By Julie Sara Porter
Bookworm Reviews
Spoilers: STOP! Before you read this book, I request that you read my previous reviews for Dr. Fixit's Malicious Machine and The Counterfeit Zombies of Noc, Volumes 1 and 2 of Jessica Crichton's The Legend of Guts and Glory Freedom Fighters of Nil to understand the series. (While you're at it, read my review of Crichton's stand alone novel, Tipani Walker and The Nightmare Knot. While it is not set in the Guys and Glory Universe, it retains many similar themes). This review will contain MAJOR HEAVY DUTY SPOILERS for the series, so please read this review with caution.
You're back? Oh good, now on we go with Volume 3: The Diminutive Defenders of Num.
Now we come to the potential end of this bold, brilliant, amusing, gripping, suspenseful, involving, surprising, and endlessly entertaining YA Dystopian Science Fiction series by Jessica Crichton. She clearly put a lot of thought into how to bring the adventures of wonder twins Trevor and Tabitha Tate AKA Guts and Glory respectively to a satisfying and memorable conclusion and she did.
To briefly recount the previous volumes. In Volume 1, Trevor and Tabitha’s mother was kidnapped. The twins and their older sister, Emily are recruited by Dr. Fixit who tells them that she was taken to the land of Nil. When they arrive in Nil, they discover that it's a dystopia in which gangs of Kids between 7 and 12 are formed to battle against gangs of Teens. Adults are nowhere to be found. Emily, later called Spirit, is taken by the Teens and eventually joins them. The twins in the meantime join the Kids, obtain the names Guys and Glory, and make new friends like Books, Turtle, Snot, Roach, Blaze, and Papercut. They also vie with the Kid's leader, Fist, who later is revealed to be their missing older brother. They learn that Dr. Fixit has villainous intentions for sending them to Nil. Then they encourage the Kids to team up with the Teens to fight the real enemy.
After Fixit is temporarily defeated in the first book, the second volume features the Kids traveling to the nearby land of Noc where they encounter Fixit's formidable ex, Marie. She controls a group of elderly people to become zombies that obey her bidding. She uses her manipulative abilities to turn many of the Kids including Guts into zombies as well leaving Glory alone to fight against them. Meanwhile Guys and Glory explore the meanings behind their new names and what they can do to earn them. They discover that the Zombies are the Kid's grandparents and once they break them from Marie's hold, they receive new allies in the struggle against the tyrannical Dr. Fixit.
Now in Volume Three, The Kids and Teens are united so they decide to finally cut Dr. Fixit off at the source. They will enter his fortress in the Land of Num and defeat him once and for all. Along the way, they find brain washed Adults, and robots that obey Fixit without question. Along the way, the Kids rediscover missing family members and learn some interesting truths that reshape their worlds. Guts, Glory, and their siblings also learn the reasons for their existence and their real purpose for coming to Nil in the first place.
Crichton is a consummate YA author because she doesn't write for a young audience. She doesn't dumb down her writing style, hide traumatic and serious topics from her readership, and doesn't talk down to her Readers. She trusts that her Readers will understand her prose without sugarcoating or making it too juvenile.
One of the ways that she accomplishes this in this volume is through narration. Dr. Fixit's Malicious Machine is told through Guts' point of view and The Counterfeit Zombies of Noc was told by Glory. They were simple limited first person narratives and we got to exhibit the plot through one pair of eyes and voice each. With The Diminutive Defenders of Num, Crichton throws that out the window by giving multiple first person points of view.
Instead of one specific narrator, this book has ten: Guts, Glory, Spirit, Fist, Snot, Papercut, Books, Roach, Turtle, and Blaze. Instead of capturing one voice, she captures all of them and makes them as diverse as possible.
This is no doubt an insurmountable task that I do not envy Crichton for. However, it shows her immense trust that her young Readers will be able to follow such a narrative process without getting confused.
It helps that she puts a name identifier at the beginning of each section to point out who is speaking and each chapter has a map which follows the path that our heroes take. But the variety of many voices and the multi layers of a complex narration cannot be understated.
The complex narration helps to develop the characters and gives them opportunities to stand out. Guts and Glory have some great moments particularly after they are separated and take different roles in fighting against Fixit. Guts is thrown into Fixit's inner sanctum and finds out some traumatic secrets about their foe. Glory also has her heroic moments especially when she learns that her abilities have increased exponentially.
Other characters get to shine on their own showing courage, empathy, intelligence, defiance, and individuality. While they are all terrific, the two biggest stand outs in the ensemble are Guts and Glory's older siblings, Fist and Spirit showing that great characterization is a Tate Family trait.
Fist has been mostly the dominant dictatorial leader turned traitor turned antihero in the previous volumes. Now, he gets more depth as he bonds with Blaze, one of the younger kids and treats her like a kid sister. He also faces his own abandonment issues knowing that his mother and siblings left him behind when they fled Nil and traveled to Earth and ruminates the difficulties of being a member of the Tate Family of heroes and what it means to be one himself.
Meanwhile Spirit has to deal with her own insecurities about what role she should play in the resistance and acknowledges her complicated relationship with her family, particularly her mother. She also has to discover and accept her own inner power when danger approaches.
One of the more unique and humorous touches to this series is Crichton's use of dialogue. The Kids and Teens speak in a language that uses a strange composite of pidgin English and slang. For example Blaze at one point describes travel by boat as “Bein’ onna boat makes ya real tough. The wind’s blowin’ on yer face, but ya can just stand there an’ tell it ta shut it, cuz ya ain't goin’ nowhere anyhow.”
It takes awhile to get used to but it definitely gives the impression of gangs of young people whose education has been limited, have to act and talk tough to survive, and learn to communicate by their own merits.
The more hilarious aspect is the Numspeak language spoken by the Adults. It consists entirely of business communication jargon and cliches. For example “bottom line” is someone's name, “cutting edge” is now or today, and “level the playing field” is discussion or communication.
As someone who has to review a lot of Self-Help, Personal Development, and Business books where these phrases occur so frequently that I inwardly roll my eyes when I see them, the concept of building a whole language around words like “think outside the box,” “synergy,” “zero sum game,” and “paradigm shift” personally amuses me. I also questioned and felt my current age when I realized that I understood the Adultspeak upon first reading it better and more clearly than I did the Kidspeak.
A slight and questionable flaw with this book is the muted presence of events and characters from the previous book, The Counterfeit Zombies of Noc. The Grandparents are introduced but don't play a huge part of this volume with the exception of The Tate’s grandmother. There is a lot about brainwashing and manipulation which is similar to Marie’s hold on the Zombies, but there is no direct link to that process.
Most importantly, it would have been interesting to see Marie play a part in this volume. The idea of her and Fixit, lovers turned exes vying with each other or working together for control of the people, is fiendishly delightful. The three books would have tied together better instead of giving the overall impression of jumping from Nil to Num without stopping at Noc along the way.
However this is a small flaw in a book that is filled with climactic moments that bring the series to an overall successful conclusion. In YA literature, it should become legendary.
