JEREMY CABBAGE AND THE LIVING MUSEUM OF HUMAN ODDBALLS AND QUADRUPED DELIGHTS

Take a liberal base of Dickens, throw in a healthy helping of Dahl and spice with a bit of Margo Lanagan, and you might approximate the recipe that yielded this fey little fantasy. Jeremy Cabbage was rescued as an infant by Polly, who raised him among a band of orphans with lots of love but little else in a shuttered library. The reader meets him, however, as he is being sold by Helga Harpwitch, into whose clutches he fell after one of his erstwhile chums betrayed them. Metropolis is ruled by the Baron, a bombastic buffoon whose shrewish wife urges him to eradicate cloons—people whose genes turn them into clowns at puberty. After a series of failed adoptions, Jeremy ends up with Bo and Ba of the Living Museum, a loving family of cloons and a collision course between Jeremy and the Baron’s minions begins. Parallel narratives follow Jeremy and the Baron’s family (could his daughter’s nose be turning red?) until the inevitable confrontation and equally inevitable resolution. As an inquiry into fascism, it’s pretty unsubtle, but entertaining and thought-provoking for all that. (Fiction. 8-12)