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100 Books, #22: Mummy
May. 10th, 2013 12:25 pmEmlyn had a bad streak.
She was well aware of it and kept it contained. Others might yearn to be the hero and save the world or save the baby. Emlyn yearned to be a brilliant thief.
This is the beginning of Caroline B. Cooney’s The Mummy, which would be my favorite Caroline B. Cooney book were it not for the Losing Christina trilogy, which is amazing but in a completely different manner than The Mummy.
The Mummy is basically a heist story starring a teenage girl, and it’s not quite like anything else I’ve ever read.
Some other kids at Emlyn’s school approach her about a mischief night prank: steal the local museum’s mummy, Amarel Re, and hang her from the belltower. But once Emlyn has stolen the Amaral Re - and Emlyn’s thievery of the mummy involves five chapters of sneaking around a darkened museum after hours and is basically amazing - a local news story notes that the contains all kinds of gold in its wrappings.
The other plotters get dollar signs in their eyes. Emlyn, who has forged a mystical connection with the mummy, gets a new goal: protect Amaral Re.
Okay, so I love basically everything about this book - the heisting! The plotting of the heisting! The atmosphere of the after-hours museum! - but most of all I love Emlyn.
I love Emlyn so much that I kind of don’t want to dissect what makes her character so great, because clearly the answer is everything. The opening lines give a clear sense of it, actually: this tension in her character between the adrenaline junkie, the girl who wants to be bad (and how rare is it to have a heroine who wants to be bad in ways that have nothing to do with sex?), and her countervailing desire to be good.
And I love the complexity contained in that desire to be good: there is a sense that Emlyn feels that she is in a sense cheating people with the way that she performs the part of the good student, the bright-eyed chipper go-getter, and rather enjoys fooling them - but feels guilty about that, because she is also at heart extremely empathetic: her ability to imagine Amaral Re’s life is part of what allows her to form this connection with the mummy that forces her to protect it.
But despite this empathy, she has blind spots. One of the fascinating things about the book is Emlyn’s realization that other people, maybe most people have bad streaks too - but they haven’t realized it, and thus they don’t strive to keep them contained.
The story is surprisingly bleak about human nature - never depressing, because it’s so fast-paced; but bleak. It shares that with the Losing Christina trilogy.
She was well aware of it and kept it contained. Others might yearn to be the hero and save the world or save the baby. Emlyn yearned to be a brilliant thief.
This is the beginning of Caroline B. Cooney’s The Mummy, which would be my favorite Caroline B. Cooney book were it not for the Losing Christina trilogy, which is amazing but in a completely different manner than The Mummy.
The Mummy is basically a heist story starring a teenage girl, and it’s not quite like anything else I’ve ever read.
Some other kids at Emlyn’s school approach her about a mischief night prank: steal the local museum’s mummy, Amarel Re, and hang her from the belltower. But once Emlyn has stolen the Amaral Re - and Emlyn’s thievery of the mummy involves five chapters of sneaking around a darkened museum after hours and is basically amazing - a local news story notes that the contains all kinds of gold in its wrappings.
The other plotters get dollar signs in their eyes. Emlyn, who has forged a mystical connection with the mummy, gets a new goal: protect Amaral Re.
Okay, so I love basically everything about this book - the heisting! The plotting of the heisting! The atmosphere of the after-hours museum! - but most of all I love Emlyn.
I love Emlyn so much that I kind of don’t want to dissect what makes her character so great, because clearly the answer is everything. The opening lines give a clear sense of it, actually: this tension in her character between the adrenaline junkie, the girl who wants to be bad (and how rare is it to have a heroine who wants to be bad in ways that have nothing to do with sex?), and her countervailing desire to be good.
And I love the complexity contained in that desire to be good: there is a sense that Emlyn feels that she is in a sense cheating people with the way that she performs the part of the good student, the bright-eyed chipper go-getter, and rather enjoys fooling them - but feels guilty about that, because she is also at heart extremely empathetic: her ability to imagine Amaral Re’s life is part of what allows her to form this connection with the mummy that forces her to protect it.
But despite this empathy, she has blind spots. One of the fascinating things about the book is Emlyn’s realization that other people, maybe most people have bad streaks too - but they haven’t realized it, and thus they don’t strive to keep them contained.
The story is surprisingly bleak about human nature - never depressing, because it’s so fast-paced; but bleak. It shares that with the Losing Christina trilogy.
