A slow but richly atmospheric read.
Lonely Lena Mattacascar heads to the border to find a father she barely remembers and an answer to her unusual appearance.
Armed with a letter and money from her absent father, 18-year-old Lena leaves her dour mother and grandmother and takes the train toward Scree—wilderness, penal colony and rumored reservation for Peculiars, humanoid creatures with tell-tale abnormalities. Cursed with elongated fingers and feet, Lena both fears that she may be a Peculiar and hopes that she may find acceptance in Scree. Obstacles plague Lena’s journey, and she is soon stranded in the faded seaside town of Knob Knoster. While seeking a guide and more money for her expedition, she finds herself working at Mr. Beasley’s steampunk-esque Zephyr House alongside the endearingly earnest librarian Jimson Quiggley, on a secret mission from the charismatic blackmailer Marshal Saltre. Set in a vaguely Victorian world, Gothic elements permeate the story: a mysterious house, an abundance of secrets, odd servants and competing romantic figures, though Lena’s shame over her abnormalities alienates her from both Saltre and Quigley. The sporadic action scenes feel artificial, but the ambiguity surrounding the existence of Peculiars and the origin of their physical deformities—magic? genetics?—is thought-provoking.
A slow but richly atmospheric read. (Steampunk. 12 & up)Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4197-0178-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
A solid genre outing.
In the near future, an incarcerated teen with a reputation for escape attempts is moved to a new, maximum-security facility called the Rig, an oil-drilling platform in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, now converted to use as a prison.
Fifteen-year-old William Drake is a likable, tough-talking narrator who hails from London, the son of an African-American father and a Polish mother. True to hard-boiled type, Drake keeps to himself and resists making friends, even as he makes enemies of the worst baddies by defending weaker kids from them and is won over by the Rig's kindly psychologist, Dr. Lambros. Flavoring the third-person narration with some great one-liners (“She had the voice of a lifelong smoker thrown in a blender”), Ducie takes his time setting the stage for the action-packed second half of the novel, with Drake carefully plotting an escape that involves the skills of his hacker cellmate, Tristan, and the knowledge of Irene, a fellow prisoner who hints at a conspiracy that eventually blows up in their faces. All the elements of a great thriller are here—sinister villains, a stoic hero with a heart of gold, even mutated sharks. If some of these details seem a bit familiar to seasoned action-adventure fans, there is still plenty to keep them engaged, and the open-ended conclusion suggests there may be more to come.
A solid genre outing. (Thriller. 13-18)Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-544-50311-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
Authorial tics aside, an engaging tale with a resilient heroine, a dead but lively supporting cast and enough wit to grease...
A goth teen meets ghosts, uncovers a murder and even gets a little (very little) work done on her horror novel in this mannered but entertaining prose debut.
October considers the cemetery next to her new house a nice touch, as her single father is clinically depressed and she’s been dubbed a “Zombie Tramp” by mean girl Ashlie Salmons just moments after entering the “teenaged Thunderdome” of her new Ontario high school. At least she can work on her magnum opus, Two Knives, One Thousand Demons, among the tombstones—except that just reading a spell from the book calls up the friendly but rambunctious ghosts of five local teens killed over the past two centuries. Then her favorite teacher is crushed beneath a car. The police call it an accident, but October’s not so sure…and with help from her motley crew of ectoplasmic allies sets out to discover the truth. Switching frequently for no evident reason between first and third person and occasionally interjecting authorial comments, Munday interweaves a brisk tale of high-school hatreds with an investigation that ultimately leads back to terrorist acts committed 40 years before and culminates in a wild Halloween climax. Munday, a cartoonist, tucks in black-and-white spot portraits and closes with notes on characters and cultural references.
Authorial tics aside, an engaging tale with a resilient heroine, a dead but lively supporting cast and enough wit to grease the wheels. (Detective fantasy. 12-15)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-55022-971-4
Page Count: 300
Publisher: ECW Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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