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Caring for Your Clown Book Two: Trial and Error
Oleander Blume, author
Overjoyed by his official adoption and with the completion of the molecular transporter coming closer, Oliver's excitement over the return of his mother conflicts with the ever-expanding mystery surrounding the circumstances of her departure and Dindet's increasingly suspicious behavior.
She's leaving, more often and for longer and longer periods of time. And left alone with devilishly wandering thoughts and idle hands, Oliver craves a distraction-- and his name is Markus.
The second entry in a series of riveting interdimensional shennanigannery and a heartbreaking emotional core that will leave anyone on the brink of tears, if not sobbing outright.
This is no childish story, despite the friendly and bouncy exterior, the content of this book and the series involve much darker themes such as intergenerational familial abuse, recovery and personal growth after terribly traumatic events, and ending the cycles of manipulative and narcissistic behavior.
However, for every awful thing, there is just as much compassion, love, and commitment through the most ultimate thick and thins.
Plot/Idea: 7 out of 10
Originality: 8 out of 10
Prose: 7 out of 10
Character/Execution: 7 out of 10
Overall: 7.25 out of 10
Assessment:
Plot/Idea: In the second of a middle grade fantasy series, Oliver, who is trans and eager for his gender reassignment, is still caring for his alien clown, Dindet. He's also dealing with thoughtless classmates and is confused over his mother's absence. Beneath the outrageous premise, Blume compassionately explores issues of abuse, trauma, and the quest for identity.
Prose: Blume's prose is warm, inviting, and lightly descriptive, but its levity often belies the story's harder truths.
Originality: Readers who weren't first acclimated to the storyline in the first book may initially feel disoriented, as there's little background info on Oliver's circumstances; the presence of an alien clown is pretty inexplicable. Nevertheless, Blume manages to make the novel's oddities mesh with the more realistic undertones.
Character/Execution: Readers will feel for Oliver as he struggles to accept what he can't change in his life–and aspire toward what he can. Readers may wish for a little more ground between the work's realism and its otherworldly elements.
Date Submitted: August 15, 2023
Reviews
Kirkus
The sequel to the author’s Caring for Your Clown: Aliens Are Real (2021) returns to the travails of 14-year-old Oliver Jariwala. Assigned female at birth (and named “Olivia”), Oliver is male. He has suffered a traumatic, abusive childhood at the hands of his conservative father, Matthew, from whom Oliver’s mother, Marie, has obtained a divorce. Subsequently, Marie, a scientist, vanished in a laboratory accident—she apparently disintegrated—while working on a “molecular transporter” device. Oliver was adopted by a Marie’s second husband, the loving, equally science-minded Jon Jariwala, whose last name Oliver is excited to take for his own (“ ‘Mom wanted me to wait until I was eighteen,’ he said, ‘But now that I'm legally his kid, I don’t have to…I wanna make sure he knows how much it means to me’ ”). Earlier, the vengeful, psychotic Matthew had pushed for legal custody. Oliver was only saved from Matthew’s brutal control by an intercession from a remarkable friend: a humanoid female alien creature named Dindet, who arrived on Earth via (apparently) the same phenomenon that dematerialized Marie. Though friendly and technologically advanced, Dindet is backwards and troublesome in many ways; bizarrely, she takes the form of a multicolored circus clown (it appears clowns are a recognized extra-terrestrial race). Disguised as a foreign exchange student living with Oliver (while trying to help Jon unravel the mystery of Marie’s disappearance on the side), Dindet experiences frequent culture shock and becomes swept up in capers with Oliver in both this and other dimensions. Oliver, losing patience with Dindet’s increasing absences and erratic nature, experiences deeper relationships with boy-next-door Douglass and a brash upperclassman, Markus, a confident and cool senior connected to the school paper. But even Markus’ own stepbrother, Cody Mulligan, warns Oliver that Markus is bad news. Meanwhile, the institute behind Marie’s fateful science experiment presses for firm answers and results.
Like the ever-morphing Dindet, a more or less an amorphous blob whose forms range from a sort of Harpo Marx–like comical character to a slavering Lovecraftian monstrosity, the plot is a real mish-mash of elements, tilting toward the shocking, confessional work of confabulated author “J.T. Leroy” in its key themes of incest, domestic violence, and gender. This is YA fiction at a rarefied level—the author has a knack for conveying how real adolescents might process the complicated feelings experienced by the characters (“The senior turned to face him, some sorry and sad frown pulling at his lips. ‘And if—if you’re not into it, that’s fine. I don't know how, uh, boy girl—girl boys work, lol’ ”). The Dindet material, which is largely relegated to a subplot here, ultimately dovetails with Oliver’s drama in very dire fashion. The two narrative strands share a painful commonality (in addition to the notion of alien-ation) in their vivid depictions of personal violation and innocents being cruelly victimized.
A winning hero confronts serious issues in this increasingly dark YA/SF saga.
