In the spirit of adventure; The Cave of the Crystal Skull

What would you do if your consciousness were suddenly and truly expanded, and you could perceive beings and visions from a parallel universe? What would you do with this dangerous knowledge?

The prospect sounds exciting and dreadful all at once—the essence of adventure. 

Sally Landaker’s The Cave of the Crystal Skull is an adventure written for middle grade readers that explores consciousness and parallel realms. While a quest involves a search for something of great value as its mainspring, adventures turn on the undertaking of a hazardous enterprise, one whose outcome is doubtful.

Adventures usually begin in happenstance, a happy coincidence or unhappy accident that leads to a situation so hazardous, the main character is tempted to turn away.  Only the concern and care for others is enough to motivate the character to go forward. 

Cousins Sonia and Eric stumble on a cave while exploring Black Mountain. When they encounter “a mystifying crystal skull” and “a menacing pool of bubbling mud,” the cousins recognize they are in danger. Still they vow to continue exploring the cave but to keep it a secret.

However, the powers that lie hidden in the cave don’t intend to stay hidden.

Eric does not question his sudden focus and confidence in his soccer game. Sonia, however, experiences a shift in consciousness so profound, she grows increasingly uncomfortable as she is transported to neighboring realms and begins to question her everyday world. 

Sonia becomes more obsessed and defiant, unable to resist the lure of the cave even as she realizes the risk.  Each time she exits the cave, she experiences a shift in consciousness that expands the boundaries of her known self. She begins to believe the crystal skull might have healing power and when a younger cousin becomes ill, Sonia engineers a plot to test her theory.

While on a quest, the hero must defeat the guardian of the treasure in order to bring the valuables home, in an adventure, there are no “others” who have to be destroyed. That’s part of what makes Huck Finn, Gulliver, and Robinson Crusoe so eternally refreshing. 

As one enthusiastic, middle-grade reviewer noted, there are “no bad guys” in this story. They aren't needed. Adventures tell a different kind of story, one that reveals the character's growing consciousness as she encounters her marvelous world. 

Sally Landaker’s The Cave of the Crystal Skull  is available in Kindle and Print at http://www.amazon.com/The-Cave-Crystal-Skull/dp/B00KLIVVOU. 

Expendable Characters

I first read Tolstoy’s War and Peace in high school. At least, I read most of it.

 I stopped in Volume 4, Part 4 when I realized Petya was going to die.  At seventeen, with friends leaving for Viet Nam, I didn't want to see a young recruit killed in battle.. It was my first encounter with the expendable character in the hands of a master novelist.

It was a bad translation anyway, with high-flown Victorian language. I finally picked up a new copy a few summers ago, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, and I surrendered to the pleasures of re-reading—returning, in part, to the girl I was at 17 while re-imagining St. Petersburg and Moscow, the march of Napoleon’s armies, and weaving all of that into today’s news, the laundry and gardening, stories and essays to be graded.  

There on page 1058, through smoke and dust of war, I watched Petya on his horse, galloping across the manor courtyard, slip sideways in his saddle, the horse rearing, the boy falling to the wet ground, his head pierced by a bullet.  Tolstoy sets the expendable character’s death against the improbable happiness Pierre finds with Natasha in the end.

My husband and I make a game of guessing who the expendable character is in TV crime dramas. These characters play an essential role in film and in mainstream and suspense novels, allowing an opportunity for the villain to demonstrate his villainy. Problem is, they are usually too obvious.

You can spot expendable characters by their vulnerabilities and a spark of goodness that puts them at risk. They are to be found among the marginalized.  The man who has already failed once or the woman who abandoned her children is a sympathetic sinner who can be redeemed by death. A main character’s brothers or sisters, the rookie, the room-mate, are especially vulnerable because they live in the protagonist’s shadows where the villain is also lurking.

Because the reader must root for expendable characters, they need a significant story problem. Petya is the darling, the youngest, favorite to both Natasha and her mother. He is stifling in a world of fading gentry, caring for the women while his older brother marches off to glory. His youth and idealism make him vulnerable to the rhetoric of war, and the reader sympathizes because Tolstoy has already demonstrated that war is madness and war rhetoric is absurd. Petya’s sin is to be naive or callow enough to believe that he can make a difference where his elders have failed; these are sins of youth we have all had to forgive.  

Finally, he’s the rookie soldier. After the defeat of the French when Napoleon’s troops are in retreat, Petya is killed in a local partisan action, a death both random and devoid of purpose. This turn in the expendable character's fate reveals the villainy in Tolstoy’s tale—a deep cosmic irony, cruel at times but also comic as witnessed in the marriage at the end.  

In the face of this cosmic irony, we must act as if everything depended on our actions, all the while laughing at ourselves for believing we might make a difference. 

I kept Petya alive through two translations and many years because, in the hands of a master novelist, the expendable character is as memorable as the protagonist.  

"What will happen if we stay here . . . "

Fed up with the heat and smoke-filled air from fires in the mountains surrounding my home, I managed to get away for a few days camping in the Crescent City/ Brookings area--the tsunami region on the Pacific Coast.

I half-expected to find the beaches strewn with radioactive debris from the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Instead, I found the cooling mists of renewal, the continuing play as the sea arranged and rearranged its assemblage of bones, shells, feathers, and seaweed. The sea, the great artist, granted its dignity to old strands of kite string, to sand-creased plastic bags, even to the bottles we humans have so carelessly discarded.



Because I kept busy walking and running in the surf, I barely touched the novel I brought with me, but I did take time to read each night from The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry edited by J.D. McClatchy. I kept returning to these lines from the German poet Ingeborg Bachman that echoed my feelings as I picked up plastic and glass from the sand:

          What will happen if we stay here,
           homesick to the root of our flowing hair,
           and ask: what will happen  
           if we survive beauty's trial?

True, a novel by Melinda Field, Wise Women Ink, 2011

To paraphrase Leo Tolstoy, great literature grows from two stories: someone goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. In Melinda Field’s first novel True, the character of young Cat sets events in motion--she is both on a journey and the stranger who comes to town.

Abandoned by her Mexican father, Cat has been raised by a drug-addicted mother and grown up tough in the streets of Phoenix, AZ. When her mother is taken to prison, Cat is forced to move to a small town and live with her Native American grandmother, a woman she has never met. To further complicate matters, the town is an isolated, predominantly white, ranching community in Northern California.

For Cat, this is a coming-of-age story. The brutality she encounters and the consequences will mark her life forever. But the novel True is much more.

The ensemble cast of characters, a diverse group of women brought together by their love of horses and their shared adventures in the mountains, is focused through Emma, a midwife who ultimately becomes Cat’s guardian. Each woman faces life-changing challenges, so that in True, Field reveals how we are always coming-of-age no matter where we find ourselves.

True is set in the contemporary west and Field evokes a palpable sense of place.  From the dusty heat of a Phoenix motel, redolent of curry and disinfectant--to the cider scent of an orchard, the crunch of apples underfoot—to the sharp-scented sage and dangerous shale of a mountain trail, the salt and blood of fear when a rattlesnake or mountain lion appears—True will transport readers from their easy chairs to a wild and authentic place.

There’s still a month of summer left. If you’re looking for a book to take with you to the beach or a book that is a vacation in itself, I invite you to read True.

For your hard copy or ebook, visit http://www.amazon.com/True-Melinda-Field/dp/097620083X