The Boxes | ||||||||||||
William Sleator | ||||||||||||
Dutton Children's Books, 189 pages | ||||||||||||
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A review by Victoria Strauss
Annie, the heroine of The Boxes, has one favourite person in the world: her Uncle Marco, who
is constantly travelling on exciting secret adventures, and looks and acts far younger than his actual
age. When the book opens he's about to depart again, but this time he leaves Annie with a
responsibility: to take care of two mysterious boxes, one made of wood, one made of metal. The boxes,
he tells Annie, must be kept separate, and no one must know about them. On absolutely no account can they be opened.
Naturally, Annie is consumed with curiosity, and after a while opening the boxes is all she can think
about. Eventually she pries open the wooden box, which she has stowed in the root cellar of the big old
Victorian house where she lives with her fat, mean, miserly Aunt Ruth. A tiny crablike creature comes
scuttling out, and disappears into the darkness of the basement. The metal box, hidden in Annie's
closet, turns out to contain a strange clocklike device, marked with odd hieroglyphics. Somehow,
opening the second box activates the clock, which now seems to be measuring time, though not in any
way Annie can understand. Meanwhile, in the basement, the crablike creature has begun to
reproduce. The resulting tribe of beings is able to communicate telepathically; they inform Annie
that by opening the boxes she has become the "nervous system," a link of communication between them
and the clock, which they appear to worship as a kind of god.
Annie and her friend Henry, in whom she has confided, discover that the clock, if asked in a certain
way (and provided with sacrifices) can actually slow time. But the evil Crutchley Development, a
construction company that wants to tear down the old neighbourhood where Annie lives and build a huge
mall in its place, has hatched a plot to steal the clock and use its time-slowing power for their own
greedy ends. Annie and Henry must find a way to prevent this from happening, foiling the company
and saving the neighbourhood.
The Boxes is a fast-paced, vividly imagined book. We aren't talking realism here: the
twists and turns of the plot are contrived, and the adult characters are entirely two-dimensional. But
young readers will love the fascinatingly creepy details of the creatures and the clock, and identify
with Henry and Annie, who are as appealingly brave and resourceful as the various grownups they must
outwit -- from miserly Aunt Ruth, who can't resist Crutchley Development's huge financial offer, to the
evil Mr. Crutchley, who wants to slow time so that he can build malls faster than anyone else -- are
satisfyingly slimy. There are some lessons to be learned: Annie, a girl who spends far too much
time trying to keep others happy, discovers how to stand up for herself. There is even some food for
thought: Crutchley Development stands for all the greedy companies in the world who try
to gobble up everything old and wild.
The book's ending, which resolves the Crutchley plot but provides no explanation of the box-creatures,
the clock, or the connection between them, takes the characters off on what appears to be the beginning
of another adventure. I'm assuming a sequel is in the works. I hope so -- I'd really like to
know where those creatures come from.
Victoria Strauss is a novelist, and a lifelong reader of fantasy and science fiction. Her most recent fantasy novel The Arm of the Stone is currently available from HarperCollins EOS. For details, visit her Web site. |
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