Rating: WORTHY!
This is a middle grade novel, the start of a series which, having read this first volume, I felt would work for the intended age range, although I had a few issues with it personally. Overall though, I rate it a worthy read for the intended age group. Note that it has nothing to do with the Avatar Airbender kind of stories, and indeed, nothing to do with bending sound at all, so the title is completely off. More on this anon.
The story features Leo Lomax and his younger brother Hollis; both attend an arts and science school in New York city, but now their parents are dead - so we're led to believe. I say that not because the novel suggests otherwise, but that the circumstances of their death are by no means nailed down. The truth is they disappeared in the Arctic (or Antarctic - I forget which ), and now Leo and Hollis have to move in with their rather oddball Uncle Crane.
Crane is a very wealthy man, having made a fortune in trading priceless (evidently not quite priceless LOL!) artifacts - cultural symbols, archaeological finds, rare fossils and so on. In short, these are great source material for a series of children's adventures. Crane may even be an outright criminal, but this is never confirmed or denied. Curiously, though, he lives in a nasty run-down dockyard warehouse where he houses literally thousands, maybe even millions of dollars' worth of his stock-in-trade, evidently with minimal security. I did warn you that he was oddball!
Leo is obsessed with capturing noises and sounds on a portable recorder. He evidently does nothing with these other than capture them, and this sound-recording habit plays no part in the story, so that felt a bit weird to me. It seemed like a clunky way to depict that he had a deep interest in sound. His brother is into playing music and has organized, or is organizing, more than one band in which he plays drums.
On his thirteenth birthday - a significant age in some cultures and religions - Leo gets a letter from his dear departed dad - a guy who studied sounds in nature and made recordings as an ethnomusicologist - informing Leo that he was not born in NYC as he had been hitherto led to believe, but on an island in the pacific during a ceremony. There is an odd disk - an old style analogue home-made disk, which Leo eventually manages to play at the used record store owned by a family friend. From this point on, Leo is suddenly sensitized to objects - not all objects but certain one which 'speak' to him - and can experience at least some of their history just by touching. So yes, there is no sound-bending. There is psychometry, but "Psychometric Bender" is a lot less catchy as a novel title, isn't it?
In exploring his new-found skill with his BFF Trevor, who is conveniently an electronics wizard, Leo discovers, amongst his uncle's artifact collection, a certain crate in storage which calls out very loudly to Leo in a very sad series of impressions and images. Tracking these down to an old recording his father once made, Leo realizes that the impressions he has been getting are form dolphins which have been used in experiments, and which may be used again if he doesn't destroy the object the has found - but it belongs to his uncle and is worth a quarter million dollars. What's a thirteen year old to do?
I found it odd that at one point in the story, Leo and a purported dolphin expert are talking about leading dolphins from an island where experiments were conducted in the past, to join the dolphin sanctuary just fifty miles away - like the dolphins couldn't function without human help, and like they couldn't have found this island themselves - especially since we've already been told that dolphins are very vocal (they use dolphones, maybe? LOL!), and that sound carries a long way under water.
I found it equally improbable that once the artifact was broken, Crane wouldn't have retrieved it and sold it anyway - it could have been, if not fixed, the copied. Crane's acceptance of this loss of a quarter mill wasn't really believable - although it was ameliorated somewhat by the fact the Crane is now more interested in pursuing another artifact with which he inexplicably believes Leo can help him.
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One thing which bothered me about this novel was the total absence of females. There was one, who was commendably a doctor (non-medical), but she hardly figured in it at all. There were no girls of the same age as Leo and Hollis, which, given that there were two authors, one male, one female, was a shameful omission.
I did not like the anthropomorphization of the dolphins. It's always a huge mistake to convince yourself that that wild animals, even very intelligent ones, necessarily think and feel just like humans do, especially if they've evolved for tens of millions of years in a completely different environment from us. There's no doubt that they think and feel, but to assume they're just like us and have our values and predilections is to do them a serious disservice. That said, dolphins (rather a lot of them) have actually been used for military purposes (military porpoises, no doubt! LOL!). Exactly what they are used for remains somewhat suspect although of course the US military denies any wrong-doing. The sad fact is that animals have been used for military purposes of one kind or another ever since Genghis Khan, Hannibal, and others.
Although I don't plan on reading any more in this series, and despite a few issues from an adult perspective, this looks to me to be plenty entertaining, informative, and scientific - for the most part - for younger children and I consider it a worthy read for that intended age group.
