Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)In "Welcome to the Ark", Elijah was the least developed of the four characters. Miranda was the easiest to empathize with, the clear center of the novel. Doug was clearly hurt, but he expressed it. Taryn had her poems and her deep connections with everyone and everything to show her feelings of loss. Elijah, a superbly intelligent boy diagnosed as autistic, was the string tying them together, but his characterization itself wasn't much thicker than one. He was the raven, both the protector and the protected, and the silent child who grew a voice in his head, on the computer, and eventually quietly out loud.
In "Flight of the Raven", much of Elijah's characterization suffers from being in the focus rather than the background. His character is interesting when based on interactions, but in this book, he's one of three things: the hunted, the hunter, or the symbol. He and Kenny play a game of cat-and-mouse that seems out of character for Elijah- especially for an Elijah who certainly remembers how to "tame" the violence, as he expressed. He might not have been sure if it would work, but none of the kids in WttA with the possible exception of Doug would have refused to try after the events in the book. Elijah, especially, tended to think before acting. His desire to "get back" at Kenny is normal, but his constant hesitations due to his own size seem to contradict the history in WttA, with Taryn calling birds and all four causing Timmy to break his own foot. The ending of this book makes no sense in the context of WttA, which provided so many ways around violence before he used violence as the means to an admittedly non-violent end. The way he used violence was also mind-boggling; his transformation wasn't precipitated by any hard facts, but he was willing to try that over something tried and true. It rang false for the mind of such a logical character.
Elijah and the raven have always been intertwined, but in this book it becomes much more heavy-handed. In WttA, it was his symbol, and it was in the dreams. As Taryn had said, "the raven still flies". In this book, everyone accepts the bird as a sign, Cassie sees it as an omen, and Kenny hunts ravens to make his point to Elijah. Ravens save Elijah. The book leaves Elijah seeming almost Taryn-like, but his views against peace (saving himself and Cassie and Amber over the lives of others) are decidedly not.
Speaking of Amber, her "Ark-ness" isn't in any way explained. Both Amber and Kenny are intelligent, but Amber shows no sign of Ark. The only signs we're given are heavy-handed, at least compared to the subtlety in WttA. In WttA there were glimmers between Miranda and Taryn or Miranda and Doug, before they communicated about their shared dreams, before Taryn "told" her how the tree felt. Here, Elijah feels connection from almost the beginning. He heals Amber before he knows her. An argument could be made that he opened up after the Ark experience, but the same could be made that upon leaving them he immediately went back to his old ways (getting "inside" the marble, Tondishi, avoidance, etc.) as soon as he left. Amber, however, has never been open to Arkness before. Ark kids were anti-violence, anti-world; she reveled in it and took her father's words at face value.
The near-assault of Amber, while compelling, seemed harsh in a book aimed at children. I don't know if the youngest readers would understand how close it seemed to a rape, and the older readers will probably wonder why it wasn't more of a focal point. Amber was okay with murder when she felt her assaulter would be properly punished, but that isn't a solution. WttA succeeded because the solutions, although not feasible in a literal sense, make sense in symbolic terms. A child could become friends with others who are different and improve the world, albeit not by psychically bonding. Accepting a bombing isn't an answer.
The bioweapons seemed both heavy-handed and scarily prescient. I wish there had been more of a hint of something wrong with Landis, besides Elijah's "bad feeling" about him. It made a possibly good plot weakened. In addition, Elijah left Mack and Kenny in charge as the lesser of evils, and it's disconcerting to think of a "good guy" seeing things that way. No, 140 million people won't die, but they aren't solving problems except with bombs whose death tolls "don't matter". As I was IMing a friend about the book, I kept finding things that rang eerily in the aftermath of even worse New York terrorism. The smallpox issues, which hit me both because of the recent news issues and because of the Cross-X high school debate topic on it, were exceptionally, frighteningly, and flawlessly accurate as far as my research has gone, but the concepts of the "solution" seemed to again go against Elijah and what he chose. He empathized with Amber over dead rabbits and dead parents, much like he did previously when he chose vegetarianism. I suppose the reader could assume that he chose to "turn off" part of the Ark part of his mind the way Doug and Miranda did, but he clearly used it with Amber throughout the novel. It makes sense for Elijah to develop his mind more, away from the stabilizing and repressing atmospheres the other three were in, but it doesn't seem logical for him to develop in this way.
Overall, despite these criticisms, I enjoyed the book. I liked references to the Ark, and the story kept within the context of the ending of WttA. Elijah is still a compelling character, although less so. But unlike WttA, this won't be a book I'll be rereading often. It provides some closure for Elijah, but didn't fit in with what I wanted to believe about all of the characters. It had all of the ingredients for a wonderful book, but they didn't mix together for a really good read.
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