Poison - Book Review

Poison, by Chris Wooding, is the story of a sixteen year old girl called Poison whose sister is stolen by phaeries. Poison, unwilling to accept her sister’s disappearance or the changeling left in her place, sets out to find the Phaerie Lord and demand her sister’s return. Poison soon finds herself pitted against weird and terrifying fairytale creatures. When she faces the mysterious figure of the Hierophant, the most powerful of the Lords, she finds herself in a fight to control her own fate, as well as the future of all humanity.

The Alchemist of Souls - Book Review

The Alchemist of Souls is a fantasy alternate-history by Anne Lyle. Set in Elizabethan England, it follows two characters: the down-on-his-luck swordsman Mal, and Coby, a girl masquerading as a boy, who is working as the tireman of a theatre company. When Mal is hired to protect the Skrayling ambassador during his stay in London, and Coby’s theatre company is to act in a competition in the ambassador’s honour, their lives are drawn together. Meanwhile, something very strange and sinister is going on, something that involves the Skrayling creatures of Viking legend discovered in the New World. As Mal learns more about the Skraylings’ powers, he realises that England’s alliance with the Skraylings may be under threat, and that his own soul is in jeopardy.

White Cat - Book Review

 
White Cat, by Holly Black, tells the story of Cassel Sharpe, a teenage boy from a family of curse-workers. Cassel has always felt alienated, neither curse-worker nor ‘normal.’ His mother is in prison, his brothers either absent or indifferent, his father dead, and the fellow boarders at his school mistrustful. Worse than this, he lives with a terrible secret and struggles every day to face the crushing guilt it causes. When he begins sleepwalking and a strange white cat visits him in dreams, he starts to unravel a sinister plot, as well as some shattering truths about his family and his past.

White Cat is a dark, witty and entertaining story set in an alternate universe in which a form of magic known as ‘curse-working’ exists openly. Those who can’t curse-work are suspicious of those who can, and the curse-workers are considered dangerous – little more than criminals. Laws have been put in place prohibiting curse-work, which do not distinguish between the bad (killing, injury, manipulating memory, etc) and the good (bestowing good luck, using emotion-work to help heal people, etc). This means that the curse-workers are often manipulated or threatened into a life of crime, or driven into it by desperation.

Zoo City - Book Review

Zoo City also has one of the best covers I've seen

Zoo City is an Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning urban-fantasy book by Lauren Beukes. It tells the story of Zinzi December, an ex-journalist and recovering drug addict who became ‘animalled’ after her actions led to her brother’s murder. Now she carries around a sloth, as well as a nasty drug-money debt and a lot of guilt. The day she gained Sloth she also developed a new, magical talent for finding lost things. When she is hired to locate a missing girl, one half of a famous teen pop duo, the case begins to lead her to darker and more dangerous places than she had expected.

Zoo City was not quite what I was expecting, but then, I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting. Perhaps something in which the fantasy or science fictional element was more prominent, not necessarily the focus of the plot, but at least more central. In this, the animals, the magic, the strangeness, are all just there, while Zinzi gets on with things. But you know what? This is a large part of what makes Zoo City so brilliant. Not only are the magical elements never fully explained (which I often prefer anyway), they are not even really important. Except that they are, just not in the ways the reader might think. Animals and the consequences of being animalled are vital to the characters and their world, as well as allowing the author to explore ideas of prejudice, guilt and the stigma attached to rehabilitated criminals, amongst other issues, without ever becoming preachy or heavy-handed. Each element that makes the world strange – the animals, the undertow, the mashavi – is revealed almost as a mundane detail in the background while the missing-person mystery takes centre stage. And then, suddenly, all these little details become vital as the plot takes a darker turn, and the existence of the animalled becomes central to the story after all. This seems like a risky approach, but it is a risk that really pays off.