The Book Jumper (Mechthild Glaser)

The Book Jumper
Mechthild Glaser
Square Fish
Fiction, YA Fantasy
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: Seventeen-year-old Amy Lennox is used to her mother's erratic, free-spirited ways; she even insists on being called Alexis, not Mom. A hard break-up, coupled with a personal disaster in Amy's own life, leads to an impulsive trip back to the Lennox ancestral home, a place Alexis ran away from when she was little more than her daughter's age - and a place with a very special secret that she hasn't even told Amy about. The Lennoxes and the Macalisters of the Scottish isle of Stormsay have in their blood the ability to jump into books and enter any story, though only before their twenty-fifth birthday; after that, they take on lifelong duties to protect the realms of literature.
Amy is thrilled to discover she's inherited this skill... but, just as she comes to Stormsay, things start going very wrong. Someone is meddling in timeless tales, stealing key ideas and leaving permanent alterations in the written word. As Amy investigates, she soon learns that there's more to book jumping than she anticipated, and just because it's all a story doesn't mean it can't hurt - or even kill.

REVIEW: As someone who usually finds the worlds of imagination more attractive than the one I'm stuck inhabiting, I was immediately drawn to the concept of The Book Jumper. I wanted this to be good. I wanted it to be immersive. (In all honesty, and despite one may think from a few of my reviews, I never pick up a book wanting it to be bad. Still, some concepts I hold higher hopes for than others, and this was one of them.) So it was that I ignored some early warning signs - such as Amy being a collection of teen heroine cliches whose reactions are more in line with a preteen, plus the tired trope of an Important Family Secret she's been deliberately and rather pointlessly shielded from - and pushed ahead. Then I reached Amy's first jump into a book... and the first pangs of real disappointment pricked my brain.
Her first jump is into The Jungle Book... not a bad choice (public domain and all), and though Amy claims to be a voracious reader, she admits she hasn't read it yet, which is plausible enough. But her reaction to entering the story is to immediately wonder if they'll break into song like in the Disney cartoon. My suspension of disbelief hit a major air pocket right there. Even not having read the book, by seventeen, simple cultural osmosis should've told her that it was highly unlikely that Kipling's classic was an animated musical (or that popular movies necessarily reflect with any accuracy the book source material), especially if she reads as much as she claims to have read. I could buy this from a younger person whose main exposure to canon is DVDs, but a teenager who has taken on Austen, Goethe, and other works?
Shortly thereafter, Amy meets and speaks to her first in-book character, the tiger Shere Khan, followed soon by a trip to the "Margin" where story characters mix and mingle when not actively retelling their tales, and I had to check the cover to be sure this was a Teen title and not a middle-grade novel that had been misshelved. The book worlds and many of the characters encountered therein just felt too shallow, too simplistic, especially for a book aimed at a slightly older and (presumably) more sophisticated audience. Couple that with Amy's ongoing clumsiness and general obtuseness, and it made for some rough going, despite a few okay mind's-eye-candy moments.
Then there's the whole concept of book jumping and the notion of "protecting" stories. Protect them from what? It's established early on that nobody outside the two clans can enter books to interfere directly with the stories, and that they lose the ability before they reach thirty. No other plausible threat is presented from which the stories need protecting, nor are the protective duties of older Lennoxes and Macalisters made in any way clear. What is there to protect stories from when the protectors themselves are the only ones from which the stories might need protecting, and then only for a decade or two of their existence? (If their duties are to protect literature from shoddy media interpretations, I'd say both clans have a lot of explaining to do, but I digress...) This also limits the suspects in story interference to the populace of Stormsay, which barely cracks double digits - a population of characters little deeper than heroine Amy. (Hands up, those surprised that the blonde teen Macalister girl is a Grade A snob... 'cause blonde, and all.) She misses some obvious clues, and has to be led to others, rarely able to achieve much on her own without help - more often than not from males. The finale, despite itself, builds some real tension and terror, with a decently emotional (if telegraphed) conclusion, barely managing to pull the rating back up to three stars.
There are some nice ideas at play here, lots of potential, and a few good moments that speak to a love of reading and the power of stories. Even during some gooey-eyed makeout sessions, though, I never fully shook the feeling that The Book Jumper, at heart, wanted to be a story for a younger audience, and suffered from being aged up.

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