Thoughts While Reading "The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey"

I just finished reading The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey (though not quick enough, I think). And, as things so often do, got me thinking. What about, you ask? Well, about the characters, their motives, the little nuances, but other things as well.

This book was the sequal of the New York Times bestseller The Mysterious Benedict Society, which I personally thought was fantastic. I didn't think the author, Trenton Lee Stewart, would be able to top himself if he wrote a sequal to this book. But, as I was enveloped in the new adventure of intuitive Reynie, scholarly-but-nervous Sticky, resourceful Kate, and stubborn Constance, I realized that Stewart topped himself easily. I was rather glad that more was shown of what was going on in the minds of some of the other characters besides Reynie. I felt it developed the characters more. What's more, they were thrown into more excitement, danger, and a "higher-stakes game" than before.

I feel that the sign of a good author is the ability to not only create memorable protagonists, but to also to create memorable antagonists. Anyone who read The Mysterious Benedict Society will vividly remember Ledropetha Curtain, the man bent on global control through brainwashing and transmitting voices to people through their minds. This time, this plan seems a bit more drastic (but I will not reveal any details). For as long as I can remember, I have never understood the reason people can be so bent on world domination. With all the people in the world, it's impossible for there not to be opposition to that person's control. The person would then have to figure out how to silence this opposition without creating even more opposition. If the person was the ruler of the world, people would come to him or her with problems, expecting the person to magically make the problem better. I mean, we're all human; we can't use pixie dust to make problems go away (though that would be kind of nice). The way I see it, there's too much pressure and stress.

Then I thought of a conversation within the story, discussing how there seem to be more bad people in the world than good. Someone made the point that bad might just be more noticed or noticable than good. I felt that this was a good point. Think of what you hear on when you turn on the news on TV; fires, earthquakes, shootings, tyrany, bad, bad, bad, bad. That's all you hear; for some reason that's very sellable in mainstream journalism these days. There are people doubting the good in people, or that good even exists at all. For all some people care, "good" is just an urban legend. We need to re-remind these people that there is good in the world; there are good people working against the bad. There are more unsung heroes than maniacal villians in this world; we just need to find them.

On one of the book jacket flaps of The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey, Stewart had a very interesting quote on the characters in his previous book: "I wish I had Reynie's shrewdness and his gift of perception, just as I wish I could read as quick and remember as well as Sticky does, and be as acrobatic as Kate, and have a fraction of Constance's ability to say what she thinks." This got me thinking about my own writing, or most writing in general. People say that writers put themselves in their stories and everything that they write. For myself, I know I put some of my own personality to my characters, plots and choice of words. But in addition, I add things to my characters that I wish I could do or could be. For example, I'm a rather shy, relatively unadventurous person. However, most of my characters are pretty outgoing and daring. Some of the things they pull off I'd never be able to do under normal circumstances, but sometimes I wish I could do the things they do so badly. I'm not sure about other writers, but I think this idea is true for most other writers.