The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World
by E. L. Konigsburg
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Amedo moves to a new town with a dream. He wants to discover something and he wants a friend to share his search.Tags
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Amedeo has just moved to a new town with his mother. When he runs to their next door neighbour to borrow her phone, he meets Mrs. Zender, an eccentric, flamboyant former opera singer who is selling her estate to move into a retirement home. Amedeo also meets William, a slightly aloof classmate whose mother is in charge of selling off Mrs. Zender’s antiques. But when Amedeo and William find a strange painting in Mrs. Zender’s home, it opens the doors to questions about Mrs. Zender’s history and also the history of forbidden art in World War II.
E.L Konigsburg is a fantastic writer. I’ve read her stuff a long time ago when I was young, but I’d forgotten what to expect when I picked up this book. Luckily I was not disappointed. show more Konigsburg writes with a maturity that makes her books worthwhile for adult readers as well. I’ve read some reviews that complain about this very quality, that say Mysterious Edge is not really a children’s book because it uses profanity or that it focuses too much on Peter, who is an adult. I’m not sure I agree with that, but I do think it’s a book for older children, or children who want to be shown a glimpse of a messy adult world (especially with the talk of the Holocaust and degenerate art).
Amedeo and William are both highly intelligent, unusual children, and Mrs. Zender was a study in a complicated, sometimes frustrating, personality. I liked how Konigsburg connected the painting with its history. However, I do wish the book had been meatier. It felt short, able to be read in one sitting, more like a tasty appetizer than a full meal. It was, like its title suggests, mysterious, and I want more. show less
E.L Konigsburg is a fantastic writer. I’ve read her stuff a long time ago when I was young, but I’d forgotten what to expect when I picked up this book. Luckily I was not disappointed. show more Konigsburg writes with a maturity that makes her books worthwhile for adult readers as well. I’ve read some reviews that complain about this very quality, that say Mysterious Edge is not really a children’s book because it uses profanity or that it focuses too much on Peter, who is an adult. I’m not sure I agree with that, but I do think it’s a book for older children, or children who want to be shown a glimpse of a messy adult world (especially with the talk of the Holocaust and degenerate art).
Amedeo and William are both highly intelligent, unusual children, and Mrs. Zender was a study in a complicated, sometimes frustrating, personality. I liked how Konigsburg connected the painting with its history. However, I do wish the book had been meatier. It felt short, able to be read in one sitting, more like a tasty appetizer than a full meal. It was, like its title suggests, mysterious, and I want more. show less
3.5/5
I didn't enjoy this as much as Konigsburg's previous works. Things really didn't pick up until the middle of the book and the characters felt underdeveloped. That said, the premise is fascinating - Konigsburg does excel at weaving art history into her plots.
Reading some of the reviews surprised me. Yes, there are more complex* topics covered in this novel. Does that make them inappropriate for middle schoolers? I don't believe it does. Often times, teachers and parents underestimate children's comprehension and awareness and unwittingly shape negative attitudes around certain themes by avoiding them altogether.
*I'm referring to Nazi Germany and nudity in art. While the global history of homosexuality is complex (as is any type show more of history), homosexuality itself is not. Love is love is love is love is love. It's way past time we treated it as such. show less
I didn't enjoy this as much as Konigsburg's previous works. Things really didn't pick up until the middle of the book and the characters felt underdeveloped. That said, the premise is fascinating - Konigsburg does excel at weaving art history into her plots.
Reading some of the reviews surprised me. Yes, there are more complex* topics covered in this novel. Does that make them inappropriate for middle schoolers? I don't believe it does. Often times, teachers and parents underestimate children's comprehension and awareness and unwittingly shape negative attitudes around certain themes by avoiding them altogether.
*I'm referring to Nazi Germany and nudity in art. While the global history of homosexuality is complex (as is any type show more of history), homosexuality itself is not. Love is love is love is love is love. It's way past time we treated it as such. show less
I used to be a big Konigsburg fan. Mixed-Up Files was one of my favorite books as a kid, and as an adult, I whipped through the rest of her oeuvre, straight up to [b:The View From Saturday|4538|The View from Saturday|E.L. Konigsburg|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1165445984s/4538.jpg|4242], which I loved. I even went so far as to ILL the long-out-of-print George, back in the days before inter-library loans became commonplace.
That said: she's really gone downhill lately. Her books are now ostensibly written for children, but they feel more like adult books that feature kids. Or rather, adults who are only 10-14 years old. Every child in her books has that kind of quiet, emotionally-brilliant maturity that takes away from the "child" show more element. This book is no exception, and it reads more like a short, mediocre adult book than children's.
Related: everywhere I turn lately I'm getting Holocaust stories. The Book Thief and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas I was prepared for, but the denouement of this title involving the convenient shared history of two otherwise-unrelated characters' husbands, one a Nazi and one a gay art dealer, was a little much. And one of the daily comics I read has been doing a series with an elderly neighbor recounting his memories of Krystallnacht. Weird. show less
That said: she's really gone downhill lately. Her books are now ostensibly written for children, but they feel more like adult books that feature kids. Or rather, adults who are only 10-14 years old. Every child in her books has that kind of quiet, emotionally-brilliant maturity that takes away from the "child" show more element. This book is no exception, and it reads more like a short, mediocre adult book than children's.
Related: everywhere I turn lately I'm getting Holocaust stories. The Book Thief and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas I was prepared for, but the denouement of this title involving the convenient shared history of two otherwise-unrelated characters' husbands, one a Nazi and one a gay art dealer, was a little much. And one of the daily comics I read has been doing a series with an elderly neighbor recounting his memories of Krystallnacht. Weird. show less
Amadeo begins helping William and his mother, who manage estate sales, as they pour over the belongings of his eccentric former opera star neighbor, Mrs. Zender. Meanwhile, Amadeo's godfather is preparing an art show of artworks that Hitler's regime declared degenerate.
Two thirds of the book focuses on Amadeo, William, and Mrs. Zender, when it suddenly veers off into a past story about Nazi's stealing artworks and how Mrs. Zender ended up with a particular piece.
The book felt profoundly off balance, The characters of William and his mother, who are so much a part of the first half of the book, are completely irrelevant to the second half. I never felt any real affinity for Amadeo or William. For a young adult book, it doesn't work that show more the ultimate plot has nothing to do with the young characters, but only with a handful of people who are either very old or dead. show less
Two thirds of the book focuses on Amadeo, William, and Mrs. Zender, when it suddenly veers off into a past story about Nazi's stealing artworks and how Mrs. Zender ended up with a particular piece.
The book felt profoundly off balance, The characters of William and his mother, who are so much a part of the first half of the book, are completely irrelevant to the second half. I never felt any real affinity for Amadeo or William. For a young adult book, it doesn't work that show more the ultimate plot has nothing to do with the young characters, but only with a handful of people who are either very old or dead. show less
I really loved the first 3/4 of this book, and then the pacing changed and I felt a little flung toward the end. It also had a very similar feel to "From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler" once I got through it, and that was a bit disappointing; I understand authors who intentionally theme their work, but I didn't believe that to be what ELK was doing here, so it made it fall a bit flat. Still worth having read, just not as unique as I'd anticipated.
Should I have remembered more from The Outcasts of Schuyler Place than I do from one read? E.L. Konigsburg is sometimes great, and when she is great she is wonderful, and sometimes not (but I can recall only one shockingly mediocre book). This had most of her great usual motifs -- responsibility, art, history, Judaism, friendship, Otherism -- that she treated so well in Frankweiler, Jennifer, Proud Taste, Jericho, Saturday, but they failed to cohere. I didn't find the friendship between the boys realistic, and the two storylines lay side-by-side without quite aligning. Overlapping is not alignment.
Like E.L. Konigsberg's classic From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler, there's an art mystery at the heart of this story of two pre-teen boys and their growing friendship with a wealthy and eccentric old lady. However, with Mixed-Up Files, I was enchanted and drawn in by the very opening words. Mysterious Edge takes some faith and some reading to get into the plot. Once in, though, it's a satisfying story, though not nearly as light-hearted as Mixed-up Files was. There's a heart-breaking and sinister Holocaust connection. Also some great verses from one of my favourite poets, Phyllis McGinley.
I had an interesting context for this book. I was reading this, the latest of E.L. Konigsberg's novels, at the same time that I was show more reading the earliest of Madeleine L'Engle's books The Joys of Love. Both L'engle and Konigsberg were among my very favourite authors when growing up; I have read pretty well everything they have written, and own most of their works. The L'engle book was an example of a young author not quite hitting her stride; The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World is something like Konigberg's twenty-first published work. It's one of her better ones. show less
I had an interesting context for this book. I was reading this, the latest of E.L. Konigsberg's novels, at the same time that I was show more reading the earliest of Madeleine L'Engle's books The Joys of Love. Both L'engle and Konigsberg were among my very favourite authors when growing up; I have read pretty well everything they have written, and own most of their works. The L'engle book was an example of a young author not quite hitting her stride; The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World is something like Konigberg's twenty-first published work. It's one of her better ones. show less
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Elaine Lobl Konigsburg, noted children's writer and illustrator, was born February 10, 1930 in New York City. She received a BS in chemistry from Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University) in 1952. She did graduate study at the University of Pittsburgh. Her best-known titles included A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver, show more The Second Mrs. Giaconda, Father's Arcane Daughter, and Throwing Shadows. She won the Newbery Honor in 1968 for From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and the William Allen White Award in 1970. She won the Newbery Medal again in 1997 for The View from Saturday. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler was adapted into a motion picture starring Ingrid Bergman in 1973 and later released as The Hideaways in 1974. It became a television film starring Lauren Bacall in 1995. Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth was adapted for television as Jennifer and Me for NBC-TV in 1973. She died on April 19, 2013 from complications of a stroke that she had suffered a week prior at the age of 83. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- 2007
- People/Characters
- Amedeo Kaplan; William Wilcox; Mrs. Zender (Lily Aida Tull); Dora Ellen Wilcox; Peter Vanderwaal; Amedeo Modigliani
- Important places
- St. Malo, Florida, USA (fictitious town)
- Dedication
- this book is for –
my hands-on family: ross adam konigsburg, sherry berks, michael berks, harriett rosenberg, leonard rosenberg, paul konigsburg, lesley koni... (show all)gsburg, laurie todd, robert todd;
and friends: joan hill, susana urbina, judyjacobson, helene edwards, judith viorst, joan monsky, phyllis lewis/lesley kirwood, debby/jack dreher, jane condon/dan selhorst, jane novak, helene baker, mary carr patton;
and doctors: steven buskirk, louis russo;
and the ineffable: bobbi yoffee
– without whom - First words
- In the late afternoon on the second Friday in September, Amedeo Kaplan stepped down from the school bus into a cloud of winged insects.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Sometimes that edge was cunning, and sometimes it was kind. Sometimes it was shabby. And sometimes it was heroic.
But it was always mysterious.
Definitely. - Original language
- English
Classifications
- Genres
- Kids, Tween, Fiction and Literature
- DDC/MDS
- 813.54 — Literature & rhetoric American literature in English American fiction in English 1900-1999 1945-1999
- LCC
- PZ7 .K8352 .M — Language and Literature Fiction and juvenile belles lettres Fiction and juvenile belles lettres Juvenile belles lettres
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- Reviews
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- Rating
- (3.36)
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- English
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- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 23
- ASINs
- 5
