Review of The Bitter Kingdom, by Rae Carson

Fantasy, Teen Fiction Review 0

The Bitter Kingdom

by Rae Carson

Greenwillow Books (HarperCollins), 2013. 433 pages.

The Bitter Kingdom is the conclusion to the fantasy trilogy begun with The Girl of Fire and Thorns. In it, Queen Elisa, bearer of the Godstone, really comes into her power.

Now, my biggest peeve against this series is that the first-person present-tense narration makes it feel rather breathless and overwrought. But despite my prejudice, I read and enjoyed the series. The main character, Elisa, learns and grows realistically throughout the series.

You won’t want to read the final volume unless you’ve read and enjoyed the first two. The conclusion is the best of the bunch. It packs a lot of adventure into one volume, beginning when Elisa must rescue the man she loves, continuing with the need to confront the Invierno kingdom, stop an attack on her own country, and stop a civil war.

Meanwhile, Elisa is learning how to harness the power of a living Godstone, and manage friendships and alliances – and make new ones. Without spoiling anything, I’ll say it was about time for Elisa to be happy in romance.

This is an ambitious and imaginative trilogy. I can happily say that the conclusion, The Bitter Kingdom, is satisfying and action-packed.

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Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Please use the comments if you’ve read the book and want to discuss spoilers!

Review of Boxers & Saints, by Gene Luen Yang

Award Winners, Graphic Novel, Historical, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 2

Boxers & Saints

by Gene Luen Yang

First Second, New York, 2013. 2 volumes, 328 pages and 170 pages.
Starred Review
2013 National Book Award Shortlist

Boxers & Saints is a two-volume graphic novel about the Boxer Rebellion that took place in China in 1899-1900.

The first volume, Boxers, follows Bao, the third brother in his family and shows his encounter with “foreign devils” and how he becomes an enthusiastic leader of the Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fist.

Bao receives training from a traveling kung fu master and learns a ritual which enables him and his brother-disciples to transform into the ancient gods of China when they fight. They travel to cleanse and heal China of the foreign devils and the secondary devils — Chinese who have converted to Christianity.

The second volume, Saints, looks at Four-Girl, a Chinese girl who does convert to Christianity, even though she barely understands it. She receives a name (which her family never gave her), Vibiana, when she is baptized.

Though Vibiana doesn’t really understand Christianity, she receives visions of Joan of Arc, and decides to become a maiden warrior, defending against the Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fist.

The caption on the back reads, “Every war has two faces.” That is the strength of this work. It brings you into the emotions and passions of people on both sides of the conflict. The perspective, in both cases, is from the native Chinese people, and I enjoyed the way when English is spoken, foreign-looking characters are used, since our heroes don’t understand English.

This is a book about war. It is violent and brutal. Our heroes are training to fight and kill. There is much blood, and there are many senseless deaths. It’s not a very cheery book, and no, you can’t call the ending happy.

I like the way both stories had elements of magic realism. Bao had the visions of Chinese gods, and Vibiana the visions of Joan of Arc. The author walks a fine line of letting us see both sides without condemning either side. We see the wild tales each side told about the other — and we can see that, in both cases, they are extreme, designed to stir people up against an enemy. The two stories do intersect, and I don’t think you would ever want to read one without reading the other, which is why I’m reviewing the two together.

This is a powerful look at two sides of a war I knew nothing about.

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on library books from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Please use the comments if you’ve read the book and want to discuss spoilers!

Review of The Dream Thieves, by Maggie Stiefvater

Paranormal, Teen Fiction Review 0

The Dream Thieves

Book II of the Raven Cycle

by Maggie Stiefvater

Scholastic Press, New York, Sept. 17, 2013. 438 pages.

This sequel to The Raven Boys takes the mysterious magical happenings in Henrietta, Virginia, to another level.

We still have Blue, the only non-psychic in a family of psychics, entangled with three Raven Boys, Gansey, Adam, and Ronan, from the private school Aglionby. The boys, led by Gansey, are looking for an ancient Welsh king that Gansey is certain is buried in the area. Whoever finds him will have a wish granted.

This volume focuses on Ronan and his ability to take objects out of dreams. We find out this ability is all wrapped up in family secrets. And there are others who want it. Dangerous others. And there are surprises and mysteries along the way.

I’m not quite sure why I don’t like this series more. It’s well-crafted and powerfully written. The plotting is intricate and keeps you intrigued. Each book has a doozy of an ending. I think the main problem is that I don’t particularly like the characters. There’s a new character we see more of in this book who is a drug addict and generally distasteful. We also follow the activities of a hit man. His addition to the book adds much to the story, and I like that we do get to see his side. But he’s a hit man! I can’t quite like him.

I will, however, definitely snap up the next book as soon as I get the chance. I don’t love these books, but I like them very much, and I am absolutely hooked. I should also say that Maggie Stiefvater, did, in fact, win me over to the heavily foreshadowed romance strongly hinted at in the first book. I had a feeling she would.

Here is how the Prologue begins:

A secret is a strange thing.

There are three kinds of secrets. One is the sort everyone knows about, the sort you need at least two people for. One to keep it. One to never know. The second is a harder kind of secret: one you keep from yourself. Every day, thousands of confessions are kept from their would-be confessors, none of these people knowing that their never-admitted secrets all boil down to the same three words: I am afraid.

And then there is the third kind of secret, the most hidden kind. A secret no one knows about. Perhaps it was known once, but was taken to the grave. Or maybe it is a useless mystery, arcane and lonely, unfound because no one ever looked for it.

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on an Advance Reader Copy I got at ALA Annual Conference.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Shadows, by Robin McKinley

Fantasy, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 2

Shadows

by Robin McKinley

Nancy Paulsen Books (Penguin), 2013. 356 pages.
Starred Review

The story starts like something out of a fairy tale: I hated my stepfather….

Okay, okay, I do know why I couldn’t deal with Val. It was the shadows. But in Newworld, where we’re all about science and you stop reading fairy tales about the time you learn to read (which always seemed really unfair), being afraid of shadows was silly and pathetic. Even if there were a lot of them and they didn’t seem to be the shadow of anything. (And if they were, whatever it was had way too many legs.) So I hated him for making me silly and pathetic. That’s scientifically logical, isn’t it?

Even the first time Maggie saw her stepfather, he was surrounded by shadows. But for some reason, her dog Mongo, who should know better, likes the shadows.

Val is from Oldworld, where they still have magic. But he never would have been allowed into Newworld if he had any magic. And Maggie can’t have any magic herself. Generations ago, the magic genes were neutralized from her family. And she has been scanned to make sure that was effective.

The problems in Oldworld are something called cobeys.

They are something like bulges, like bulges into our world from another, like hands beating against a curtain, and we do not worry unless they appear as a series… too many strong hands against an old curtain which may tear if the hands beat too hard.

But when Maggie suddenly discovers power to deal with a cobey that opens up around her, her new problems are with the authorities. For it seems there’s a lot more magic in Newworld — at least in the people Maggie cares about — than she ever knew.

I love all of Robin McKinley’s books. This one is very different from a typical fantasy tale. Who ever heard of a danger of too many shadows? And problems with boundaries between worlds?

There are places where the magic-working — including using origami and animals and shadows — seems a little vague and hard to figure out exactly what is happening. However, somehow I can handle that in Robin McKinley’s books where it might bother me in someone else’s. Perhaps because she always draws me completely in to her characters?

This book has magic and romance and danger. And an intriguing world, perhaps not as devoid of magic as the government thinks it is.

robinmckinley.com
robinmckinleysblog.com
penguin.com/youngreaders

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Source: This review is based on my own copy, purchased via preorder on Amazon.com.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Please use the comments if you’ve read the book and want to discuss spoilers!

Review of Across a Star-Swept Sea, by Diana Peterfreund

Romance, Science Fiction, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Across a Star-Swept Sea

by Diana Peterfreund

Balzer + Bray (HarperCollins), 2013. 449 pages.
Starred Review

Okay, before I begin the serious review, I’m going to gush a little. I LOVED this book! SO good! I stayed up all night reading it, and I’m not the least bit repentant. It helps that I have a 3-day weekend starting, but still, I haven’t read a book good enough to make me do that in awhile, and I’m so happy to find one.

Across a Star-Swept Sea is a sequel to the delightful For Darkness Shows the Stars, which was a science fiction retelling of Jane Austen’s Persuasion. You honestly don’t have to have read the first book. Some characters from the first book do make an appearance in the second book, but this one takes place in a totally different part of a future devastated earth, so their societies developed differently, and you don’t need to know about the society from the first book.

This book is a science fiction retelling of The Scarlet Pimpernel. As you can tell from one of the first Sonderbooks reviews I wrote, back in 2001, The Scarlet Pimpernel is one of my all-time favorites, and I’ve read it many times. That made me appreciate all the more what a brilliant job Diana Peterfreund did with this retelling. There was almost a scene-for-scene correspondence.

The big, fun thing she did was flip everyone’s gender. So “The Wild Poppy” is a 16-year-old girl, Persis Blake. It puts quite a different twist on the story.

The Scarlet Pimpernel is about a daring Englishman who saves nobles from the French Revolution. In Across a Star-Swept Sea, they’re in the same future earth as For Darkness Shows the Stars, where humankind was devastated by an accident with genetic engineering. People who used the genetic engineering gave birth to children who were “Reduced” — never having more intellectual capability than a small child.

The people living on the two islands of New Pacifica believe they are the only humans to have survived the wars. But one of the islands, Galatea, is having a revolution. Over the years, the people who were not Reduced, naturally, became the ruling class. The Reduced were capable of nothing but being servants.

However, a generation ago, a cure was developed, so that the Reduced were able to have “Regular” children. The new class of people, “regs” were still not treated well on Galatea, so they began a revolution. And the worst part is that they have developed a pill that destroys the brains of the former aristos, so they are now the Reduced ones, fit for nothing but service.

Persis Blake, in her many disguises as the Wild Poppy, is rescuing aristos from the revolutionaries. No one knows her identity, and she poses as an empty-headed socialite in the princess regent’s court of the other island, Albion. Their society has perfected genetic engineering, so she uses “genetemps” to disguise herself in any way she wants. But when one of those genetemps goes wrong and makes her sick, she’s saved by a Galatean medic who was looking for passage to Albion anyway. He’s handsome and seems to want to help the refugees, but can Persis trust the nephew of the revolutionary leader?

All the wonderful plot twists of the original are here, except that she tells you sooner (right away) the identity of the Wild Poppy. But those who know The Scarlet Pimpernel would know immediately anyway, and this works well.

If they didn’t take you seriously, they would never see you coming. Persis was the most stylish, the most glittering, the most frivolous girl in Albion. There was no way she was secretly orchestrating a spy ring.

This book is marvelously written and will make delightful reading whether you’ve read the original or not. Those who already know and love the original, like me, will appreciate this book all the more. Magnificent!

dianapeterfreund.com
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authortracker.com

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on my own copy, ordered via Amazon.com.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Please use the comments if you’ve read the book and want to discuss spoilers!

Review of The Madness Underneath, by Maureen Johnson

Paranormal, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

The Madness Underneath

Shades of London, Book 2

by Maureen Johnson

G. P. Putnam’s Sons (Penguin), 2013. 290 pages.
Starred Review

This is the second book in the Shades of London series, and, yes, you should read the first book, The Name of the Star to properly enjoy this one.

Without saying too much about the first book, Rory is an American who’s going to boarding school in London. But while there, she has an almost-dying experience and then begins to see ghosts. And then one of those ghosts begins recreating the murders of Jack the Ripper. And he knows she can see him.

Book Two comes after she has survived what the Ripper tried to do to her. Her parents are upset and have been keeping her in a bubble. But some powerful friends want Rory’s help — she gained some power through her experience — and they are able to make it happen that Rory goes back to school.

But she didn’t get much work done while she was away. And the schoolwork in England was difficult already.

So now she’s in danger of failing, and there is more than one group who is interested in her, and it seems a crack has opened under her school that connects to the burying ground of Bedlam, the old mental hospital. And the ghosts that are coming out now are not happy.

In many ways, this book feels like a bridge between what went before and what comes next. But some dramatic things happen in this book, and I’m dying to know what Rory will do next.

I love Maureen Johnson’s writing style. I could easily imagine her tweeting most of the things that Rory says. The style is a little demented and a whole lot of fun, and Rory’s the kind of person who would always be fun to be around. So we get to be around her for as long as it takes to read these books.

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Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Rose Under Fire, by Elizabeth Wein

Historical, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Rose Under Fire

by Elizabeth Wein

Hyperion, New York, September 2013. 346 pages.
Starred Review

Rose Under Fire is one of the Advance Reader Copies I was happiest about snagging at ALA Annual Conference, and one of the first ones I read. Rose Under Fire is listed as a “companion novel” to Code Name Verity, and you don’t have to have read Code Name Verity to enjoy this novel. However, I recommend reading Code Name Verity first, for the simple reason that once you read Rose Under Fire, you’ll know who lives and who dies in the earlier book.

Rose Under Fire doesn’t have a killer plot twist like Code Name Verity. Although some of the characters we love appear, this is a very different book. It’s still about World War II, but this one is a concentration camp book.

Now, I’ve read an awful lot of concentration camp books. (As a child, I read The Hiding Place, by Corrie ten Boom, which Elizabeth Wein said in an interview she also read as a child and got her obsessed with Holocaust stories.) It’s not a cheery topic at all, and just when you think you know the story, this one comes along.

The fact is, Elizabeth Wein is a masterful writer. I love this book because I love the characters, which she makes come to life in her own unique way. This particular concentration camp book focuses on a group of Polish prisoners who underwent experimental surgery the Nazis performed on them and were then held at Ravensbrück.

But we start with a young American girl pilot name Rose Justice. She’s helping out in England, not flying in combat zones, but transporting planes. But then when she gets a chance to take a plane to France, something goes wrong, and she ends up captured by Nazis and sent to Ravensbrück.

Rose is a poet, and her poems are worth bread to her fellow prisoners. And they find out each others’ stories.

Here they are talking about how they came to Ravensbrück:

“I landed my plane in the wrong place,” I said.

Ró?a snickered and leaped into the conversation. “I was arrested for being a Girl Scout. They arrested my whole Girl Scout troop in the summer of 1941. I was fourteen.”

I gaped at her.

“We were delivering plastic explosive for bombs,” she said. “You know, little homemade bombs to sabotage officials’ cars and throw in office windows. Most of us got released, but they kept the oldest — and I didn’t stand a chance, because I’d actually been stopped at a checkpoint and, well, it was pretty obvious I was smuggling explosive. You know how it is when you’re fourteen — you think you’re so much smarter than everybody else and nothing will ever hurt you. . . .” She trailed off, wiping her own bowl with her last crumb of bread, and then said in her offhand way, “They didn’t beat me, but they made me watch while they beat my mother, trying to get me to tell them who I was working for. Lucky for me I didn’t know. Someone always dropped off the stuff in our baskets with a note that said where to take it. They beat the crap out of our Girl Scout leader and then they shot her. So, 51498, what were you doing when you were fourteen?”

I think what made me love this book, once I’d gotten a little way in, was how richly the author draws the characters. They’re distinctive and individual. And they’re holding on to hope that one day they will let the world know what has happened.

elizabethwein.com
un-requiredreading.com

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on an Advance Reader Copy I got at ALA Annual Conference.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Please use the comments if you’ve read the book and want to discuss spoilers!

Review of Dangerous, by Shannon Hale

Adventure, Science Fiction, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Dangerous

by Shannon Hale

Bloomsbury, New York, April 2014. 390 pages.
Starred Review

Okay, I can’t wait any longer to post this. The book won’t come out until April 2014, so I hope I’m not being mean by tantalizing other fans. I know I’ll read it again when the published version comes out. But I did exclaim all over Twitter and Facebook about snagging this review copy on the opening night of ALA Annual Conference, so I think I should tell people that I indeed liked the book very much, and they will want to watch for it.

It’s no secret that I’m biased by the love I already have for Shannon Hale’s other books. I knew I’d enjoy Dangerous, and indeed I did.

This is not, however, a fairy tale retelling or a contemporary romance. Dangerous is a science fiction thriller, completely different from anything Shannon Hale has written before.

Shannon Hale fans like me will of course want to read it, so I’ll try to describe it for others who just want to figure out if they want to read this particular science fiction thriller.

I love the heroine, Maisie Danger Brown. She’s not your typical vanilla-flavored main character. Her mother is from Paraguay, so her family is bilingual. And she’s missing her right hand, using a prosthesis, which she calls Ms. Pinch. Maisie fills out an application found in a cereal box and wins a trip to Astronaut Camp. Once there, she meets Jonathan Ingalls Wilder, son of a billionaire, and explains to him her middle name:

“My parents were going to name me after my deceased grandmothers — Maisie Amalia — then in the hospital, it occurred to them that the middle name Danger would be funny.”

“So you can literally say, Danger is my middle –”

“No! I mean, I avoid it. It’s too ridiculous. It’s not like anyone actually calls me Danger. Well, my mom sometimes calls me la Peligrosa, which is Spanish for Danger Girl. But it’s just a joke, or it’s meant to be. My parents have to work really hard to be funny. They’re scientists.”

This description fit with Maisie’s constantly punning father. (Just like mine!)

Space Camp ends up far more than a typical summer camp. The first sentence of the book is “Every superhero has an origin story.” Sure enough, at camp, Maisie gets a chance to go up in the Space Elevator to an orbiting asteroid, and there a piece of alien technology takes over her body, turning her into a super-inventor. Four other teens get embedded with technology, each having varying superpowers, all revolving around Jonathan, the Thinker. Maisie doesn’t know how much her thinking about Jonathan is because she fell for him before the incident, or if it’s because of the embedded alien technology.

And it’s a wild ride from there. I don’t want to say too much, but there are some deaths, and it becomes apparent that the remaining team members can take on the alien token from someone who dies. Maisie doesn’t know who to trust, and she’s afraid her family will be used to get to her. Things come to a showdown. Will Maisie be killed for her token, or will she have to kill her friend?

And that’s not even the end. There’s also the question of why aliens sent these tokens to earth. Yes, it turns out the fate of all humanity is at stake, and it’s not at all certain that the alien superpowers will be enough.

When the Space Camp story began, I thought this was going to be a kid-finds-out-alien-plot story, similar to The Fellowship for Alien Detection. But it quickly got to be a much bigger story. When it became apparent that alien technology was taking over some kids, I expected to roll my eyes at the science descriptions. That didn’t happen either. I’m not saying it was water-tight, but it never seemed blatantly impossible. And, wow, with the team members fighting each other, there were shades of The Hunger Games. We also had plots among different adult groups, trying to control the alien technology, and more of Maisie having to figure out who to trust. All that besides the aliens set to take over earth.

There’s also a delicately-done romance. I’m not sure I wouldn’t have preferred Maisie to end up with the other guy, but I can’t complain that it didn’t seem realistic. I loved Maisie’s thinking when they’re alone, and he’d like her to go farther.

He started to kiss me again, and I relented, kissing back. But his words haunted me — I can’t help myself, as if he were constrained to want me. I wanted him to choose me, not kiss me mindlessly. Even so, a part of me would give up any choice to just let things happen. And that shocked me. I’d decided long ago what I would do and would not do, and here at the first opportunity, I was tossing out reason for instinct. If I couldn’t make a decision using my brain, then was I even Maisie anymore? Better to ache with want than to become an illogical girl I didn’t know, I thought.

Now, I must admit that I’m probably never going to enjoy a science fiction thriller as much as a fairy tale retelling. If anything, I think maybe she’s packed a little too much into this book. I feel like I’ll have to read it again to grasp all that happened. I’m not sure if I quite believe all the alien stuff.

But I can safely say that I enjoyed this book more than any science fiction thriller I’ve ever read. The personal touch of knowing Maisie Danger Brown, la Peligrosa, girl who’s grown up with a missing hand – that made me want to travel with her through life-and-death fights, threats by aliens and humans, wild superhero stunts, and the need to save the world.

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Bloomsbury.com

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/dangerous.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on an Advance Reader Copy I got at ALA Annual Conference.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Please use the comments if you’ve read the book and want to discuss spoilers!

Review of The Fitzosbornes at War, by Michelle Cooper

Historical, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 2

The Fitzosbornes at War

by Michelle Cooper

Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2012. 552 pages.
Starred Review

This is the third and final volume about the royal family from the Island of Montmaray, a fictional island in the ocean between England and Spain. After the Nazis took over their kingdom in Book One, Sophie and her family have been living in exile in England.

Like the second book, The Fitzosbornes in Exile, the third volume is not as action-packed as the first book, A Brief History of Montmaray, when we had the original conflict with the Nazis and life-or-death confrontation. This book is more along the lines of Downton Abbey, only one war later, showing us how things were socially during World War II.

But Sophie and Veronica do have much more freedom than in the second book, when they first came to England. They both get jobs to help with the war effort, and send Sophie’s little sister Henry off to boarding school – if they can find one that will take her. Toby and Simon, of course, end up fighting.

This book covers the entire period of war between England and Germany. Since you know who won World War II, I think it’s safe to tell my readers that they get rid of the Nazis on their island. I won’t say how and when.

But most of the book is about the events of World War II from the ground. Yes, there’s some heartbreak here. And lots of bombing and fighting and danger. And, yes, Sophie’s growing up and ready to find a husband. Which reminds me – don’t leaf to the back of the book if you can resist. There’s a family tree at the back which shows all the marriages and children at the end of the book and gives quite a bit away.

This is a long book, and it moves at a rather leisurely pace. (I actually was spurred on to finish by looking at the family tree.) But I do believe that those who have already come to know and love Sophie and her family will be happy to spend more time seeing the world through Sophie’s eyes. You’ll get a taste of what it must have felt like to live during World War II while you’re at it.

MichelleCooper-Writer.com
randomhouse.com/teens

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Please use the comments if you’ve read the book and want to discuss spoilers!

Review of Dodger, by Terry Pratchett

Adventure, Historical, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Dodger

by Terry Pratchett
read by Stephen Briggs

Dreamscape Media, 2012. 9 compact discs, 10 hours, 32 minutes.
2013 Printz Honor Book
Starred Review

I had planned for quite some time to read this book, but this is one where the audio should not be missed. Dodger is set in Victorian London, and yes, this is the Dodger from Dickens’ books and “Charlie” Dickens is a prominent character. So all the British accents, from the street people to the “nobs” add so much to the book.

Dodger is a “tosher” — someone who goes through the sewers looking for lost treasures like coins or jewelry. Only recently have nobs started dumping their waste in the sewers — originally they were built by the Romans to manage rainwater. And Dodger is good at his job, a veritable king of the toshers.

But one day during a storm, he comes up out of the sewers to see a young lady being beaten and forced back into a carriage. He rescues her, and both their lives will never be the same. That’s also when Dodger meets Charlie, who with his friend gets the girl to safety.

But it turns out that this girl’s fate is tied to international politics. There are powerful people who want her dead, and when Dodger gets on their wrong side, they’d also like Dodger dead. Along the way, Dodger has other notable adventures, such as encountering a villainous barber (Or is he villainous?) named Sweeney Todd.

This audiobook had me mesmerized from the start. In the first place, Terry Pratchett knows how to turn a phrase. (That’s the one problem with audiobooks. I can’t quote choice bits for you.) But as well as that, we’ve got the exotic but completely historical location — the sewers and streets of Victorian London. We’ve got international intrigue. We’ve got assassins after our hero. And we’ve got clever plots and counterplots. And we’ve got a clever, plucky hero who makes good.

Wonderful storytelling! Gripping adventure! Fascinating history! And my favorite: Great British accents! You can’t go wrong with this book.

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Source: This review is based on a library audiobook from Fairfax County Public Library.

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