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This is the story of the greatest thief that ever lived. Forced into a life of thievery, ten-year-old blind orphan Peter Nimble longs for escape. One fateful afternoon he steals a box from a mysterious traveller - a box that contains three pairs of magical eyes. Little does Peter know that these eyes will lead him on an unforgettable adventure...
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes is a children's story. Its main characters are children (with speaking furry sidekicks), the story takes place in a fantastic and slightly surreal world, and of course, our hero is an orphan - that ancient prerequisite of many old-fashioned children's stories.
Peter Nimble is not just an orphan, but a blind orphan, raised by a cat (who was drowned with her kittens, but Peter escaped from the bag) - and a master thief. A blind master thief with special senses and able to pick locks with his bare fingers. No, this was never going to be a realistic story. That's fine. It's a fantastic adventure story after all - and the title even includes the word "fantastic" in case you had any doubts about that.
The narration is written with numerous little asides addressing the reader directly. This is a story that is not too far from a goodnight tale, or a story told verbally - it wants you to feel coddled and involved and slightly part of a conversation. The chapters are mostly quite short, quite possibly designed to be read to children at bed time (or by children themselves at bed time). And the adventure is indeed quite engrossing, if slightly surreal. I felt reminded of Michael Ende (whose books often had a good dollop of surreal elements).
There are some crucial differences, however. Michael Ende's books had real darkness - the grey men in Momo (Puffin Books) are ruthless and sinister. And the swamp of sadness in The Neverending Story (Puffin Books) is perhaps one of the most memorably tragic moments of my youthful reading. But they never strayed into gratuitous violence. And, at his best, Ende's novels felt whole and coherent.
Peter Nimble, on the other hand, has adventures that don't feel like a coherent story until quite late in the tale. There are loose ends, and much of it feels improvised and then stuck together in a rather haphazard way. Worse, the violence does get gruesome and gory, culminating in big battles that cause rivers of blood, but without having any real impact on our heroes. Most of the story feels like it is aimed at 10 year olds, but the violence seems like it belongs in a young adult / 15-year-old audience novel. Meanwhile, the caricature villain could just as easily appear in a Lemony Snicket tale (based on the movie - I never read the books). The various elements of this book never sit together comfortably. It's too childish for adults / young adults, and too gory for children. It's too violent for its whimsical bits, or too whimsical for the darkness to convince. One character feels like he's been stolen from the movie Labyrinth (Collector's Edition) [DVD] [2004](only instead of a small yipping dog, he's been recast as a hybrid kitten-horse-man), while the ravens could just as easily have lived in a Stephen King novel, and the apes seem like they escaped from a Tolkien novel.
If this were a movie, I'd say it'd be directed by Terry Gilliam - it has that uncomfortable, not quite settled feeling, like a wedding cake flavoured with garlic...
Worth a look for adults who feel nostalgic about children's novels, but I would not recommend it to children or teenagers.
Then again, I never read any C. S. Lewis. Perhaps there is a market for young children's stories with big epic gruesome battles, rivers of blood, dismemberments and so on. It's just not what I would have enjoyed reading as a child.
Peter Nimble is not just an orphan, but a blind orphan, raised by a cat (who was drowned with her kittens, but Peter escaped from the bag) - and a master thief. A blind master thief with special senses and able to pick locks with his bare fingers. No, this was never going to be a realistic story. That's fine. It's a fantastic adventure story after all - and the title even includes the word "fantastic" in case you had any doubts about that.
The narration is written with numerous little asides addressing the reader directly. This is a story that is not too far from a goodnight tale, or a story told verbally - it wants you to feel coddled and involved and slightly part of a conversation. The chapters are mostly quite short, quite possibly designed to be read to children at bed time (or by children themselves at bed time). And the adventure is indeed quite engrossing, if slightly surreal. I felt reminded of Michael Ende (whose books often had a good dollop of surreal elements).
There are some crucial differences, however. Michael Ende's books had real darkness - the grey men in Momo (Puffin Books) are ruthless and sinister. And the swamp of sadness in The Neverending Story (Puffin Books) is perhaps one of the most memorably tragic moments of my youthful reading. But they never strayed into gratuitous violence. And, at his best, Ende's novels felt whole and coherent.
Peter Nimble, on the other hand, has adventures that don't feel like a coherent story until quite late in the tale. There are loose ends, and much of it feels improvised and then stuck together in a rather haphazard way. Worse, the violence does get gruesome and gory, culminating in big battles that cause rivers of blood, but without having any real impact on our heroes. Most of the story feels like it is aimed at 10 year olds, but the violence seems like it belongs in a young adult / 15-year-old audience novel. Meanwhile, the caricature villain could just as easily appear in a Lemony Snicket tale (based on the movie - I never read the books). The various elements of this book never sit together comfortably. It's too childish for adults / young adults, and too gory for children. It's too violent for its whimsical bits, or too whimsical for the darkness to convince. One character feels like he's been stolen from the movie Labyrinth (Collector's Edition) [DVD] [2004](only instead of a small yipping dog, he's been recast as a hybrid kitten-horse-man), while the ravens could just as easily have lived in a Stephen King novel, and the apes seem like they escaped from a Tolkien novel.
If this were a movie, I'd say it'd be directed by Terry Gilliam - it has that uncomfortable, not quite settled feeling, like a wedding cake flavoured with garlic...
Worth a look for adults who feel nostalgic about children's novels, but I would not recommend it to children or teenagers.
Then again, I never read any C. S. Lewis. Perhaps there is a market for young children's stories with big epic gruesome battles, rivers of blood, dismemberments and so on. It's just not what I would have enjoyed reading as a child.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
50 reviews
41 of 42 people found the following review helpful
Peter Nimble: Utterly Fantastic
29 July 2011
Format:Hardcover
I've been looking forward to Peter Nimble since the moment I came across Jonathan Auxier's website, The Scop. The site is simple, the sketches are fun and that might be the best "about me' section I've ever come across. So to hear Jonathan was publishing his first middle-grade this fall, literally made me giddy. Then I found that this particular middle grade novel is set in a quazi-Victorian age, starring a blind-orphan-thief.
Here's what I need: books that I can look a kid in the eye and say, "Trust me, you're going to love this." So that while they're developing their reading (and thinking) strategies, they'll fall in love with literature and see the relevancy for the skills. I'm looking for books that create "the circulation effect" (I pass off a book and by the time it's returned two months later, I've seen it on 15 different desks). I'm quite confident that Peter Nimble and his Fantastic Eyes will be one of those books.
First and foremost, Peter Nimble has an absolutely mesmerizing flow to it. It's got all the fun of disenfranchised Dickens mixed with Phantom Tollbooth absurdity. Jonathan Auxier seamlessly blends these two very diverse attributes, strapping his readers to his back as he takes them along for a breakneck ride through complete obscurity. One minute you're meeting his traveling companion, an enchanted horse-cat-knight; the next minute you're giggling over a reference to 18th century burgling proverb. And that's what makes this novel so much fun.
Auxier immerses you in this wonderfully substantial tale while relentlessly sprinkling in bits of humor at every turn. To really buy into fantasy, there needs to be in a believable world. In a lot of the high-fantasy for middle-graders that I've read, this tends to get a bit descriptive. Not that it's a bad thing, most of the time it's completely essential to the story. But for inexperienced readers who haven't built the stamina to stick it out, such description can slow the story down to abandonment. Auxier does much of his world-building through an astute sense for humor. Thieving terminology and old sayings build Peter's culture. This enables the author to spend less time creating the world and more time pushing Peter through it. And the reader can pick the rest up along the way.
By omitting the overly descriptive elements of fantasy, we're left with a story that moves at a truly exceptional pace. Take my knees for example. I had an hour to kill before heading home for dinner. I made my way over to the beach with Peter Nimble in tow. Before I knew it three hours had passed, my legs were cooked, and I was late for family dinner.
The chapter structure and pace just work sensationally. Some end in total cliffhangers, others are satisfying bookends; all without ever feeling predictable or formulaic. Sometimes a section was wrapped up nicely when I assumed it would stretch out, while other times I thought I knew how a chapter would end only to be left with a dropped jaw and a yearning to find out where we're going next. And all of this happens from the moment we set foot into Peter's tale.
Right from the introduction it's clear that we're in the hands of a storyteller. It doesn't feel like the characters or the narrator know something that you don't. The information we learn in the beginning later becomes pertinent but it never comes off overly mysterious. There's nothing wrong with employing those strategies at a story's onset but doing so risks losing that audience that isn't quite ready to pick out the questions they'll need to keep in their heads for a few hundred pages.
Another major component of Peter Nimble's flow is the manner in which we meet new characters and explore new settings. The story's landscapes constantly shift without inundating the reader with detail. We grow accustomed to Peter's new surroundings with him. Seeing as how Peter is blind, both he and the reader are exposed to the setting by moving through it. Characters too, flow in and out without coming off hollow or hurried.
Our boy, Peter Nimble, is blind. The disability drives the story without ever becoming preachy or asking the reader for sympathy. It's refreshing to have a main character whose handicap is the source of his success (without him having to learn some character trait by coming to terms with the disability). In fact, frequently, the disability becomes the butt of many a pun. Good. We certainly want to teach our kids to treat everybody, able or handicapped, with respect. It's nice to see Peter isn't discluded from good-natured humor at his expense, like so often is the case when disabilities appear in children's literature.
Peter Nimble and his Fantastic Eyes is sure to be hit with middle grade boys and girls alike. At times it's utterly absurd; others, rich and poignant, but it always remains sensationally obscure. And if nothing else, it's that current of obscurity running throughout the novel that will charge its readers and keep them chuckling until the last page.
It's my job to get emerging readers the skills they need to be proficient with text. But what good is a skill set if you can't find a relevancy in it? I say I have just as much a responsibility to help my readers find both. Many times, it requires some salesmanship. And, a salesman is only as good as his product. It's the caliber of story that is simply... Fantastic.
Okay, I can't end without mentioning how every bit of this book drips with style. The cover is gorgeous, the chapter titles are some of the best I've ever heard, and as I was finishing it up on the way to our field trip today a student leaned in to check out the illustration at the top of the chapter. That attention to detail clearly shows the amount of respect both the author and the publisher have for their readers.
Here's what I need: books that I can look a kid in the eye and say, "Trust me, you're going to love this." So that while they're developing their reading (and thinking) strategies, they'll fall in love with literature and see the relevancy for the skills. I'm looking for books that create "the circulation effect" (I pass off a book and by the time it's returned two months later, I've seen it on 15 different desks). I'm quite confident that Peter Nimble and his Fantastic Eyes will be one of those books.
First and foremost, Peter Nimble has an absolutely mesmerizing flow to it. It's got all the fun of disenfranchised Dickens mixed with Phantom Tollbooth absurdity. Jonathan Auxier seamlessly blends these two very diverse attributes, strapping his readers to his back as he takes them along for a breakneck ride through complete obscurity. One minute you're meeting his traveling companion, an enchanted horse-cat-knight; the next minute you're giggling over a reference to 18th century burgling proverb. And that's what makes this novel so much fun.
Auxier immerses you in this wonderfully substantial tale while relentlessly sprinkling in bits of humor at every turn. To really buy into fantasy, there needs to be in a believable world. In a lot of the high-fantasy for middle-graders that I've read, this tends to get a bit descriptive. Not that it's a bad thing, most of the time it's completely essential to the story. But for inexperienced readers who haven't built the stamina to stick it out, such description can slow the story down to abandonment. Auxier does much of his world-building through an astute sense for humor. Thieving terminology and old sayings build Peter's culture. This enables the author to spend less time creating the world and more time pushing Peter through it. And the reader can pick the rest up along the way.
By omitting the overly descriptive elements of fantasy, we're left with a story that moves at a truly exceptional pace. Take my knees for example. I had an hour to kill before heading home for dinner. I made my way over to the beach with Peter Nimble in tow. Before I knew it three hours had passed, my legs were cooked, and I was late for family dinner.
The chapter structure and pace just work sensationally. Some end in total cliffhangers, others are satisfying bookends; all without ever feeling predictable or formulaic. Sometimes a section was wrapped up nicely when I assumed it would stretch out, while other times I thought I knew how a chapter would end only to be left with a dropped jaw and a yearning to find out where we're going next. And all of this happens from the moment we set foot into Peter's tale.
Right from the introduction it's clear that we're in the hands of a storyteller. It doesn't feel like the characters or the narrator know something that you don't. The information we learn in the beginning later becomes pertinent but it never comes off overly mysterious. There's nothing wrong with employing those strategies at a story's onset but doing so risks losing that audience that isn't quite ready to pick out the questions they'll need to keep in their heads for a few hundred pages.
Another major component of Peter Nimble's flow is the manner in which we meet new characters and explore new settings. The story's landscapes constantly shift without inundating the reader with detail. We grow accustomed to Peter's new surroundings with him. Seeing as how Peter is blind, both he and the reader are exposed to the setting by moving through it. Characters too, flow in and out without coming off hollow or hurried.
Our boy, Peter Nimble, is blind. The disability drives the story without ever becoming preachy or asking the reader for sympathy. It's refreshing to have a main character whose handicap is the source of his success (without him having to learn some character trait by coming to terms with the disability). In fact, frequently, the disability becomes the butt of many a pun. Good. We certainly want to teach our kids to treat everybody, able or handicapped, with respect. It's nice to see Peter isn't discluded from good-natured humor at his expense, like so often is the case when disabilities appear in children's literature.
Peter Nimble and his Fantastic Eyes is sure to be hit with middle grade boys and girls alike. At times it's utterly absurd; others, rich and poignant, but it always remains sensationally obscure. And if nothing else, it's that current of obscurity running throughout the novel that will charge its readers and keep them chuckling until the last page.
It's my job to get emerging readers the skills they need to be proficient with text. But what good is a skill set if you can't find a relevancy in it? I say I have just as much a responsibility to help my readers find both. Many times, it requires some salesmanship. And, a salesman is only as good as his product. It's the caliber of story that is simply... Fantastic.
Okay, I can't end without mentioning how every bit of this book drips with style. The cover is gorgeous, the chapter titles are some of the best I've ever heard, and as I was finishing it up on the way to our field trip today a student leaned in to check out the illustration at the top of the chapter. That attention to detail clearly shows the amount of respect both the author and the publisher have for their readers.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Peter Nimble is MY New HERO
22 July 2011
Format:Hardcover
This review first appeared on my blog.
I would KILL to have this title on Kindle, so if you are listening, Amulet Books, get on that! This title-- which is available in hardcover for a reasonable $17, is the most charming thing written for kids I've come across since Harry. Jonathan Auxier has created an incredibly charming adventure with this novel. Peter, the title character and hero, is a blind orphan. At the tender age of ten he must learn to survive, and does so by becoming an unlikely thief. He steals a box filled with three sets of magical eyes. From the book blurb:
One fateful afternoon, he steals a box from a mysterious traveling haberdasher--a box that contains three pairs of magical eyes. When he tries the first pair, he is instantly transported to a hidden island where he is presented with a special quest: to travel to the dangerous Vanished Kingdom and rescue a people in need. Along with his loyal sidekick--a knight who has been turned into an unfortunate combination of horse and cat--and the magic eyes, he embarks on an unforgettable, swashbuckling adventure to discover his true destiny.
What more could any kid want? Pick this one up. Absolutely adorabe, genuinely new ideas, and beautifully crafted. This is why kids fall in love with books!
I would KILL to have this title on Kindle, so if you are listening, Amulet Books, get on that! This title-- which is available in hardcover for a reasonable $17, is the most charming thing written for kids I've come across since Harry. Jonathan Auxier has created an incredibly charming adventure with this novel. Peter, the title character and hero, is a blind orphan. At the tender age of ten he must learn to survive, and does so by becoming an unlikely thief. He steals a box filled with three sets of magical eyes. From the book blurb:
One fateful afternoon, he steals a box from a mysterious traveling haberdasher--a box that contains three pairs of magical eyes. When he tries the first pair, he is instantly transported to a hidden island where he is presented with a special quest: to travel to the dangerous Vanished Kingdom and rescue a people in need. Along with his loyal sidekick--a knight who has been turned into an unfortunate combination of horse and cat--and the magic eyes, he embarks on an unforgettable, swashbuckling adventure to discover his true destiny.
What more could any kid want? Pick this one up. Absolutely adorabe, genuinely new ideas, and beautifully crafted. This is why kids fall in love with books!
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
truly unique, entertaining, and touching story and soon-to-be classic
9 Aug 2011
Format:Hardcover
I could never write a children's book. Balancing entertainment and quick-paced action for young readers without sacrificing the setting detail and character backgrounds needed to truly paint a vivid story seems almost an impossible task. Jonathan Auxier has absolutely mastered this equation in what has been the very best children's book I have read in years! I would say this story is as unique as James and the Giant Peach, and as touching and memorable as C.S Lewis' Narnia series. Go buy this book now!
Told in a witty 3rd person narrative ,Peter Nimble and his Fantastic Eyes is a story about a blind young orphan forced into thievery, who after a miserable childhood is finally given the chance/promise from the kindly professor Cake that he is the boy needed to rescue a vanished kingdom from an evil imposter king. "It was a choice between comfortable misery and terrifying uncertainty... professor Cake had given him a choice - a gift no one had ever offered him before" (P. 68) Under normal circumstances, this would be a hard task, but good thing Peter Nimble happens to be the greatest thief that ever lived! Thankfully he has his best friend, who also happens to be an "enchanted cat-horse-man creature" by his side to help with their quest. In a completely original and fast-paced sequence of events, readers young and old follow Peter along his journey and you will never guess how it ends.
This book was "fantastic" while entirely entertaining, with not a slow spot in it. The story also is challenging and compelling on a moral level as well. Characters struggle with, and learn the value of bravery, justice and blind faith. This book is the perfect book for reading aloud with your children. It is definitely the first book I will grab to read aloud to my daughter as soon as she is old enough to sit still and listen.
Told in a witty 3rd person narrative ,Peter Nimble and his Fantastic Eyes is a story about a blind young orphan forced into thievery, who after a miserable childhood is finally given the chance/promise from the kindly professor Cake that he is the boy needed to rescue a vanished kingdom from an evil imposter king. "It was a choice between comfortable misery and terrifying uncertainty... professor Cake had given him a choice - a gift no one had ever offered him before" (P. 68) Under normal circumstances, this would be a hard task, but good thing Peter Nimble happens to be the greatest thief that ever lived! Thankfully he has his best friend, who also happens to be an "enchanted cat-horse-man creature" by his side to help with their quest. In a completely original and fast-paced sequence of events, readers young and old follow Peter along his journey and you will never guess how it ends.
This book was "fantastic" while entirely entertaining, with not a slow spot in it. The story also is challenging and compelling on a moral level as well. Characters struggle with, and learn the value of bravery, justice and blind faith. This book is the perfect book for reading aloud with your children. It is definitely the first book I will grab to read aloud to my daughter as soon as she is old enough to sit still and listen.
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