About half of What Came from the Stars was good, a story of a family wracked with grief for their mom, threatened with having their beachfront land consumed by condominiums, having to fight a terrible evil. The other half? Boring. Boring in a way that you wanted to throw the book across the room.
The Good Part
Tommy and Patty’s mom died in a car accident a few months before the story begins. Tommy blames himself because his mom, usually a careful driver, and he got into a small fight when she dropped him off at school, just before she spun out of control on the icy road. His sister Patty has not spoken since.
Their father is an artist who has barely touched his paints since the accident. They live in an old, beat up house on the ocean near Plymouth, Massachusetts. The local Realtor, conveniently married to the lieutenant governor, greedily plans to get an easement through their property to build condominiums. The scenes in the local zoning board are excellent; we see that the other land owners all feel it is unfair but they are all only too glad it is not their land she covets. No one speaks for Tommy’s family and the town grants the easement.
Tommy has friends and enemies. The Realtor’s daughter is a total pain in the neck and a loud-voiced bully. Tommy’s teacher suddenly takes ill and is replaced by a mysterious sub. Tommy can tell that the sub is linked to the mysterious vandalism in the town.
I’ve not read Gary Schmidt’s books before but will look for them now. He has a gift to take a simple story and make it compelling, readable, the characters real people that you care about.
The Bad Part
Maybe if you are twelve and just finished reading every book J. R. R. Tolkein ever wrote you might like the ponderous, dull parts with the heroic wording. I did not. It was incredibly difficult to wade through and I didn’t feel like Mr. Schmidt really got the right voice. It was not campy silly nor was it inspiring good. It was just plain ponderous and overwrought. I winced every time I turned the page and saw we were back to the heroic tale of the Valorim.
Overall
I have to give this book 4 stars despite the way too heavy dose of bad heroic fantasy prose. The characters and story of Tommy and his family, their friends and the nasty Realtor were too good to not rate this high. But oh, the bad parts. If I could rate them separately they would get a 1.
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