  That’s usually reason enough for me to give a book the spotlight, but in this case, I also felt a certain readership would enjoy The Seems more than I did, and I want to help get the word out to them.

The biggest strength of this book is the marvel of world building that is The Seems.  If your average author serves up a world building meal that is well-balanced and nutritious, while your exceptional author serves up a four-course meal complete with delightful flourishes on the side, these two–Hulme and Wexler–serve up a loaded-til-the-tables-groan banquet and all-you-can-eat buffet.  Of course, there in lies one of the challenges…even for something of a world building geek, I sometimes felt it was too much.  Like I was being forced to stay at table til my plate was clean, when perhaps the meal would have been easier to savor if there were simply less of it.  However, the setting certainly comes to life and plays an integral part of the story, so I count this an over all win.  Just don’t try to read it when feeling impatient, or if your mind is already cluttered.

The second great strength of the book is an extension of the first, and also another place where the story stumbled, for me.  Specifically, its being told in an omniscient pov.  And, by omniscient, I don’t mean multiple third person, or deeply embedded third with a few narrative cheats.  This is the old-fashioned kind of omniscient we rarely see, in which we are following one character and know what he’s thinking, but often spend time (while in his company) quite briefly in someone else’s head, even if that character is minor or little more than a set piece.  The narrator also refers to the main character by his title sometimes, such as ‘the fixer picked up his next Tool’ or some such.  It all works surprisingly well in the novel, and allows The Seems to come alive in a way that would quite likely be impossible otherwise.  It also allows for more possible ‘entry points’ in which different readers can connect with a diverse cast of characters.  However, it has the inevitable drawback of distancing the reader from the main character, and because of that the story labors much harder to make the story problems matter, and connect the reader emotionally to the tale.

Lastly, the book spends a lot of time in the first half the book (at least) slipping around in time, mostly going backwards in individual flashbacks but sometimes going forward from a past point in a series of hoping flashbacks that progress forward til the book present.  Phew! lol  They’re handled well, but still a distraction and during those parts of the book I found myself quicker to set the book down and slower to pick it up.

All of that said, in the end young Becker comes through as a character, and proves himself sufficiently sympathetic to carry the complexity of the world and plot.  In addition, the sometimes random appearing bits which irked in the moment were mostly tied back into the plot, therein rewarding the reader for trusting the authors.  I can’t say that I’ll pick up the second, because in truth I probably won’t.  But, I will be recommending The Seems to friends, and that’s a pretty high compliment.

I asked Apricot-kitty what she thought of it, but she’d long since passed out.  The second two thirds of the book are set in Sleep, a domain within The Seems, and Apricot-kitty found the talk of dreams, pillow forts, a delicious concoction of Snooze, and Bedtime Stories too much to resist.  She’s out cold.

Pass this book along to readers who liked Artemis Fowl and The H.I.V.E, but tired of the bad boy pov, or who simply love a really twisty world with a delicious sensation of looking inside something to see how it works.  And happy reading!

For more Marvelous Middle Grade Monday reviews, spotlights, interviews and giveaways, check out Shannon Messenger’s blog!

Share, share away: