A review by bluestjuice
The House with a Clock in Its Walls by John Bellairs

3.0

This was cute. I never read it as a child, but it was highly recommended to me and I approached it with an open mind. It delivered. In particular, I appreciated the way Lewis was written as a very realistic, nerdy kid. He's overweight, not athletic, and is bullied significantly by his peers, but is not incompetent and interacts reasonably with the adults in his life. I did feel that the emotional impact of losing his parents in a car accident not long before the novel begins was somewhat ignored, but the emotional impact of the various things that happen in the course of the story were treated with appropriate weight, and I'm willing to write that off as background that was meant to install him in a particular place in the plot, not to drive his emotional life. Early on I spent some time trying to work out what the intentions of the author were in terms of realism: was this the sort of novel where the magic is mostly the magic of childhood and imagination, or the sort where there is real actual magic? It turns out there is actual magic, which caught me a bit by surprise as there is otherwise so much realism in the approach, but magical realism worked well here. The clock itself, when it appeared, was a bit of a let-down if only because the conceit of a clock hidden throughout the walls of an old Victorian house is such a fascinating one, it was almost impossible to live up to. Also, I was struck and bemused by how very much time young Lewis spends up at ridiculous hours for a kid his age. But yes, I would definitely recommend this.