Priestly pours generous measures of Dickens and Doyle (Sir Arthur Conan, that is) into this melodramatic murder mystery, set amid the vividly rendered stews of 18th-century London. A shadowy killer stalks the city’s rooftops, each of his arrow-shot victims found with an ominous calling card. Young printer’s son Tom Marlowe becomes involved in the hunt after a lowlife friend, Will, is found strangled; enlisting the aid of canny, well-traveled Dr. Josiah Harker and other adult allies, he is led to crime scenes, taught to sift for clues, and survives several narrow squeaks. The killer turns out to be a tattooed, English-speaking Mohawk with an astonishing head for heights and an otherwise peaceable nature who is exacting vengeance on a gang of thieves responsible for the massacre of his village. Despite the Noble Savage bit, and the fact that Tom’s role in the tale is largely a passive one as his associates do most of the fighting and deduction, fans of Pullman’s Victorian tales may enjoy the similar level of violence and almost tangibly miasmic setting. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: May 13, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-82466-9
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
From England’s Children’s Laureate, a searing WWI-era tale of a close extended family repeatedly struck by adversity and injustice. On vigil in the trenches, 17-year-old Thomas Peaceful looks back at a childhood marked by guilt over his father’s death, anger at the shabby treatment his strong-minded mother receives from the local squire and others—and deep devotion to her, to his brain-damaged brother Big Joe, and especially to his other older brother Charlie, whom he has followed into the army by lying about his age. Weaving telling incidents together, Morpurgo surrounds the Peacefuls with mean-spirited people at home, and devastating wartime experiences on the front, ultimately setting readers up for a final travesty following Charlie’s refusal of an order to abandon his badly wounded brother. Themes and small-town class issues here may find some resonance on this side of the pond, but the particular cultural and historical context will distance the story from American readers—particularly as the pace is deliberate, and the author’s hints about where it’s all heading are too rare and subtle to create much suspense. (Fiction. 11-13, adult)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-439-63648-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
Characteristically provocative gothic comedy, with sublime undertones. (Autobiographical fiction. 11-13)
An exhilarating summer marked by death, gore and fire sparks deep thoughts in a small-town lad not uncoincidentally named “Jack Gantos.”
The gore is all Jack’s, which to his continuing embarrassment “would spray out of my nose holes like dragon flames” whenever anything exciting or upsetting happens. And that would be on every other page, seemingly, as even though Jack’s feuding parents unite to ground him for the summer after several mishaps, he does get out. He mixes with the undertaker’s daughter, a band of Hell’s Angels out to exact fiery revenge for a member flattened in town by a truck and, especially, with arthritic neighbor Miss Volker, for whom he furnishes the “hired hands” that transcribe what becomes a series of impassioned obituaries for the local paper as elderly town residents suddenly begin passing on in rapid succession. Eventually the unusual body count draws the—justified, as it turns out—attention of the police. Ultimately, the obits and the many Landmark Books that Jack reads (this is 1962) in his hours of confinement all combine in his head to broaden his perspective about both history in general and the slow decline his own town is experiencing.
Characteristically provocative gothic comedy, with sublime undertones. (Autobiographical fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-37993-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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