What The Mysterious Benedict Society Does that Percy Jackson Doesn't
Which kids' book nails it? Surprise, it's my forever favorite: The Mysterious Benedict Society.
A few weeks ago, we examined problems with Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. Today we’ll continue that discussion by bringing in a few other kids’ books. Get excited.
Riordan isn’t alone in writing characters whose physical description stands in for their inner characteristics. My only critique of The Tale of Despereaux on a re-read was how Kate DiCamillo makes the protagonist a pretty, skinny princess and makes the antagonist a poor, dirty, fat maid. Even though the maid is starved! And the princess has plenty to eat. It would literally make more sense for the princess to be clean and fat.1 Then DiCamillo could have (get this name) Miggery Sow (the maid) be dirty and maybe ugly but at least skinny? Emaciated from starving during the kingdom’s famine! But DiCamillo can’t even split the malicious intersection of undesirable physical qualities enough to support her own story.
The writing I’ve described, both in Percy Jackson and The Tale of Despereaux, is problematic. But what’s even worse is the fact that if the authors remove weak, reductive descriptions, they still have to describe their characters, and something creative can go in that place.
Which brings us to a perennial favorite of mine, Trenton Lee Stewart’s The Mysterious Benedict Society. Stewart writes four protagonists, two girls and two boys. Go read the books rn if you haven’t yet! He makes one of the girls the biggest kid, and she’s the only one who’s athletic at all. He makes the Black boy crushingly intelligent and names him George Washington. This Black kid is the only one of the four who has two parents. He makes the youngest girl cranky and loud and frustratingly stubborn. She naps and writes obnoxious poems and doesn’t contribute to the team in any obvious ways.
All of these characteristics work against expected types. It’s fascinating! The tired, problematic tropes he could have used would go something like this:
all boys are athletic
all kids are white
white kids are smart
presidents are white
girls should be quiet
girls should be agreeable
people on teams should be highly functional
. . .and on and on.
But Stewart didn’t go for that! His characters look like this:
the athlete who grew up in the circus and is super handy is a girl
main characters can be Black
Black kids are brilliantly, shockingly smart
Black kids can have two loving parents
obnoxious, loud, stubborn girls exist
a person doesn’t need to be functional to deserve a spot on a team
These four characters are an absolute joy to follow. They are darling and funny and smart. And the characteristics Stewart gives them makes them deeper and cooler and gives them a wider base to move from. They go into the challenges of the book with these pieces of their personalities and move through the world and save it precisely because of their athleticism and intelligence and stubbornness.
The four main characters are my focus, but there’s also an adult on the support team named Rhonda Kazembe who is Black. Stewart doesn’t just make one kid Black as a token diversity creation. He writes Sticky as an intricate character and also gives the kids support people in whom they could see themselves, in characteristics like kindness and cleverness and, in Sticky’s case, physically as well.
It is important to have Black characters in your book. Period. It’s important too when you live in America, where racism is a glacier of a problem. The author Trenton Lee Stewart lives and writes in the city where Elizabeth Eckford walked to a newly desegregated Central High School as the only Black student. You may have heard of the Little Rock Nine? Representation matters. And, it’s important to have representation of Black kids getting to do normal kid things. Getting to be heroes in adventure books that aren’t stories about slavery and racism. (And heroes in stories that are, too! Not trying to limit anything here. More. More. More of everything.)
When an author rejects simplistic thinking (@Percy Jackson Book 1!) for complex nuance (@Mysterious Benedict Society!), their choices take them deeper into the characters and their inner worlds. The work benefits.
Let’s talk about Kate. What does it mean to make one of the girls the oldest and the biggest and the only one who is physically strong? The whole time I’m reading the book, I’m picturing Kate as taller and stronger than the boys. As she walks across a room on her hands and crawls through the maze via a heating pipe and catches Sticky from falling into a drapeweed trap, I’m seeing her do physical feats. She is confident in her body. She is capable. Her body is useful. It is primarily utilitarian. And she is living this, saving the world this way, at an age when most girls begin to experience a change in how they experience their own body and how the world around them perceives their body. But I, as a twelve year old reading this, get to watch Kate eat it up. It is special.
And Constance! Ugh, Constance. She is portrayed as annoying and sleepy and frustrating—and yet, not to spoil the plot, she ends up being the key to it all. The skills the other three kids have are skills we comprehend easily: physical strength, intelligence, leadership. Constance’s strength is her stubbornness. She is crucial to the team even with every inconvenience she presents—needing to be carried piggyback, needing naps, needing to complain aloud frequently. When Stewart centralizes her and focuses on her and gives her plot and growth even in all her differences, he’s creating a world where you don’t have to be “highly functional” to deserve to exist and be integrated into the communities around you. This, too, matters.
What about the fourth kid? The one I’ve said nothing about? His name is Reynie. He is described as totally average-looking. He is your entry point. He is your blank-enough canvas so that even if you identify strongly with Kate or Sticky, you’re able to follow the adventure with a perceptive guide. He’s the one who thinks about everyone else. We follow largely through his eyes with the third-person omniscient narrator.
And what a time we have.
There’s three main books in the Mysterious Benedict Society series, then a fourth one where they’re a bit older. There’s a prequel, which is one of the most exquisite books I’ve read. There’s also a puzzle book.
Like I always say: run, don't walk.
Of course, having enough to eat and weighing a certain amount are not directly related. We know that weight is largely determined by genetic and environmental factors. My argument flattens the science of that just to make an interesting point. I am not saying starving always creates weight loss in the real world. Just saying maybe the kids’ book doesn’t need to go the direction of anti-fat bias when there are other viable (still imaginary) options.