Lately I seem to be alternating between reading The New Yorker and reading middle-grade fiction, which is pretty satisfying. (The April 11th issue of The New Yorker was amazing! It had zero long articles about politics or economics, but had long articles about: an Icelandic artist, a walk in the Alps, a motel owner/voyeur, and Filipina domestic workers in New York. It was basically my ideal New Yorker issue.) For my latest middle-grade read, I found myself picking up The Wright 3, even though I didn’t really love its predecessor, Chasing Vermeer, and hadn’t planned to read any of the sequels. (What happened is, I found a copy of the third book in the series on the sidewalk and took it home, and then figured if I was going to read more Blue Balliett, I might as well go in order.) The good news is, I think The Wright 3 is better than Chasing Vermeer: the writing’s less clunky, and the supernatural/unexplained elements didn’t bug me this time around, maybe because I was expecting them, or maybe because they’re introduced right at the book’s start.
So: Petra, Calder, and Tommy are in 6th grade, and are figuring out if/how they can all be friends—Tommy and Calder used to be best pals, but Tommy moved away, and Calder and Petra got close in his absence, but now Tommy’s back, and he kind of wants Calder to himself. But a cause bigger than the kids unites them. One day their teacher tells them that the Robie House, a Frank Lloyd Wright creation in their own neighborhood of Hyde Park, is to be disassembled and sold, in pieces, to four different museums. She’s outraged, and so are the kids, who have been studying art and architecture. The class stages a demonstration against the house’s dismantling, and Petra, Calder, and Tommy decide they want to figure out a way to save it. Meanwhile, some weird things are happening: a mason has fallen from the house’s roof, and Petra finds not one but two copies of an H.G. Wells book (The Invisible Man), and when the kids look at the house, they see weird flashes of light, or hear weird things: it’s almost like the house itself is trying to communicate with them. But what is it saying, and can the kids figure out a way to save it?
I like the pacing of this book, the way its mysterious events unfold, and I like the characters, including the kids’ teacher, who has them exploring questions like “Is a building a piece of art when you can’t see all of it at the same time? Can a building be a piece of art on the outside but not on the inside, and vice versa?” (11). I like how Petra sits in her room, facing the train tracks, and writes down what she sees as trains pass, and how Tommy is a collector of all things fish-related, and how Calder thinks spatially/mathematically with his set of pentominoes. This book was solidly pleasing, and I’m looking forward to the next one.
Leave a Reply