The Umbrella Maker’s Son left us feeling all wet

It’s possible to be too clever or too meta when audiences aren’t ready for it yet. The Umbrella Maker’s Son falls into one, or two of those traps.* The surface of The Umbrella Maker’s Son has a lot going for it that will be attractive to middle school readers. Oscar Buckle is the titular son of an umbrella maker, named after their family and boy does the city ever need umbrellas.** Everything is going well with Buckle and their umbrellas, after all, they’re the best in town and priced appropriately.**** Unfortunately, the city’s other umbrella manufacturer is selling more market share. This causes Oscar to have to quit school and work for his father as an apprentice to learn the family business and ask questions about the competitor.

So, the product that costs more, which would produce less waste, because fewer of them would supposedly break, is on the defensive posture in the book. No, I agree, let’s have consumers purchase the cheaper, easier-to-break products so that they have to buy them multiple times. This way they have less money, the corporations get more cash and the landfills get their pound of flesh too. Just when mglit has an anti-capitalist message down to where I know what to expect, they throw in a curve ball. To put things in even more of a quandary, strange things start to happen in town and the lighthouse that everyone knows all about just might have a more nefarious intent.

I did read The Umbrella Maker’s Son, but it was a frustrating experience. The chapters were all of various lengths, some were typical of an mglit book, while others were just two or three pages. Normally when chapters are that short it’s done to highlight tension or showcase something that’s happening unbeknownst to the main character. Some chapters are only one page and willingly fake you out with the big Macguffin that lurks in the book.

It’s also a long book, clocking in at just over 350 pages. The shape of the book is slightly smaller than other middle-grade books that they’ll pick up. However, those mglit readers who are easily intimidated by ‘bigger’ books will be easily thwarted from picking up Umbrella.

I know that some mgtlit readers will enjoy that meta or self-aware fun, but many will not. The ending is also one that readers will see coming from a long way off. There are many books where the ending is apparent, but those books are better-paced or don’t rely so much on tricks like hundreds of liner notes and staccato sentences.

The Umbrella Maker’s Son is by Katrina Leno and is available on Little, Brown and Company, an imprint of Hachette Book Group.

There are affiliate links in this post.  

*Traps, like using lots of footnotes within the text that explains terms used throughout the book. There are 162 total footnotes in The Umbrella Maker’s Son. Some readers will find it amusing, akin to a seek-and-find book, while more will probably find the act of looking up and down at the page a bit annoying.

**It rains a lot in Roan.***

***It rains so much in Roan that there are 47 different ways to describe rain, with about two dozen of them listed in the book’s glossary.

****See: they are more expensive than the other umbrellas in town.