Book Review: Anyone But Ivy Pocket by Caleb Krisp

I picked up the book because it struck me as something in the vein of Paddington bear, Inspector Clouseau, or Amelia Bedelia. The illustrations remind me of Tim Burton's oddly proportioned, unusual style. What I thought I was getting was absolutely not what I got and I'm deeply disappointed. Innocent mishaps are a delight to read but this book has a main character who is neither innocent nor prone to mishaps. She puts herself in every situation because of her own willful ignorance or exaggerated self-importance. While the character is supposed to be bumbling, charming, and oblivious, she comes off as pretentious, self-righteous, willfully ignorant, and is a chronic liar.

Summary

Ivy Pocket thinks she's the best maid in the world and can't understand why everyone falls to pieces when she's around. It must be because they all wish they were like her! After her current employer flees Paris to America in the night, leaving Ivy stranded and unemployed, Ivy is offered a job by a dying duchess - she is to carry a diamond necklace to England and give it to a young girl for her birthday. From the moment she gets the diamond, things go wrong. A nice woman attaches herself to Ivy on the voyage to London and seems to turn up everywhere Ivy goes. The house she stays in is robbed. There are even rumors the diamond necklace is cursed! But Ivy doesn't worry about any of that. She's got a job to do and she's going to do it, no matter what happens.

Thoughts

There are some fun choice of words throughout the story and wild mental images.

When I first set eyes on the Duchess of Trinity, two things were immediately clear. Once, she was gravely ill. Two, she was monumentally fat. A great big slug of a woman - part goddess, part hippopotamus. She was as magnificent as she was terrifying.

On the surface that seems to be the humorous observation of a pre-teen girl meeting a stranger. If descriptions like this were scattered around lightly, I don't think I would mind but Ivy Pocket aims this mean-streaked negative view at every person she meets. She calls people dim-witted, simple-minded, plain, and points out their flaws and insecurities with uncalled for bluntness and enthusiasm, then acts condescending when they're offended. Frequently she sifts her insult back to them as if they were too stupid to understand what she was saying and therefore too stupid to know what they were saying to her and she must forgive their ignorance.

As coincidences, robberies and murders continue to happen wherever she goes, Ivy scoffs at the precious few adults cautioning her to be careful. She brags about how astute and sharp she is, but it's obvious to the reader that she is misinterpreting every situation and weaves some wild tale of what she thinks is happening. When anyone calls her out on lying or being careless, Ivy calls them nitwits or foolish dingbats.

Even the mystery in the book is stupid because Ivy is too busy making up fanciful lies to notice someone is trying to rob her. She blindly trusts complete strangers instead of the people she was told would help her.

Although told explicitly not to put on or tell anyone about the diamond necklace entrusted to her care, Ivy does both several times. She openly tells people that she has the diamond sewn into her pocket but, in a fit of clarity and caution, moves it to a hidden location each night. The one thing she’s successful in is not handing the diamond over too soon, and then when she finally realizes the horrifying truth of the situation, refuses to hand it over at all.

I can understand how a character like this would appeal to children. She is unashamedly self-confident, speak to her mind, doesn't let anyone put her down, and goes where she pleases with independence because she's self-reliant. However it plays into the frightfully prevalent trope that children are smarter than adults and don't need to listen to anyone. It embraces the modern cultural concept that a person has no flaws and therefore do not need to change anything about them regardless of how it impacts other people because they are a unique individual and must be accepted exactly the way they are. There's no room for the character to mature or to show any growth over the story. She is who she is and refuses to be anything but that. She shows no respect to anyone except the characters she identifies with.

Mixed in all of this is the actual mystery - a diamond on a necklace that people are willing to kill for. The diamond also seems to give Ivy the ability to see ghosts and heal some injuries. The whole plot with the necklace is abruptly and partially resolved in the last couple chapters, setting it up for the next books (it's a trilogy). One of the characters, a thirteen year old, dies and no one seems to care - not her mother, cousin, aunt, governesses, or Ivy. They're all sad for a moment and then shrug it off.

The writing style is abrupt and choppy with a "stream of consciousness" feel I find unpleasant in most books. Again, it's a matter of quantity, like Ivy's negative and fanciful descriptions of people. Used sparingly, these shorts, abrupt sentences can be very effective in conveying urgency, danger or extreme emotion. When the action finally rolls around, it’s almost impossible to tell; there is no increase in tension through Ivy's POV because her voice hasn't changed. While this might work for a character who is calm and collected with little emotional attachment, Ivy is not that sort of character. If sentences had been longer throughout the book and gradually shortened at the climax, the reader would have felt some kind of urgency, even if Ivy didn’t.

Conclusion

This book was a trainwreck from the first page. I skimmed the whole story to see if there were any redeeming qualities and found none. In reading other reviews of the books, the conclusion is that, taken seriously, the book is hideous, but if taken as satire, it ranges from painfully funny to an outrageous frolicking adventure. In either case, the thing that alarms me is that this book is written for children who aren’t mature enough to understand that Ivy Pocket is not a character they should mimic.

If you enjoy stupid characters doing stupid things, with mean-spirited attempts at humor and bland mysteries, you might just like this book.