Christmas With George is More Fun Than a Barrel of Monkeys

Over the weekend, the mall where I work was swamped. One reason, no doubt, is the simple fact that several busloads worth of shoppers had landed, eager to hunt down some deals. Another is that with Halloween out of the way, the mall has quickly switched into full-on Christmas mode, and folks in my town seem to be taking the bait. But I think at least a bit of the credit ought to go to a curious monkey by the name of George, who stopped by for story time with a slew of appreciative kids.

The beloved primate continues to enchant young readers with new adventures despite the deaths of his creators in 1977 and 1996. In Merry Christmas, Curious George, released last year, George gets himself into a tricky situation when the Man in the Yellow Hat takes him to a nursery in search of a Christmas tree. Each one seems so fantastic, George happily swings from tree to tree, until the magnificent specimen in which he is resting is chopped down, strapped to a truck and carted away to a children's hospital.

Never one to let his fear get the better of his curiosity, George soon ventures from behind the needles and investigates the hospital, where he is greeted by excited children and an aggravated nurse. A monkey has no business in the hospital, especially when he takes it upon himself to decorate the tree that brought him there with pilfered items such as x-rays and get well balloons. Who will persevere in this battle of the wills?

The story was written by Cathy Hapka, who I assume is the same Cathy Hapka who wrote two LOST tie-in novels, one of which was considerably more satisfying than the other. Here, she only has two characters she has to worry about getting right, and that's George and his sunny human pal, who scarcely is involved in the story anyway. Hapka delivers an enjoyable story, and Mary O'Keefe Young illustrates it entertainingly, giving us many glimpses of George's well-meaning mischief.

As a nice, though not terribly practical, bonus, inside the cover is tucked a sheet of thick wrapping paper featuring an assortment of glass ornaments in which scenes involving George are reflected. After witnessing his generous spirit, perhaps the kids reading will be a little more eager to make use of it. In any case, this recent outing of Curious George is a fun tale to be treasured for years to come.

With Installments Like Endangered Species, the Line of LOST Novels May Be Endangered

Shortly before the finale of this season of LOST aired, I got my hands on a copy of Signs of Life, the third in a series of tie-in novels about the epic stuck-on-a-mysterious-island drama. I found it very disappointing, but not as disappointing as the prospect of enduring the rest of the year without any new installments of my favorite current series. So I rushed to the website of the Erie County Library and discovered that I could read the first two books in the series in electronic format. Hoping for the best, I downloaded both and was pleased to find that author Cathy Hapka demonstrated much greater skill and familiarity with the show than Frank Thompson, at least with Secret Identity, the second of her efforts.

Her first outing, while still considerably better than Thompson's, is not as successful as her second, which impressed me more than it should have simply because Signs of Life was so dreary. Entitled Endangered Species, it runs parallel to Secret Identity in that it covers roughly the same time span of the first few days after the crash of Flight 815. The star red-shirt this time around is Faith Harrington, a graduate student passionate about ecology and wildlife, particularly snakes. Very quiet and unassertive, she has a tendency to get yanked around by people with more forceful personalities preying on her desire to make a positive difference in the world.

Faith is a sympathetic character, clearly a kind-hearted young woman who could be a valuable asset given her expertise. She and Arzt ought to put their heads together; I was a bit disappointed that he didn't have a role to play in this book, since I think they would have complemented each other nicely. She reminds me of myself, which is perhaps why I often found myself so frustrated with the way her rampant insecurities lead her to either hang back, so overwhelmed and intimidated that she is immobilized, or go along with the orders of somebody else even when her gut instinct tells her she shouldn't. She comes across as a bit whiny on the island, while in the flashback chapters she allows herself to be manipulated in a series events that rather obviously are leading to a calamitous conclusion. She puts her trust in the wrong people while allowing a moment of disillusionment to destroy a cherished relationship.

The writing in this novel is not as artful as in Secret Identity; the narration often comes across as rather cliched and bland. Moreover, Faith's actions leading up to the event necessitating her quick departure from Australia seem awfully dim-witted to me. Jeff and Dexter, the protagonists in the other books, also made some pretty grievous errors, but Faith just doesn't seem to be paying attention. Or maybe she's too blinded by love to realize what's happening. But when her overzealous activist boyfriend talks her into going to Australia to protest the lecture of her former mentor, it's only one in a series of very poorly considered decisions on her part. I guess the point is that the island is supposed to give her some backbone. Does it succeed?

Perhaps the biggest problem with Endangered Species is that the main character with whom Faith interacts on the island was invented for this book. When I spotted a couple references to him in Secret Identity, I assumed the middle-aged, talkative George must have been a throwback to this first novel, and I was right. The trouble is that even more than the island and all its inherent enigmas, what makes LOST compelling is its characters, so if people are picking up a book based on the show, they want to read about Jack, Kate, Hurley, Charlie, Sun, Jin and all the other castaways they've come to love. I can accept the decision to put the focus on characters who haven't been explored on the show, but in order for this to really feel like something that is part of the LOST universe, there needs to be a bit more involvement from the main players.

It doesn't help that although George is described as a pleasantly gregarious fellow, he's actually rather obnoxious, bossing Faith around minutes after meeting her and blowing a gasket because of her environmentalist views. His violent reaction is explained somewhat when we learn that his job as a real estate developer causes frequent clashes with people of Faith's persuasion, but his behavior is still less than laudable and has a pronounced negative effect on her, particularly when he needlessly squashes a spider that she points out.

What bothers me most about George is the fact that we're seeing him instead of the established castaways. Faith's interaction with most of them is minimal, in some cases limited to just a passing glance. She has brief conversations with Sawyer, Sayid and several others and forms the beginnings of friendships with Hurley and Claire. If I recall correctly, the back cover blurb on this seemed to indicate some sort of confrontation between her and John, but he actually seems poised to mentor Faith as he did with Charlie, Boone, Claire and several of the other castaways. It would have been nice to see that explored a bit more; as it is, she interacts with John, Claire and Hurley more than anyone else other than George, but all three relationships seem pretty tangential.

If you're a devoted fan looking for something to ease the wait until the fourth season, it might be worth it to see if your local library carries these books. This one is the longest, and even so it's barely longer than 200 pages, so you won't be wasting hours upon hours on shoddy writing. The story is engaging enough, but if you want a decent dose of all those fantastic characters from the show, Secret Identity is the only one of the three that really delivers. Something tells me the LOST tie-in novel is an endangered species...

Cathy Hapka Shows She Knows the Secret to Good Television Novelizations With LOST: Secret Identity

Earlier this week, I happened upon three novels written in conjunction with LOST. I selected the third, Signs of Life, to include in a LOST-themed care package and read it before sending it off, at which point I wondered whether the other two books were available through our library. A quick investigation revealed that both could be downloaded in eBook format, automatically disappearing after three weeks. I'd never heard of such a thing, but I was soon sitting with Secret Identity in front of me, scrolling down through the pages and wishing I'd picked this book for the box instead.

Some of my satisfaction with Cathy Hapka's book - which takes place within the first few days after the crash of Flight 815, its final pages corresponding with the death of federal Marshall Edward Mars - stems from lowered expectations after my experience with Signs of Life. While it was nice to see familiar faces in that novel, few of the characters came across very naturally, and the events didn't seem to synch up very well with the established timeline. Secret Identity seems much more skillfully written, with an artistic narrative style and a clear understanding of the different characters and how they relate to one another.

Because it covers a pretty short and iconic span of time on the island, there are all sorts of references to events in the first three episodes, but rather than feeling like a tired retread, it struck me as a good method by which to root us in familiar territory while still giving us a different perspective, much the way the third season's Expose - a wrongly maligned episode, in my opinion - did. Hapka manages to squeeze in every major character and even several minor ones, among them Joanna, Scott, Steve and, in a satisfyingly prominent role, irritating but helpful science teacher Arzt.

There are brief mentions of Faith, Janelle, Larry and George; I know Faith is the main character in Hapka's first LOST novel, Endangered Species, and I presume the other three also were introduced in that first book. None have a significant role here, so if you're reading out of order, they seem a bit out of place, but Hapka seems determined to include everyone, so I suppose these characters' presence makes sense.

The focus of this novel is Dexter Cross, a young man in his first year at a prestigious college. Dexter won my sympathy right away, particularly once it came to his flashback, showing him as an unlucky, impoverished teen picked on by his peers and forced to assist his boorish Aunt Paula (a woman rather reminiscent of Aunt Marge from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) in her frequent trips to the store, where she makes as much of a spectacle of herself as possible and seizes upon an opportunity to sue the company for an alleged injury.

While Dexter is mortified by his aunt's actions, she stuns him by offering some of the money received from her settlement so he can go to college. At first, it seems Dexter's dreams have been handed to him, but along with his aunt's gift comes the expectation that he will major in something that will earn him a lot of money. Soon he finds himself caught in a tangle of lies, trying to conceal from his overbearing aunt and timid mother the fact that he intends to major in English (oh most impractical of all majors!) while spinning ever more elaborate lies to his dazzling girlfriend Daisy about his high-brow family back home.

On the island, Dexter awakes, having been helped out of the wreckage by Boone and watched over by Arzt. In a state of confusion, he embarks on a search for Daisy, but no one seems to have seen her. What's more, several people insist they've seen him wandering around in the jungle. Investigating the matter further, Dexter sees his doppelganger for himself, or thinks he does anyway... He has more than one encounter with this mysterious person, and the inclination is to see him as some sort of hallucination or vision along the order of Jack seeing Christian or Eko seeing Yemi. But then how to explain the fact that other people see him too? Hapka never really delivers on that score, and we are left to wonder along with Dexter just what the deal is.

But on the whole his story is much more coherent than that of Jeff Hadley, the protagonist in Signs of Life. Dexter's flashback chapters - all of the even ones - are just as engaging as the ones that occur on the island; he's very likable and easy to relate to, while his story has obvious echoes of The Prince and the Pauper and Aladdin, tales of a poor boy trying to pose as a prince and finding himself in a little over his head. Most importantly, though, Hapka has a very enjoyable writing style that lends her prose an air of seamlessness. Her descriptions of the castaways are dead on, so it's a lot easier to accept her introduction of new characters as well.

While many of his encounters with the 815ers are fairly superficial - bumping into Sawyer as he's pillaging the fuselage, trying to play psychologist for an unresponsive Rose, chatting up John as he carves the whistle that will eventually aid in the finding of Vincent - he forms close friendships with Boone and Shannon, who are close to his age and remind him of his college friends. They have some nice scenes together, and almost all of his interactions with the various castaways seem true to character.

My biggest disappointment with the book was probably the glaring inconsistency in terms of the timing of the crash, since Hapka has it occurring during Dexter's spring break. I guess it wasn't written in stone that the airdate of LOST's pilot episode and the date of the crash were the same until Live Together, Die Alone, which aired several months after this book was published. But surely the creators would have known, and I'd think that would be one fact they'd be sure to pass on to those writing official tie-in novels in order to avoid this situation. This novel has the crash occurring about six months before or after it actually did, and considering how the plane crashed, and the fact that days almost seem like weeks on the island, it strikes me as a pretty big deal.

Aside from a couple of quibbles, though, Secret Identity is a breezy read with consistent enough characterization and dialogue to satisfy LOST fans. I'm not sure why Hapka didn't write the third tie-in novel, but if there is to be a fourth, here's hoping she's at the helm again.