Intelligent and Word-Rich
The Mysterious Benedict Society features children as its main characters, but the writing is not at all childlike. Even when the child characters are speaking, and even when—as is often the case with Constance—they are speaking rudely, their word choices and sentence structures remain intelligent. There are no I was like, she was like, he was like statements, nor do the kids resort to saying whatever on a regular basis. Instead they say things like:
- "I'm no great chess player, but I would say not." (5.43)
- "No surprise there […] I've never met a grown-up who believed me capable of thought." (5.137)
- "Look, there's a window just above the Institute flag. I'll bet something important's up there. […] There's always something important behind the highest window." (10.74)
- "Mature drapeweed develops a woody brown stem, but young drapeweed has tender green shoots." (10.91)
(Pop quiz: there's one quote from each of the four kids above. Do you know who said what?)
What we're getting at is that these kids are smart—they talk in complete sentences and they use good words. What's more, both the dialogue and the non-dialogue parts of the story are highly descriptive, and since the characters do a lot of thinking about their situations, we get a lot of metacognition too, which makes the book very word-rich.
And no, by word-rich we don't mean wordy. Wordy implies that a lot of words are used when things could be said in a simpler way. Word-rich (which yes, is a Shmoop coined term) means that because there's a lot to explain—such as the way characters feel about the way they feel—a lot of words are used.