This book was originally reviewed on my blog, Books from Bleh to Basically Amazing.Figgs and Phantoms by Ellen Raskin won the Nebery Honor in 1975. Four years later, she won the Newbery Award for The Westing Game. I read The Westing Game several years ago, and I really enjoyed it. It was wonderfully complex and the characters were simply delightful. (More on that later). So, I was actually quite excited to read Figgs and Phantoms.Alas... Figgs just didn't work for me.. It was quite the disappointment. I started this book, not really knowing what to expect about the story itself, but looking forward to it, because I had so enjoyed The Westing Game. Sigh.Figgs and Phantoms is about a family, The Figgs, who are all wildy quirky, except the youngest daughter/niece, Mona. She is decidedly normal, hates her family's weirdness, and is terribly embarrassed by what she believes the people of her town, Pineapple say about all those crazy Figgs.I thought that Raskin was trying too hard with this novel, and as a result she missed the mark just about everywhere. Every single character has something weird, wacky, crazy, or unbelievable about them. All of them, except Mona. (She's just bitter about life and everything in it. Rather than make her quirky, I'd say she's just a teenager.) It got to be a little bit too much for me. Her mom, Sister Figg Newton (Newton being her married name) tap dances. All the time. Everywhere. Her uncle Truman, the human pretzel and sign maker (but horrible speller). And the list goes on and on and on. There was too much for me to believe it. Sometimes I'd look at the book and want to shout at the author- Enough already! I get it! They are weird. Can we move on please?!- Or something like that anyway...The majority of the book focuses on Mona and her angst. I think it's supposed to be about her struggle to find her place in life, and accept her family as they are but it always just felt like angst to me, and not the good, realistic kind. Just the really annoying, get over yourself already type. Raskin makes hints about what she is supposed to be learning, and she gives us subtle clues here and there, but by that point, I was so fed up with Mona's whining and general annoying-ness that I didn't care. I just wanted the book to end. The only person Mona feels close to is her Uncle Florence. Everyone else is ridiculous, embarrassing and needs to just stop so that Mona can stop feeling embarrassed to go out in public. But, Uncle Florence is sick, and getting sicker.The Figgs believe that when you die, you go to a place they call Capri. It's been written about in a journal passed down the family. The family meets together periodically for a night of reading from the family journals about Capri, a ritual they call 'Caprification'. Mona, or course, barely participates but when her uncle Florence dies (not really a spoiler, because it gives strong and obvious hints on the back cover) Mona knows she must find Capri so she can either bring her uncle back, or live with him in Capri. Even more weirdness ensues.Nothing in this book was very believable to me. I had a hard time believing that much of what happened, and in the order or way they happened would be possible. Very often we were taken from point A to point F and just expected to believe that this was the natural progression of events, never mind the fact that we missed points B-E in the process.On a positive note, I did enjoy several of the characters and their quirks, especially in the beginning. The secondary characters are often delightfully fun and I actually really enjoyed their time on the page. Truman's misspellings were fun (even one sign where he misspells his own name) and I especially liked the idea of Romulus and Remus Figg, the Walking Book of Knowledge and the Talking Adding Machine, respectively. I did wish the secondary characters had been more a part of the novel, and had been more fleshed out. I don't think I would have been as annoyed by the amount of quirks these characters had it they had also had more personality. But no. They were written as if their unique trait was all there was too them. It was how they were defined, described, and we didn't get to see any more than that. I do recognize that much of this is probably because that is how Mona sees them, but knowing why doesn't make it any less annoying.All in all, I'd probably say this is one to skip. I don't know that I would really recommend it to very many people. I read it because I enjoyed The Westing Game, and because, as you (should) know, I'm trying to read the Newbery list. But, it's one I feel I could probably have done with out. There wasn't anything really special about it. The rating came really easy too. I finished the book, looked at it a moment, and then said- Meh.
The prejudice that holds that a book cannot be worthwhile unless it treats of serious and realistic subjects in a serious and realistic fashion is thankfully on the wane these days, though it remains powerful: don't hold your breath for Neil Gaiman's next novel to be shortlisted for the Pulitzer or the Booker. Still, genre fiction has come a long way, so the next step is, I feel, for the literary merit of children’s books to be more widely recognized. While some children’s books (I refer here to books for kids roughly 10 and up, or whatever age you were when you first read, say, "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe") are indeed too simple-minded to hold the interest of an adult, the good ones are not. There are some adult concerns that they don’t touch on, but very few books attempt to cover all aspects of life. It is true that the structures of children’s books are in general simple and straightforward, their language isn’t overly complex, and they are relatively easy to read, but the same thing is true of, for example, Dickens and Austen. And of course interesting characters and fascinating stories appeal to readers of all ages: just because the book in which they come is designed to be accessible to children as well as adults doesn’t make it any less worth reading.All of which is a roundabout justification for my decision to reread “The Westing Game”, and then upon discovering that Ellen Raskin had written three other books, to read those as well (not that this was a very time-consuming project: all four books are short and read easily). “The Westing Game” is of course a long-standing classic, a brilliantly devious little mystery featuring a large group of characters who search for the killer of the mysterious and wealthy Mr. Westing following rules he laid out in his will. Though we really only get to know a couple of the characters well, all are given enough depth, and enough secrets, to be interesting and to keep the plot moving. And even though I remembered the solution to the mystery, I still found it highly readable, which is a sure sign of quality. For the most part, Rankin plays it straight: there are occasional jokes but in the main Rankin concentrates on freely distributing clues, red herrings, hints of the mysterious past, and all the other ingredients of a classic murder mystery, only with a final twist that I don’t think Agatha Christie ever thought of. Rereading a book as in adult, you often discover new things about it: in this case, I found, to my surprise, that “The Westing Game” is also a paean to America as a melting pot, as well as an endorsement of what politicians like to call the free enterprise system (I can’t go into details without ruining the mystery, though). Presumably a combination of these factors led to it being awarded the Newbery, which it certainly deserved.Interestingly, though, "The Westing Game" is completely unlike any of Raskin's other books, and anyone who goes into “Figgs and Phantoms” hoping to read something similar is going to be disappointed. "Figgs and Phantoms" is, quite frankly, a weird book, one that really represents, I think, Raskin getting her feet under her as a writer. Unlike her other books, this one has no mystery: instead, it has a long, vaguely psychedelic scene in which the main character, Mona, takes something sort of like a dreamwalk in an attempt to join her dead uncle in Capri, which is not the physical real-world place but rather a sort of heaven that her family members believe they will go to when they die. Said family members are the former members of a vaudeville troupe who still follow their old trades as much as possible, even thought they are now firmly settled in Pineapple: for instance, there’s a running joke about the constant parade of unlikely groups — girl scouts, firefighters, etc. — coming to take tap dancing lessons from Mona’s mother. The plot, such as it is, is driven by the fact that Mona is ashamed of her flamboyantly theatrical family: the only one who she really respects is her uncle Florence, who has quit his theatrical life (he was a midget whose child star act didn’t age well) to become a rare book dealer. The first part of the book, essentially, consists of our introduction to said family members: the second part is the dreamwalk, when Mona, devastated by her uncle’s death, attempts to rejoin him in Capri, but ends up instead reconciling herself to her life and her family in the real world. The book has an appealingly off-beat quality to it, but most of the characters are just sketches, the plot is minimal, and the dreamwalk sequence doesn’t quite work. As a first effort it’s not bad, but it doesn’t measure up to the later books.
What do You think about Figgs & Phantoms (2001)?
The positive: Funny and heartbreaking and meaningful. Seeing the good and the bad in your family instead of only one or the other, understanding the naturalness of death, forgiving the people who've accidentally (and unknowingly) caused you pain.The negative: The second half is most people's least favorite, because it is in some ways a departure from what came before. I loved it, though.The summary: I love Ellen Raskin. In both this and The Westing Game, she gives so much respect and depth to her child characters, while also keeping them flawed and sad and strange, like children really are. Just a fantastic read if you have the right sort of temperament.
—Sara
To say that I really like Ellen Raskin’s "The Westing Game" is an understatement. I adore that book. So when I got copies of two other Raskin books ("The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel)" and "Figgs and Phantoms") in a giveaway, I had great expectations…and while these other books exhibit her signature style (and illustrations), they are not in the same league.While she lives in an eccentric world, Mona, daughter of Sister Figg Newton and Newton “Newt” Newton still deals with preadolescent difficulties. She is embarrassed and often annoyed by her zany parents. She feels that the only person who understands her is her uncle, Florence Figg.Uncle Florence hints that he is soon to leave this world but Mona doesn’t want him to leave her with “a tap-dancer for a mother and an incompetent used-car dealer for a father.” The Figgs descend from circus performers and have their own personal heaven they call Capri. Mona finds her way there to search for her beloved uncle and readers can decide whether Mona is dreaming or if her spirit is actually in Capri when she passes out.Each writer creates a world and Raskin creates peculiar ones with lots of clever wordplay where loving families are made up of eccentric characters—some related and some not. Children trying to figure themselves out in these books deal with sometimes immature adults—another hallmark of children’s literature. While there were a few slightly dated and/or not politically correct notions floating through "The Westing Game," Raskin’s earlier books exhibit even more of these themes. And at times the quirkiness and whimsy is a bit much.Read more of my review on my booksploitation blog.
—Jada
For some reason, although I was able to forgive The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel) for not being The Westing Game, and forgive The Tattooed Potato and Other Clues for not being either of those, and loved all three, I was never able to forgive this one for not being any of the above--I never tried to read more than the jacket flap. I can recognize this as a good, Newbery-Honor-worthy book without... actually liking it all that much. It doesn't have the likeable, intriguing characters or straightforward writing of the other books, and it isn't nearly as funny as they are, either. Not that it was trying to be funny. But I like funny books.I think it's sad that Ellen Raskin was so very careful and detailed in her book design and then the design gets all messed up in paperback editions. I'm glad my library is broke enough to have an elderly copy of this.
—Wendy
