Review: Spell "Great Literature This Isn't, But It's An Enjoyable Read In Its Own Way"

Book review: The Spell of the Sorcerer's SkullOn Christmas Day, a snowstorm swept across New York, dropping close to two feet of snow in Schenectady, and around a foot in Scenic Whitney Point, where Kate and I were visiting my parents. Not being foolish enough to travel in such weather (we had originally planned to come back to the Albany area that afternoon), we spent an extra night, and a lazy day lounging in front of a roaring fire.

I didn't feel much like reading the books I had with me, so we pawed through the old books in my parents' basement, and I picked this up. It's one of Bellairs's "gothic" kids' books, and thus not especially Christmas-y, but otherwise well suited to the situation-- mildly scary, with a happy ending, and the whole thing can be read in an hour and a half or so.

Johnny Dixon is a young boy who lives with his grandparents in New England (his father is a fighter pilot in Korea), and gets into a number of sorcerous scrapes over the course of several books. In this case, Johnny and his good friend Professor Roderick Childermass are on vacation in New Hampshire when they stumble on an ornate clock carved by one of the Professor's ancestors. The clock contains a meticulously crafted replica of the room in which another ancestor met a mysterious end, and the discovery sets in motion a curse laid on the Childermass line. Upon returning home, the professor disappears, and it's up to Johnny to rescue him with the aid of his good friend Fergie, the local priest Father Higgins, and an odd assemblage of pseudo-Catholic mysticism.

Great Literature this isn't, but it's an enjoyable read in its own way (as are all of Bellairs's kids' books).

The Library of Babel
August 2002