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Library | Call Number | Status |
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Searching... Monmouth Public Library | Fic Garner, E. 2009 | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Mount Angel Public Library | GARNER | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
The skies of Oxford are aflame with meteors the night Edgar Jones comes into the world--clearly this is no ordinary boy. While his mother is apprehensive about her restless, inquisitive child, Edgar's father believes, without a doubt, that his son is destined for greatness. To his father's dismay, Edgar turns his back on the scholarly life and apprentices himself to a blacksmith, but it is not long before his ingenuity and metalworking skill brings him to the attention of a maverick professor at Oxford University, a bone collector with plans for a museum of natural history. Finally Edgar has the opportunity to showcase his singular gifts, but at what cost to himself and his family? Darkly satisfying and compulsively readable,The Ingenious Edgar Jonesis an unforgettable coming-of-age story about the complexities of family life and the journey of one young man as he finds his place in a rapidly changing world. "Garner has made--or unmade--her own visionary Oxford in an enjoyable and eloquent novel." --Times London "Elizabeth Garner successfully draws the reader into her gothic maze of stony streets, thorny thickets, and Machiavellian professors...Garner is also caustic about Oxford's mythical appeal and stacks up a magpie's nest of bright details." --Guardian "Darkly atmospheric...A delight to curl up with." --Metro(London) "Magical, disturbing, and yet utterly compelling." --London Paper
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Set in Oxford in the 1850s, this coming-of-age story looks at the son of an Oxford University night porter with academic ambitions for his heir. Instead, "oddness" and possible dyslexia steer young Edgar Jones to apprentice with a domineering blacksmith. Plucked from the forge by a rebellious Oxford anatomy professor, Edgar soon finds himself torn between his benefactor's progressive ideas about natural history and the traditional beliefs of his father. The succinct plot doesn't help rein in character development and tone, which are all over the map: instead of bright and unconventional, Edgar frequently comes across as antisocial, and his initially doting father turns tyrannical as soon as he finds Edgar struggling to copy out his assigned Bible verses. The middle third is richly drawn-almost Dickensian-but a late lunge into magical realism makes for an unsatisfactory ending. Though enlivened by obvious love for Oxford, memorable villains and a well-captured sense of science's ability to awe and baffle, inconsistencies will frustrate adult readers; historically curious young adults may be more forgiving. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Garner (Nightdancing, 2003) returns with the tale of a mysterious, talented boy livingin 19th-century England. The night Edgar Jones is born, a meteor shower lights up the skies above Oxford University.His father Williamdotes on him, while his mother Eleanor worries about the innate wildness she sees in her only child. The author can't seem to decide on a protagonist, leaving readers without intimate knowledge of or empathy for any one of the Joneses. Curious, precocious and determined, Edgar takes on an almost devilish quality as he grows up, parlaying an apprenticeship at an iron forge into a position at the university, where his father works as a night watchman. The professor who shepherds him into Oxford has dubious intentions, but Edgar falls in love with the ironwork involved in creating the professor's pet project, a museum of natural history. Meanwhile, Eleanor, feeling isolated from her husband and son, starts a sewing business with the help of a benefactress. As the business becomes profitable, she acquires a new sense of independence, though the trials Edgar's mischief brings her, as well as her relationship with an increasingly angry and erratic husband, are endless sources of angst. Garner doesn't fully explore the motivations of her characters, who seem like caricatures. Edgar is certainly bizarre, but he is neither interesting nor likable. He is not scary enough to frighten, clever enough to admire or kind enough to champion. Choosing iron as the source of his inspiration poses a brave challenge, but the theme is painfully over-romanticized, and the fantastical elements require too much suspension of belief, especially at the end. Striving for attractively old-fashioned lyricism, the prose seems instead fabricated and childish. There are some thrilling scenes as the plot twists nicely toward the finale, but by then most readers are unlikely to care much anymore. Disturbing, but not compelling. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Misunderstood, misfit hero Edgar Jones, a boy who revels in invention, who literally wants to fly, whose very body marks him as strange, will grab your heart. Edgar's personality rivals that of John Irving's Owen Meany a brilliant, odd little boy with a naive trust in human nature and a childish thirst for adventure that sets him apart from the staid Victorian world. Edgar's inquisitiveness lands him in trouble with his masters: first the blacksmith; then the ironworkers; then his beloved professor, an inventor; and finally his own father. Like any inventor, Edgar must first learn to take things apart, and that's what he does; but it's what he creates and why he does it that make him so compelling. Garner uses Edgar's character as a way of exploring the ideological revolution in Oxford during the early 1800s, as science battles religion for supremacy. Edgar's parents find themselves trapped in this changing world, first encouraging their son's ingenuity and boldness, then shocked by the outcome . The lovely cadence of Garner's language and her careful attention to the physical world as a story mirror ( Edgar was flying over the skin of the world ) create an atmosphere of excitement and wonder Edgar's outlook on life as a reading experience. Heartbreaking, exhilarating, and unforgettable, Edgar's rite of passage into adulthood is also a Darwinian portrait of a society in upheaval.--Baker, Jen Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ON a night when shooting stars fill the skies, a child is born with the head of an old man and a strip of bristly hair running down his spine. With this celestial omen, Elizabeth Garner opens her novel "The Ingenious Edgar Jones," the tale of an unusual child making his way through a 19th-century Oxford riven by struggles of faith and scientific inquiry. Edgar Jones, the son of a college porter, quickly shows signs of mechanical genius. His father is initially entranced by the boy's promise, if concerned by his unorthodoxy. Stifled by book-learning, Edgar launches himself into a series of metalworking apprenticeships in which he finds scope for his curiosity and canvas for his imaginings - until a combination of mischief and pride leads, as legends demand, to a spectacular downfall. The legendary quality of the story announces itself early. Though the book is not fantastical (save for one disappointing supernatural flourish at the end), the language invests each workaday item with folkloric significance. Edgar himself is a sort of changeling; the gap-toothed woman who presides over his birth is like a fairy godmother, distributing blessings that might be curses; a blacksmith stands girded like an ogre; the collapsed iron latticework of a museum roof becomes a dragon, a chitinous demon sprawling after the Fall. Or this, of molten iron: "The more he looked, the clearer he could see it: the cliff sides of fire, the verdant valleys of white light, the hidden land stretched out its borders, the sea spun at the edges, and on the sea, a single fleck of ore, a black raft upon a golden ocean, a bold vessel, scaling the fiery waters. Edgar would give his whole life to be a sailor upon such a ship." This transformation of the banal into the wondrous beautifully echoes the alchemical experiments and investigations simmering in Victorian Oxford. In the natural history museum that Edgar helps build, stonemasons carve flora and fauna harking back to Gothic cathedrals and forward to a world of Darwinian theory. On the lintels, men chisel apes instead of angels. (The real-life equivalent of Edgar's museum would soon host the famous Huxley/Wilberforce debate on evolution.) Throughout, Garner's lush metaphorical prose offers the same delights as one of Edgar's creations, a light show presenting in succession the mythologies of superstition, science and law. Given the story's mythological resonances, it's perhaps unsurprising that the characters have a flat, fairy-tale feel. Edgar's father starts as a man delighted with his son's wonder at the world, thrilled by knowledge and opportunity - then collapses, in the space of a page and a half, into a lumbering bigot. The conversion smacks of authorial convenience. The nameless professor who employs Edgar is clearly a villain, but as an antagonist is unsurprising and tepid. Edgar's first words - "Papa, am I a bad boy?" - point to rich questions of moral nuance that aren't put into play until late in the novel. Readers may feel disappointed that, for all the book's auguries and dark hints, Edgar's career has only just begun as the story ends - so we can never really assess whether he fulfills the opening promise of falling stars. It is hard not to wish Garner had given us less of Edgar's long, slow apprenticeship and more of his remarkable flight into adulthood. The most satisfying invention in the novel, in the end, is Garner's own transformative prose, converting science into magic and rational inquiry into the poetry of adventure. "A miracle," she writes, is "the changing of one thing into another, or giving life to dead things" - and this she does ingeniously. Edgar makes his way through a 19th-century Oxford riven by struggles of faith and scientific inquiry. M. T. Anderson's novel "The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing" won a National Book Award in 2006.