![]() ![]() For a start, it is very engaging, written with panache and a great deal of imagination. You might be forgiven for thinking this is a cunningly reverse-engineered work, but that would be a mistake. The paradigm is clearly Pullman’s His Dark Materials – especially given Ropa will discover that children are being abducted for arcane purposes – but even Pullman’s work was somewhat indebted to Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen. The novel’s feisty heroine, Ropa, lives in a world of dwindled or hoarded resources, in something akin to a refugee camp her adventure will encompass her acquaintance with Edinburgh’s criminal but likeable underclass and a secret, snobby faculty of occult practitioners. “Magic” is explained in terms of the reversal of entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, as in Steven Hall’s Maxwell’s Demon. ![]() ![]() It has an Edinburgh setting, with old buildings nursing dark secrets, much like Jenni Fagan’s Luckenbooth. Like Chesterton’s Father Brown I am sceptical of coincidences, and was so while enjoying this. TL Huchu’s novel is characteristic of both, and is also aimed at the Young Adult audience, although desiccated old fogeys like me can spend a very engaging and thrilling afternoon reading it. Of all the miscellaneous genres within “speculative fiction,” two strands are enjoying a certain degree of prominence at present namely, urban supernatural fantasy and apocalyptic dystopia. ![]()
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