2 posts tagged “special topics in calamity physics”
Much like the lush worlds of those stories and art, the Mouse Territories are not for those with weak constitutions. Terror hides in every dark corner. Friends are lost in battle. Treachery and treason infect souls. I'm not sure if David Petersen intends his Mouse Guard to be children's lit but I'm sure it will be considered as such. Taken that way, it's the kind of kid lit I like. It doesn't lie or coddle. It tells children what they need to know, not that bad things exist (they already know this) but that bad things can be dealt with (why do I feel like I'm stealing that from something I saw this week?).
Each chapter opens with words of wisdom from Mouse Guard text and guide books. I was particularly taken with this one:
Recommended."Clouds, leaves, soil, and wind all offer themselves as signals of changes in the weather. However, not all the storms of life can be predicted."
"...never try to change the narrative structure of someone else's story, though you will certainly be tempted to, as you watch those poor souls in school, in life, heading unwittingly down dangerous tangents, fatal digressions from which they will unlikely be able to emerge. Resist the temptation. Spend your energies on your story. Reworking it. Making it better. Increasing the scale, the depth of content, the universal themes. And I don't care what those themes are — they're yours to uncover and stand behind— so long as, at the very least, there is courage. Guts. Mut, in German. Those around you can have their novellas...their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you...you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last."
-Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl, Penguin Books, 2007
