Book Review: Inkling, by Kenneth Oppel (1), published September 1, 2018, 304 pages (Kindle edition), Lexile 650. Recommended for ages 8-12 or grades 3-7. Please note: this book is not yet in the Pageturner library and will require student requests for purchases to be made.

 In a tour de force of magical realism similar to previously reviewed Olivetti , but also highly illustrated, here we have another inanimate object associated with writing: this time a blot of ink, that escapes an artist’s sketchbook to help, again, a family grieving the loss of the one person who held them together in every way, who is, of course, the mom. Peter Rylance, the dad, is stuck in his grief, unable to function fully as a dad and utterly unable to come up with a single idea to follow his successful comic book series about a congenial mutant named Kren:

“Kren had made him famous, but now he was blocked. That was the word Dad used. The way he said it, it wasn’t just a little chunk of concrete in the road—it was a huge black stone wall topped with barbed wire and guard towers….‘Have you ever thought of doing it?’ Ethan asked. ‘Bringing him back?’ ‘Kren?’ ‘Why not?’ His father said nothing for a moment, then rubbed hard between his eyes. ‘Sometimes people die. That’s just the way it is.’” Kren has died because mom has.

 12-year old Ethan is trying to fill dad’s shoes--at least mom had taught him how to cook scrambled eggs!--but he’s growing increasingly resentful even as he panics:

“When Ethan looked in on Sarah, she smelled a bit poopy, but he didn’t want to check whether she’d had an accident. That was Dad’s job. Ethan paced the living room. Now that Soren had left, he felt a lot lonelier. Worse, he was starting to feel scared. It was almost three o’clock, and Dad was still in bed. Was he having some kind of nervous breakdown? What if he never got up? After Mom died, there’d been a few times Dad stayed in bed all day.”

At school, Ethan and his buddies, including his bff Soren, are working on a comic book, an assignment requiring their class split into teams; each team is to collaborate in creating their own story, art, dialogue, and lettering.  Because his dad is a celebrated artist, the whole class expects him to be the artist for his team.  Ethan, however, has no artistic talent; like his dad, he, too, is stuck.  He doesn’t want to let the entire class in on what he believes is his debilitating secret, but he also doesn’t want to let down his team and earn a poor grade for them.  His little sister Sarah, age 8, with Down Syndrome (2), always refers to herself in third person and can’t stop asking for a puppy no matter how many times dad says no.  She seems stuck, too, as she regresses.

In their dad’s atelier, a splotch of ink tears itself away from his sketchbook.  The book pulls at the blot, trying to force it back onto a page, but it manages to escape.  Ethan first sees that life has apparently been breathed into Soren’s story: 

“Ethan sat back with a sigh, trying to make sense of it all. The ink ofhis father’s sketches had somehow come to life. And this ink had the power to erase—and draw! And what pictures it could do! He gazed at the finished art again. “But how did you know the story?” He hadn’t noticed the crumpled page of Soren’s script until now, probably because it was completely blank, except for a few stray letters at the edges. “You read his story?” Ethan breathed. What other explanation could there be? It was one thing to draw a gorilla, but these pictures were clearly based on his stick figures and the scenes in the story. “You can read?” As Ethan watched in amazement, a tiny point of ink stretched out and shakily wrote: A BIT”

The splotch names itself Inkling and becomes Ethan’s friend.  It erases books, newspapers, anything composed of ink to feed itself, and uses that to create art. Early on, Inkling asks where is mom? And learns that mom has died and is gone forever. 

Ethan feeds Inkling some great works of literature.  When Inkling has read Anne of Green Gables he spouts Anne’s own words: “PLEASE FORGIVE ME. I AM IN THE DEPTHS OF DESPAIR! Ethan couldn’t help smiling. ‘It’s okay, honest. You don’t have to be in the depths of despair!’” After Inkling has gone through Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, he even speaks Hemingway!

“The part when the sharks come, that was really exciting.” THE WRITING WAS GOOD AND CLEAN AND TRUE. IT WAS GOOD TO READ IT. IT WAS GOOD TO READ ONE CLEAN, TRUE SENTENCE AFTER THE OTHER. “Um, yeah,” said Ethan. Was that the way people talked in the book? I LIKED THE GOOD, PLAIN LANGUAGE. I HAVE BEEN USING TOO MANY WORDS. I WILL USE FEWER.”  A middle grader might not get the joke, but I couldn't help laughing out loud. 

Inkling is essentially a product of Peter Rylance’s creative mind. Because of that, Inkling can access his dreams. Inkling sees and eventually draws Ethan’s mom in her hospital bed as she appeared shortly before passing.  Some time later, Inkling will find a box of her personal belongings, packed up by hospital staff; Ethan’s dad has never looked into it, but Inkling will.

Meanwhile at school, Ethan’s archnemesis Vika, daughter of Peter’s publisher, isn’t fooled by the pretense that his team’s latest art is Ethan’s own work. She visits them at home and inadvertently sees Inkling, which gives the game away.  When she overhears her parents arguing and learns that Peter’s failure to produce anything her dad can publish for over two years might cause them to lose their home, she decides to steal Inkling for their own use. She captures Inkling in a glass jar, the one surface he can’t track.

It deserves mention here that BOTH fathers immediately see Inkling purely for his monetary value, as a thing to be used--and both immediately hit upon caging him. Ethan is horrified when his dad keeps Inkling in a glass vase. Vika’s father will keep him in a fish tank. When Inkling cleverly creates a distraction and escapes Vika, she clamps the jar tightly around him again, accidentally cutting off a piece.  Vika’s dad puts the two in separate tanks and refuses to feed them unless they produce art. He feeds the second inkblot  hyper-violent comic books it devours; he threatens to feed Inkling himself to his second, which produces only hyper-violent, ugly art. It calls itself BLOTR, which they figure to mean Blotter.  Blotter becomes a brutish, nasty thing, belching and farting while growing astronomically.  Soon Blotter is hellbent on eating Inkling.  Meanwhile, Vika’s dad is blackmailing Ethan’s dad and will soon squirrel both inkblots out of sight, in lockdown at his office.  

Vika finally realizes her father is in the wrong.  On the sly, she gives Ethan the keys and passcodes to rescue Inkling.  Ethan and Soren go to retrieve Inkling, where a huge battle occurs. When they manage to escape with Inkling, Blotter is along for the ride. Home again, Blotter almost kills Ethan by smothering him, completely covering his face--but Ethan gets into the shower in the nick of time, washing Blotter down the drain.  Blotter soon erupts from the drain and there seems no end in sight.  Inkling uses all his strength to force Blotter toward the art studio and Peter’s dreaded sketchbook. Ethan screams no! But Inkling tells him it’s the only way, sacrificing himself. Unbeknownst to all, Vika’s father has cut off three more pieces, whom he views fondly in his office.  He intends to feed them all the copycat adult violence he can find in comic books to make himself rich.  

Ethan’s father, however, has learned differently.  Inkling had given him mom’s last letter as she lay dying.  Peter tells Ethan she died alone and he’s never forgiven himself for going home to take care of the kids. But she knew, and she’d forgiven him before he even knew he’d do it.  You take care of the children first; it’s the parental prime directive.  When Ethan asks whether his dad will now resurrect Kren, Peter says no, he’s going to write a story closer to home.  

Newly aware of what really counts in life, he's going to write Inkblot’s story.

Unlike Olivetti, Inkling provides readers with real monsters as formidable, even terrifying, opponents: both Vika’s dad and his alter ego, Blotter, qualify, here. This, I think, will make the story more interesting for students still enamored of graphic/manga novels.  The grief explored is more genuine, too, as in Olivetti mom had only taken an unannounced trip away for a while. As a literary device, that seemed something of a cheat, and kids are keenly aware of the difference. Even better: students may be thrilled to learn that author Oppel wrote his first novel at 14! (3)

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1) AWARDS AND HONORS: Sundogs Award (Manitoba Young Reader’s Choice Awards), Silver Birch Award FinalistSaskatchewan Young Reader’s Choice Award - Diamond Willow Award,Rocky Mountain Book Award, New York Times Notable, CYBILS Awards, Red Cedar Book Award (B.C.'s Young Readers' Choice Awards)Quill & Quire Best Book,Amazon.com Best Books of the Year, CBC Best Book of the Year

 
2) RE: DOWN SYNDROME “Toddlers and older kids may have delays in speech and self-care skills like feeding, dressing, and using the toilet. Down syndrome affects kids' ability to learn in different ways, and most have mild to moderate intellectual disability. Kids can and do learn, and they can develop skills throughout their lives…But many can go to regular schools, make friends, enjoy life, and get jobs when they're older. Getting special help early — often when they are just babies and toddlers — can be the key to healthier, happier, more independent lives.” https://kidshealth.org/en/parents/down-syndrome.html

In this article, behavioral symptoms and intervention strategies for children/adults with Down Syndrome are discussed: https://www.down-syndrome.org/en-gb/library/research-practice/12/2/strategies-address-challenging-behaviour-young-down-syndrome/

 
3) FROM THE AUTHOR: “I was born in Port Alberni, a mill town on Vancouver Island, British Columbia but spent the bulk of my childhood in Victoria, B.C. and on the opposite coast, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. At around twelve I decided I wanted to be a writer. I started out writing sci-fi epics then went on to swords and sorcery tales and then, during the summer holiday when I was fourteen, started on a humorous story about a boy addicted to video games. It turned out to be quite a long story, really a short novel, and I rewrote it the next summer. We had a family friend who knew Roald Dahl - one of my favourite authors - and this friend offered to show Dahl my story. I was paralysed with excitement. I never heard back from Roald Dahl directly, but he read my story, and liked it enough to pass on to his own literary agent. I got a letter from them, saying they wanted to take me on, and try to sell my story. And they did.

Colin's Fantastic Video Adventure was published in 1985, in Britain and Canada and the U.S, and later in France. It was easily the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me -- and it gave me the confidence to think I could make writing my career.

I did my BA at the University of Toronto (a double major in cinema studies and English) and wrote my second children's novel The Live-Forever Machine in my final year, for a creative writing course. I married the year after graduation and spent the next three years in Oxford, where my wife was doing doctoral studies in Shakespeare. Since then we've lived in Newfoundland, Dublin -- and Toronto, where we now live with our three children.

My books include the Silverwing trilogy, which has sold over a million copies around the world, and Airborn, winner of the 2004 Governor General's Award for children's literature, and the Michael L. Printz Honor Book award from the American Library Association.

Half Brother has won both the Canadian Library Association's Book of the Year for Children Award. as well as their Young Adult Book Award -- the first time in the awards' history the same title has won both honours. 

My latest books are Inkling and The Nest (which won the 2016 CLA Book of the Year for Children Award).”  https://www.kennethoppel.ca/

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