The Mysterious Benedict Society, by Trenton Lee Stewart

“Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”   C.S. Lewis

I like childrens and young adult books for the same reason I enjoy fantasy and sci-fi: they can deal with big plots, major symbols, and the deep questions of life, in a way that authors of a standard grown-up thriller or literary fiction would be embarassed to tackle.  But why read at all if you can't deal with big ideas?

The Mysterious Benedict Society lays the whimsey on a little too thick at times (a girl who always carries a bucket, another character who never sleeps, a villian who happens to be the long lost twin of the hero's mentor).  Even in children's or young adult literature, I find this annoying.  Give me a fully realized fantasy world like Hogwarts, allow some well-defined magic to exist in that world, but then make everything else as familiar and real as possible so I will want to suspend my disbelief and spend time in a place that seems real.

Nothwithstanding this one weakness, when Mysterious Benedict works, it works well, and it kept me reading to the end.  There are some important ideas here for young people and old people to learn, such as:

-there are different types of intelligence, all valuable in their own way;
-when recruiting for a secret mission to save the world, it's as important to test for moral character as for ability;
-if some person or group wants to take over society, their first step will be to manufacture a false "crisis" followed closely by taking over the media.

All true concepts, all worth knowing.