Pseudonymous Bosch is the author of a “Secret Series” of books featuring 3 main characters: Cass, Max-Ernest and Yo-Yoji.  They are around 11 years old, but they are intrepid adventurers who belong who belong to one secret organization, the Terces Society, fighting another secret organization, Midnight Sun.  There are so many parallels with Lemony Snicket’s “Series of Unfortunate Events” that it is hard to avoid comparisons, and This Book is Not Good for You lacks the same charms.  It’s the pace of the writing that takes a while getting used to: it is very busy, full of details, and trying very hard to be clever.  It doesn’t let the emotion in the story come through.  For example, Cass, the heroine of the story, is adopted, and is curious about who her natural parents are.  At a special dinner with her friends and her adopting mother, Cass gets angry and says that she is not her real mother.  She then feels bad about it, but we don’t get much description or feeling for it.  The characters don’t have the depth of the Baudelaire orphans in the Snicket series, and it is hard to summon up much concern for them. 

The main story of this book revolves around chocolate, cooking, magic, an artificial rain forest, child slavery, a circus, Japanese warriors, and some villains who appeared in previous books in the series.  The leaps in the plot caused by magic and fantasy make the book disjointed and hard to follow.  The most attractive feature is the way that Bosch makes the characters say all sorts of supposed facts, and then there are notes that confirm whether they are right or not. 

The unabridged audiobook is a performance of the story with multiple readers, and it has plenty of sound effects along with the dynamic reading. 

Links:

·         The Secret Series

·         Pseudonymous Bosch

© 2010 Christian Perring        

Christian Perring, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Dowling College, New York.