Todd Klein's Blog, page 3

Rereading: THE BLACK STALLION CHALLENGED by Walter Farley

Cover art by Ruth Sanderson

For the previous book in his racing horse series, “The Black Stallion and Flame,” Farley brought The Black to the hidden island home of his other stallion, but while the two horses worked together to defeat a common enemy, a bat infected with rabies, their owners were not present and did not meet. Readers may have felt cheated, and in this book, Alec Ramsey, owner of The Black, and Steve Duncan, owner of Flame, not only meet, they race together in Hialeah, Florida.

Alec, The Black, and trainer Henry Dailey are at Hialeah while the horse recovers from a hoof injury that’s kept him from racing for a few months. While there, Alec gets a letter from Steve asking if he could come and meet him to talk about trying to get his horse into racing at the track. Steve explains he and his friend Pitch need to raise $65,000 to buy an island. Readers of the Flame stories know this is the island holding the secret hidden valley where Flame and his band live. The island is owned by the British government, and is apparently for sale, but only Steve and Pitch know the treasures it holds, both in horses and Spanish artifacts, Pitch is exploring the latter.

Steve and Flame are currently in Nassau, the Bahamas, and Alec advises Steve to begin by trying to win a race there. Perhaps that will interest the owners of the Hialeah track. Steve succeeds at that, and gets a trial work-out at Hialeah, which turns into an unplanned race between Flame and The Black that tests both horses and amazes the watching officials. Alec offers advice to Steve, who is cocky and sure of himself and his horse, but Alec explains that there’s a lot to learn about racing beyond having a fast horse. Will Steve listen to Alec? The two horses are entered in a big race, so we’re about to see what happens.

Farley always manages to make these books interesting and exciting with lots of insight and knowledge about horses, racing, and people. Recommended.

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My Music: AFTER THE OPERA

Windsor Castle entrance, July 1979

This song was written after my first trip to England with friends in June and July of 1979. It’s not based on an actual event, but suggested by one that did happen on the trip, though the song makes more of it than the reality. I never recorded it, and it’s one of the songs I forgot the melody and chords to over the years. In the fall of 2024, I went through a number of songs in the same situation, and found a few I was able to resurrect. I think on this one I barely remembered the melody for the first few lines, and reconstructed the rest from that. I recorded it in November 2024, and then redid the vocal in April 2025. The song: After The Opera.

After the Opera is © Todd Klein, all rights reserved.

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Rereading: PETER GRAVES by William Pène du Bois

Du Bois wrote a number of excellent fantasy novels/stories for young readers, this is my second favorite after “The 21 Balloons.” They are illustrated by him usually in black line with gray tones, as above.

Peter Graves is a teenage boy in the town of Houndstooth in a rural area of the eastern United States. As the story opens, he’s leading an ambitious and dangerous game of Follow the Leader for his gang, the Houndstooth Growlers. Peter leads them through a river, along the cables of a large suspension bridge, across a field containing a dangerous bull, and as his final destination, to the front door of the town’s most feared citizen, Houghton Furlong. Not one of the gang stays to this point, and Peter finds himself face to face with the strange old man, and invited into his house.

Furlong is an inventor, formerly employed by the US Government, and now retired to Houndstooth, where he continues his dangerous experiments. It’s a regular thing for Houghton to call the fire department to put out fires he’s started with his experiments, and he even has his own fire signal bell on his front lawn. At other times, strange noises and clouds of noxious gas emerge from the house. Despite his reputation, Peter is surprised to find Houghton quite friendly, and he’s soon being shown some of Furlong’s inventions. The most important one is Furloy, a metal with anti-gravity powers. Peter begins to think of interesting ways to use that, something Furlong hasn’t bothered to explore.

Then another accident happens, when Peter loses control of a ball containing Furloy that bounces higher than it was dropped. This sounds tame enough, but it’s a heavy ball, and before long it’s completely destroyed Houghton’s home. The inventor and the teenager then join forces with plans to put on shows using Furlong to raise money to rebuild the house and laboratory, but a sinister and resourceful figure is lurking nearby with intentions of stealing the amazing invention.

A great read, highly recommended.

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Rereading: WET MAGIC by E Nesbit

Generally I like Nesbit’s novels for children better than her short stories, but this is definitely a lesser work. It starts out in a promising way as a family of four children—Bernard, Kathleen, Mavis, and Francis—are taken on a seaside holiday where they learn that a live mermaid has been captured and is on exhibit at a local circus. With the help of Reuben, an orphan boy working at the circus, they manage to get the mermaid back to the sea and release her. Later she comes when they call her, and invites them all to visit her undersea kingdom, using her magic to make them able to breathe and move underwater.

After that, the story gets bogged down in an undersea war between the Merfolk and their deep-sea enemies, the Under Folk, and most of the rest of the book is focused on that. There are some subplots about lost kings and missing parents that are all resolved by the end, but generally the battles are hard to get involved in, at least for me. Nesbit’s magic solutions pop up whenever things seem hopeless, but lucky coincidence is just as often the answer to a problem. I never felt the characters were in any real danger. There are also some unlikely characters that come out of books, which is an odd choice for an undersea story. Often Nesbit seems to almost forget the watery setting, and offers strange reasons why everything seems pretty much the same as on dry land as it suits her narrative.

Mildly recommended.

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Rereading: TO SAIL BEYOND THE SUNSET by Robert A. Heinlein

Cover art by Boris Vallejo

Published in 1987, the final book completed before Heinlein’s death in 1988. This book is long and complex, and overstuffed with characters and plot, but I did enjoy rereading it, despite some of the usual flaws of late Heinlein work such as too much talking/lecturing as well as the things mentioned above. It’s mostly the life story of Maureen Johnson Smith, born in Missouri in 1882, who narrates after being captured and imprisoned in a future and different Earth. Her only companion is the cat Pixel, from the previous book “The Cat Who Walks Through Walls,” who has the ability to find her and visit here in any time, place, and dimension. While Maureen waits and hopes for rescue, she uses an internal recorder to tell her story. Much of it is surely the author’s story as well, and one would think Maureen is also modeled on his own mother and siblings, and perhaps also based somewhat on his first wife Leslyn and his second wife Virginia.

Like “Cat,” and other late novels, this one continues to tie together many of Heinlein’s past works. Most importantly it describes the early days and evolution of the Howard Foundation, the group that systematically encouraged the births and lives of long-lived people through genetic selection using financial and social incentives. This figures in a number of other books, but is given more detail here. The book also allows the author to comment on what he liked and didn’t like about the many years of his own life, and there are plenty of opinions. I have to say that I agreed with a lot of them, but not all. There’s an obsession with sex, something Heinlein was probably unable to write as frankly about earlier in his career, which has its moments, but gets tiresome at times. When Maureen is not thinking about sex, she has some interesting adventures along the way to becoming a wealthy, well-educated, and successful person. I liked the fact that this book ties up loose ends from “Cat,” whose ending I found disappointing, and in general I enjoyed this one more. At the end is not only a list of characters, but a list of previous Heinlein works showing where they previously appeared. But there are too many, and characters I would have liked to see more of are often short walk-ons or only named. Heinlein liked the work of James Branch Cabell, who did a similar thing by tying together many of his books into one connected epic, some revised to do that after they were first published. It worked better there than here simply because there are so many Heinlein characters, and most of them are simply versions of the author himself, so when in groups, each one does not stand out much.

Still worth reading, and a pretty good wrap-up to his long career. Recommended.

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My Music: WEDDING DAY

This was written for a ceremony held at Rutgers Kirkpatrick Chapel, New Brunswick, in May of 1979 to celebrate the wedding of my friend Paul to his first wife Dorothy, they’re above. They lived in Baltimore, and were married there, but Paul had many friends in New Jersey, and wanted to have an event here as well for them. I don’t know whose idea the song was, but our mutual friend Anna and I had been playing folk music together from time to time, and I asked her to perform the song with me. The recording is from the ceremony. Anna’s voice is better and stronger than mine, but I think we managed to make it work. We both played guitars, and I recorded the performance: Wedding Day

Anna went on to a career as a cantor, singer, and choral conductor in central New Jersey, where she remains active, and we keep in touch on Facebook. Paul’s marriage did not last long, sadly. He married two more times, and moved to Oregon, where he passed in 2022. I miss him, we were friends since high school.

Wedding Day is © Todd Klein, all rights reserved.

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And Then I Read: INKWORLD, THE COLOR OF REVENGE by Cornelia Funke

Cover art by Jim Tierny

Cornelia Funke wrote a trilogy of three Inkheart books some time ago, and has returned to it with this new title. The concept is that a few gifted people have the ability to bring fantasy stories to life simply by reading them aloud, and to put real people into those worlds as well. This story takes place in one of those fantasy worlds as detailed in the earlier books. It can be enjoyed alone, but reading “Inkheart,” “Inkspell,” and “Inkdeath” first will ease confusion and fill in background on many of the characters.

Orpheus Gemelli is the villain of this story. He was stripped of his word spell powers in the previous book, and has been plotting his revenge. It’s a complex one that involves creating a new book with portraits of each of his perceived enemies by the greatest artist of this world, and then adding dark magic to those portraits so that the pictures and people themselves gradually fade to gray and disappear. All but Orpheus’s main target Dustfinger, who he once considered his best friend, until Dustfinger betrayed him. His plan succeeds, and the rest of the story is about Dustfinger and his few remaining allies trying to find Orpheus and rescue their friends and family. It’s a long and dangerous business with assassins, dark magic, and heartbreak on the way.

Well written and full of interesting magic and ideas. Recommended.

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Rereading: PLOW PENNY MYSTERY by Lavinia R. Davis

While America was getting involved in World War Two, Lavinia Davis was trying to keep America’s children entertained with stories of kids and horses (and other animals), and doing it well.

Larry has recently come to stay with his uncle in rural Connecticut for the summer. Larry’s mother and new stepfather have gone off to do other things, which is fine with Larry, as he doesn’t like the stepfather. Larry at first feels out of place at his uncle’s farm, but begins to make new friends in the Ware children who live nearby: Connie, Clem (called Clown) and Sambo. They discover a small abandoned hamlet between their properties and begin fixing it up as a club and camping spot. At first Connie thinks Larry is a scaredy-cat, but eventually he gets over his initial fears of many things, including horses, when his uncle rents an old, placid horse for him to ride. Then he, Connie, and Clown can ride together.

At the hamlet, mysteries begin to unfold as things suddenly disappear or are moved around. An unfriendly neighbor could be to blame, but they never see him. A strange coin they call a Plow Penny is one of those things, and the children call themselves the Plow Penny Detectives after it. Many adventures are had in their hideout as well as riding across the fields, and at a local horse show, but someone seems to be trying to get them in trouble, and they’re determined to find out who and why.

Great book for fans of kids and animals, recommended.

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Rereading: THE LOST FARM by Jane Louise Curry

This book is connected to “Mindy’s Mysterious Miniature,” though it works fine on its own.

Pete MacCubbin lives with his father and grandmother on a remote farm in Summit County, Pennsylvania. Pete is twelve as the story opens, and doing a lot of the farm chores, caring for their sheep, cows, mules, and chickens, while Granny does a most of the gardening and all the cooking and cleaning. Pete’s father is pretty useless on the farm, he’s too busy collecting “treasures” from around the area. His junk-gathering obsession has given him the nickname Trashbin, and he’s often in trouble with the law. One day Trashbin steals from the wrong person, a temporary resident at the farm down the hill known as Professor Lilliput, who has a traveling caravan where he displays a miniature village. Trashbin breaks into the barn where the caravan is parked, and steals a miniature car from the exhibit. Up close, this car is amazingly detailed and realistic. The professor’s source for his attraction is actually real full-size houses and other items he’s shrunk with his Reducer machine. When Pete investigates the place himself, he meets a tiny girl named Samantha who was accidentally shrunk with her house, but before he can do anything to help her, the professor uses his Reducer to shrink the entire MacCubbin farm. The family wakes up one morning to find they and everything in the farm is about 10 percent of the size it should be.

Pete and Granny do the best they can with their new situation, but Trashbin seems befuddled and unable to cope. Pete makes attempts to get to the nearest town, but he always fails for one reason or another, and over time he and Granny learn to make do with what they have or can gather nearby. Years pass, and no one seems to know or care about the lost farm, until one day things begin to happen.

Entertaining, a good read. Recommended.

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My Music: A TALL TREE TALE

Another song I never recorded back in the day, and made a new recording of earlier this year. In addition to voice and guitar, it includes mountain dulcimer and tin whistle, above. The dulcimer was Ellen’s, I use it occasionally when it’s the right sound for a song. This is a tall tale as might have been told by a traveling minstrel in medieval England. A Tall Tree Tale

I’m not the most accomplished whistler, so I kept that part brief! And the dulcimer part is simply a melody on the double string, I didn’t use any chords or harmony.

A Tall Tree Tale is © Todd Klein, all rights reserved.

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