One of the perilous things about being an adult is there comes a point where the doors of your mind open far wider than required by your own concerns. There’s no ceremony when this occurs, and no warning. It simply happens one day and suddenly you find there are seventy things going on at once and you’re flinching amidst a maelstrom of love and lost opportunities and hard choices and the tenacious grasping hands of the past, not to mention tidying the garage. Adults are not distracted for the sake of it, so cut them a little slack. [p. 276]
A cheerful, uplifting and delightful book about things that are not intrinsically cheerful: parents separating, the nature of evil, and people behaving badly.
Hannah Green is eleven and life is horribly unfair and bleak and mundane. Her parents have separated, and Hannah lives in Santa Cruz with her dad, who is not adjusting well to single parenthood. He suggests that she might like to go and stay with her grandfather in Washington State. So off Hannah goes -- only to discover that her grandfather has a number of secrets, among which is that he heard Johann Sebastian Bach playing the organ, and that his longevity is due to him having built an awesomely complex device for the Devil.
Yes, that Devil. Who, despite this being (possibly?) targetted at a young adult or teenage audience, is not at all nice. It's in the job description, of course, but modern audiences are accustomed to transformative works where the Devil is misunderstood, or reformed, or subject to a case of mistaken identity. Not here. This Devil is prone to bestowing cancer on airport security staff, making petty criminals explode, and arranging unpleasant accidents for insufficiently polite waiters.
Someone or something has been interfering with the natural balance of things. The Devil, and Hannah's grandfather, and Hannah herself need to restore balance. Along the way, Hannah learns a great deal about the power of Story and the drawbacks of adulthood. There is also an accident imp named Vaneclaw (who resembles a four-foot-high mushroom), a petty criminal named Nash, and a potentially evil rollercoaster.
Which last might be a metaphor for this novel: fun but scary, with some nauseating bits, utterly compelling while it's running, and over too soon. (The novel, however, is well-crafted and not in the least creaky.)
It's also worth noting that there is a strong authorial presence here: a sardonic, straight-talking, oddly reassuring narrative voice that constantly demolishes the fourth wall and subtly draws attention to the subtext of apparently straightforward scenes. (Is it the author? Or is it another layer of fiction? Who knows? Does it matter?)
I liked this novel a lot, though would hesitate to recommend it to anyone under about 16 on the grounds of the Devil being really quite likeable, despite his cruelty.
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