Rating: WARTY!
This is an absurd excursion into absurdist humor for young children aimed at drawing their attention to the problem of recycling and responsible waste disposal, but as I started to read it, I began to feel increasingly that it was rather too far divorced from reality to make it effective. In addition to this, it proffered some really bad science and poor plotting, so overall, I honestly don't feel I can recommend this series because it's ultimately a wolf in recycled sheep's clothing.
The Lane family, which in the opening adventure consists of George the dad and kids Evie, and Rick (mom Melinda is at work which is another issue) are eco-nuts who travel around in a hollowed-out Sequoia tree that had been brought down by lightning and now has been turned into a hovercraft. At the start of this story, they're trespassing on a wildlife preserve that has been turned into a garbage dump by a corporation owned by the father of one of Evie's class-mates, Vesuvia Piffle.
They're spotted, and get into trouble with Winterpole, the global policing organizing that fights any change at all. I found that amusing, except that Winterpole is more like the Nazis than ever it is like Interpol. They don't even have a trial any more: they simply impose a penalty! While there is no problem with a bird being killed by garbage dumping, it's against the law to remove that bird from certain death, because it's in a protected preserve! Sounds like something George Bush invented, huh? Actually Winterpole mostly reminded me of the bureaucracy in the Terry Gilliam movie, Brazil which is brilliant. Winterpole, not so much.
Some of the information included in the novel is a bit misleading at best. Yes, there is a North Pacific Gyre, but it's a oceanic circulation system which encompasses pretty much the whole of the North Pacific. It's not like it's a little whirlpool, so to talk about an island of trash here is misleading, not only because there is no such island, but also because it makes the North Pacific Gyre seem small and inconsequential, and it's not. Far from it. Yes, it is true that if you collected all the floating garbage in the Pacific together, it would make an impressive island of trash, but the trash is spread out thinly and as such, is not readily observable - which makes it all the more insidious and difficult to combat.
In this book, the story has it that the "island" is slowly being munched-down by three robot elephants invented by dad, which are turning it into floating plastic blocks. Dad's plan is to create the eighth continent here as a wild-life preserve. To me this was a completely wrong-headed lesson to give to children. If the plastic is toxic and dangerous, then how is making a whole continent out of it improving anything? And what would a floating continent do to Earth's oceanic eco-system? Very likely it would interrupt the North Pacific Gyre and precipitate an ice age. None of this is addressed, and the plan is fundamentally flawed, as I shall point out shortly.
Without that gyre, Earth's climate would change even more than it is already. Indeed, some scientists fear that global warming will kill these gyres (there are many of them, all important) and hence kill global oceanic circulation and bring on a new ice age. That sounds paradoxical, but it's actually a real danger. Almost worse than this, though, is the idea that we should abandon the rest of the Earth to corporate depredation and pollution, and build a little wildlife preserve in the middle of the Pacific to "protect" them. Such a deluded plan would inevitably fail.
You can't get the endangered species from the entire Earth and put them all into a microcosm in the North Pacific. There are too many species in widely varying eco-systems, in too many diverse locales to be able to 'fix it' by concentrating them all in one place. This sounds disturbingly like the Nazi plan of concentrating 'undesirables' in one place - the concentration camps - to 'fix' that 'problem'. It doesn't work because it's a fundamentally (with the emphasis on 'mental') idiotic idea to begin with. You can't fix our problems with global destruction. Nor can you fix them with a sci-fi version of the Noah's ark fantasy.
There were other minor issues - such as the fact that Switzerland doesn't celebrate Arbor day! I don't know what nationality Mr. Snow from Winterpole is, but it's odd to hear him talk of Arbor day in Switzerland, even if he is American. Another issue was the hypocrisy in having Lane senior obsess over global pollution when his own home is a polluted mess. At one point the kids go down through several basements, and there is a complete mess down there, including the results of explosions that have never been cleaned up, piles of junk, and rusting remains of archived artifacts. How is this any better than the pollution they were bewailing earlier? Yes, at least it's confined to his home, but it was a poor example to set and a poor choice by the author.
Why the male figure in the Lane family is portrayed as the scientist and the woman as your standard clichéd corporate rep is a genderist mystery I don't have the patience to go into here. Suffice to say this was one in a plethora of issues I had with this book. In one instance, Rick, wearing a SCUBA said he could smell Evie's breath. That's hard to believe (even if it wasn't her breath he was actually smelling). The author evidently didn't grasp the 'self-contained' part of the underwater breathing apparatus.
In this same section, the author has these kids diving in the Arctic ocean wearing wet suits. No! It's a dry suit for the bitterly cold water, otherwise you'll freeze! That wasn't even as bad as the fact that they were near the North Pole and yet there was no ice save for a few icebergs. I didn't get whether this was meant to be in the future where the North Pole ice has all melted because of climate change, or whether the author simply didn't grasp that near the north pole, the water is frozen. Maybe he meant 'near the ice cap' instead of' near the pole', but that's not what he wrote. Maybe he doesn't actually understand the concept of the North Pole (or the fact that here are two of them!), because if he did, he could have offered a great, and for children, rather mind-blowing teaching tool here. The magnetic north pole is all over the place. Even the geographic north pole moves because of the Chandler wobble. The North Magnetic Pole, which is what we typically count on as being due north, was determined in 2001 to be in Canada, almost ten degrees away from the geographic pole. Now if that doesn't offer a stupendous potential for an hilarious story, I don't know what does. But it was lost here.
There was a so-called "thermal-charge power plant" which appeared at one point in the story, but this is just another name for a perpetual motion machine, which is impossible and as unscientific as you can get. The biggest "impossible" of all, however, was this compound which supposedly converts all inorganic matter into organic matter, and which is what supposedly will help them make their eighth continent livable. I mentioned I would address this, and I see two problems with it.
First of all, the "continent" is to be created from the plastic garbage in the Pacific, but the compound only works on non-organic matter, and the plastic is organic, so it would not work! I think the author doesn't understand the definition of "organic" in this context. It doesn't mean things which are grown without artificial fertilizer or without antibiotics. It doesn't even mean "living things". In this context, it means things which contain carbon. Plastics made from oil contain carbon! The compound would have no effect on it!
The second problem is, if you have a compound which converts everything non-organic into organic matter (which would be an amazing thing that defied the laws of physics), then how do you contain it? This is a two-fold problem, first regarding storage and second concerning containment in a much broader sense. In what vessel would you store such a compound? You can't keep it in a metal container or a glass container: it would convert it and get loose! You could keep it in an organic container, but what happens as soon as you unleash it to do the work it's designed to do? Recall that this is supposed to be unleashed on a continent surrounded by water - which is inorganic (no carbon)! The water would be converted, and without water the entire planet would die! These people are not scientists, they're morons. I know this is a children's book but does that mean we have to make it stupid?
A separate issue I encountered is one which is common in children's stories involving a school: the unrelenting and unpunished bullying and rampant snobbery. I shudder to think what kind of horrific schools these writers encountered in their youth for them to write in this way. Snobbery is not a crime, but bullying is - or ought to be - in schools. Why were these people able to get away with it? Why were the parents of the victims not up in arms over it? The fact that this is tolerated as a fact of life here is a sad example to set in a book aimed at children.
In one part of the story, when running around in Winterpole's headquarters, the two Lane kids, upon discovering piles of paperwork, made a point about the waste of ink, yet not a word was spoken about the waste of trees! This is so sad in a book which purports to be about eco-consciousness. It was doubly sad, because it was at this same point in the story where things really picked-up and started to be rather entertaining, as Rick and Evie ran around trying to avoid capture. At the risk of being hypocritical myself, I longed for them to wreak more havoc than they did here. Setting the place on fire or blowing it up would have been the wrong way to go, but could there not have been some mulching device turned loose, and shredded the whole building, or something?! No, there could not, and the story never did regain the spark of riotous mischief it had here.
That was the only part of the book that I really enjoyed, yet still I felt let down by it. The rest of it was passable in terms of technical considerations, and in terms of it being the kind of story young kids might like, but in terms of fulfilling its ostensible objective, I found this book to be a serious disappointment and I can't recommend it, and I know my kids would reject it. But then they have a decent science education.
