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3.43 AVERAGE
3.43 AVERAGE
3.5 stars -- Here is my too-long review after probably overthinking this book a bit. Sometimes the overthinking is hard to avoid.
Everybody knows something in Gentry is wrong, but like his neighbors and parents, Mackie is willing to ignore the strangeness until several things happen to force his attention: Tate, a classmate, comes to him for help because she is sure that her baby sister, who just died, wasn’t really her baby sister; he meets a mysterious stranger who tells Mackie something he’s suspected for quite a while, that he’s a Replacement and he's slowly but surely dying from iron exposure; and his sister Emma, also aware of how ill he’s become, makes a deal with one of the fey to help him and puts herself at risk. Mackie's only hope is to investigate his past, which leads him to become involved with the fey, who offer him medicine to keep him alive -- as long as he helps them keep sway over the town, by joining the band Rasputin and beguiling the humans with song, and by turning a blind eye to the whole sacrificing babies thing, like they do.
The dark side of the fey, or faeries, whatever you want to call them (Yovanoff resists naming them, so I am just going to call them "the fey" because it's a good blanket term) is well-mined territory in YA literature; finding a new take on them is a challenge, and I think Yovanoff succeeds in doing so. This debut novel creates its own mythology of changelings and the underground world where the fey live, while still using many common folkloric tropes. Discovering the dark, moody town of Gentry and their unnatural patrons is what kept me reading, even when I was semi-annoyed with suspect character motivations or the rushed ending. While I hesitate to call this a horror novel, because it’s not nearly scary or disturbing enough, it has horror undertones that make for a nice contrast with the current crop of more romantic paranormal YA books.
Here, at least, the fey and their world are not seductive: while they can appear beautiful (some of them, anyway), it’s not their natural state, and when they pass among humans, they disturb more than entice. The fey in this book are mostly creepy: some of them are revenants (the “blue girls”), and the alive ones appear almost human, but there’s always something off, like a mouth full of needle-sharp teeth, or red-rimmed eyes and lashes crusted with sickly yellow gunk. Even Mackie, the Replacement (changeling) who survived against all odds, is described as not being quite right -- he's too pale, too hollow-cheeked, and his eyes are too black (never mind the inconsistency that this supposed "ugly" boy seems to fit in so well at school one minute and then stand out as a freak the next, depending on what's convenient to the story). Humans aren’t swooning around the fey in sexual stupor, basically, which is refreshing in a genre that is overfull of super-hot, super-fly supernatural creatures. The fey don't seem to be all that powerful on their own, and it's obvious that they are struggling to survive, a species on the brink of dying out.
The two warring sisters who rule the fey, the Morrigan (in the form of a little girl) and the Lady (in the form of a beautiful woman), live underneath a slag heap and a dump hill respectively, and though their homes are grand and cavernous, they're also filled with disturbing things, like an insane revenant girl floating in a pool, or collections of pinned butterflies and stuffed birds. Despite their shared creepiness, the Morrigan and the Lady have different agendas for ensuring their hold over the town stays strong: the Morrigan sends up her musicians (posed as a rock band Rasputin) to make the town adore them, but that's not enough for the Lady, who needs blood sacrifice of the town's children. While the Morrigan disagrees with her sister's methods, she's unwilling to put herself and her people at risk to stop her, so instead she turns a blind eye, much like the humans in Gentry.
The relationship the fey have with the town of Gentry is parasitic at best: while both prosper whenever the bond between them is renewed, the times have changed so much over the centuries that even the sacrifices have lost some impact. Nobody's really prospering anymore; they're enduring instead, and none of them seem truly happy. The town is just as complicit in this relationship as the fey are. Every seven years a human baby disappears with a sickly fey baby left in its place, and nobody does anything. They wait for the fey baby to die, as it invariably does in its new inhospitable environment, and the family buries this replacement baby as if it were their own, even though they know it isn't. It's a culture of fear and silence and secret ritual, where parents hang scissors and other metal implements over their babies’ beds in the hopes of keeping the fey away. An interesting exercise for me was wondering how many of the townspeople accept this on a conscious level -- knowing that this is what it takes to honor the deal -- and how many just go along with it because it's the way it's always been, without allowing themselves to make the disturbing connections.
This makes Mackie's relationship with the town, and with his family and friends, particularly interesting, as he’s one of the only Replacements to grow up. Up front, no one seems to know that he isn’t anything other than what he pretends to be: Mackie Doyle. At first, he doesn’t even know he’s a Replacement, at least not consciously, but he feels there’s something secret going on that he’s involved in without understanding what it is. He feels as if the whole town is in on it, but at the same time, that the town doesn’t know about him . . . yet. He worries that eventually he'll do something wrong, something to make his unnaturalness stick out, and the town will take retribution, conveniently making him a scapegoat for their own ignorance and complicity. (There's even a very interesting local legend about such a man, who lived among townspeople for years but was eventually blamed for all of the children's deaths in his time and murdered, that Mackie worries will parallel his own fate.)
This immediately makes Mackie a sympathetic character, for me. He doesn't really want to know what's going on. He'd like to just pretend he's normal, but he worries that eventually the fiction will come crashing down when he least suspects it, and he'll be at the mercy of an angry mob. I think that fear motivates him more than anything else in the book; while he eventually comes to care about Tate and her baby sister, Mackie goes after the Lady who's killing children because he's afraid of what will happen if he doesn't. Even when he keeps talking about "what's right" (as in "it isn't right to kill babies just so you can be powerful"), and he has a world's worth of moral outrage on his side, I still think it's motivated a little more by desires to save himself. That's just my take on his character, though; I'm not sure it's intended.
Mackie's parents and sister were interesting side characters, the only side characters I think behave totally consistently. Mackie's parents have adjusted their household to his “allergies” to iron and concocted lots of cover stories for his aversion to blood and consecrated ground (event though his father is a pastor), but they never discuss the reasons for them. It’s so taboo that it’s clear they know a lot more than they let on, and one of the things I found most interesting to contemplate is whether his parents have grown to love Mackie for who he is or whether they are merely making the best of a bad situation by refusing to admit he isn't really their son. It adds a whole layer to the idea that you are supposed to love and trust your family, no matter what. Once you find out more about his mother and her childhood as a "pet" underground with the Lady, it's even more interesting -- Mackie is one of the very creatures she loathes, and yet, he's her son.
His sister Emma, on the other hand, clearly does know and in fact remembers the night the original Mackie was taken (while the replacement baby starts off looking like the original, the glamour wears off quickly, leaving a sickly, monstrous baby with sharp teeth behind). Despite knowing the truth, though, Emma is unwavering in her loyalty and devotion to Mackie, who has been her brother long enough to be the only one she really remembers. Her unconditional love has sustained him over the years and is the main reason Mackie has survived as long as he has. Emma may come off as a little too perfect, but I liked her relationship with Mackie and how it contrasted with everyone else's; she has a big heart, she's nonjudgmental (she recognizes, like Mackie does, that not all the fey are monsters; some are just victims of circumstance, like the humans), and she doesn't shy away from the truth.
Mackie's friends, on the other hand, are a weird, uncertain force in the book. His three closest friends are described in such an odd way that it seems like they know more than he does, particularly his best friend Roswell, who comes across as quite cagey. Tate seems to also know something, given that she seeks out Mackie for help when her baby sister is Replaced (Why else would she go to the weird guy she's never spoken to before? Why would she keep pestering him even when he said he didn't know what she's talking about?), but what she knows is never made certain. She looks to Mackie for proof that her baby sister is still alive, and seems sure that he will get it. I didn't really get where their romance came from -- it seems more of a product of convenience rather than actual feelings (they're working together on something dangerous, so they become too interested in each other), but it also feels like something just for the YA market, where there has to be a romance, even when it doesn't really fit. This book would have been fine without a love interest for Mackie; better, I would argue.
When Mackie finally "comes out" to his friends, they all accept the news with such ease that I’m still not sure if I was supposed to assume they already knew, or if that's just poor characterization, so that Mackie doesn't have to deal with any extra (but more realistic) drama just when he needs a support system the most. I suspect it's the latter in most cases, but I could be charitable, since one of the whole points of this book is that everybody knows Gentry has a dark secret they refuse to talk about, so some details are left for Mackie to figure out on his own. Still, his friends all eagerly agree to storm the Lady's underground home and kidnap back Tate's baby sister two seconds after learning about the town's bloody history and without having much of a plan for how to get back out once they get in. They are so willing, and so supportive, it feels like there was a shortcut in there, like we went right to the top of the skyscraper without bothering to check the foundation because, if you can get to the top of the skyscraper, well the foundation must be there, right?
Not in fiction, baby.
Of course their plan fails miserably, but they still win, thanks to a couple plot contrivances that play out very quickly. The worst is when Cutter, a monster who, as has been established over the course of the book, loves to torture with knives and is amazingly strong and fast, dukes it out with Tate and actually runs away because she gives him a bad scratch! Okay, okay, he retires chagrined from the field of battle, prepared to fight another day, with a "let's go another round someday soon" parting threat, but c'mon. He just leaves? It feels like Yovanoff wrote herself into a corner, with all of the kids captured and being held in the graveyard by creatures much stronger than them and the Lady about to murder Tate's baby sister, and realized if it played out honestly, they were all going to die. And that would suck.
However, the part of the ending I did like is how Mackie finally defeats the Lady (with a major assist from the Morrigan, of course). The connection between love and the survival of the fey is one made several times in the book (Emma's love kept Mackie alive into his teen years, and like him, the rest of the fey are sustained by worship and adulation of the town) and has a big part to play in the ending, when Mackie realizes the love of his friends and family make him stronger than the Lady, who is diminished by her inability to truly understand what love is. She equates love with the kind of worship that comes from fear, and her inability to understand the more purer forms of love is what gives Mackie the edge. Though I complain that the ending is rushed, I did like how this theme ultimately plays out. It didn't feel like a cheat, nor did the fairly pathetic nature of the Lady's death, with the Morrigan tutting over her corpse.
Overall, I complain, but I enjoyed reading this eerie story. I loved the setting of Gentry and its secret underside, its intriguing history, and the complex and frighteningly inhuman nature of the fey (especially on the Morrigan's side). I thought Mackie was a sympathetic character, given all the secrets he has to unearth before he can feel safe, and I liked his relationship with his sister. I may not have bought his romantic feelings for Tate, but I did believe that he loved his sister Emma. The writing itself isn't super distinctive -- it's kind of "see-through" writing that doesn't have its own style and just tells the story in a direct way -- but it's strong enough, particularly in describing the creepier aspects, that I have high hopes for Yovanoff's next book, especially if she continues the semi-horror route.
Everybody knows something in Gentry is wrong, but like his neighbors and parents, Mackie is willing to ignore the strangeness until several things happen to force his attention: Tate, a classmate, comes to him for help because she is sure that her baby sister, who just died, wasn’t really her baby sister; he meets a mysterious stranger who tells Mackie something he’s suspected for quite a while, that he’s a Replacement and he's slowly but surely dying from iron exposure; and his sister Emma, also aware of how ill he’s become, makes a deal with one of the fey to help him and puts herself at risk. Mackie's only hope is to investigate his past, which leads him to become involved with the fey, who offer him medicine to keep him alive -- as long as he helps them keep sway over the town, by joining the band Rasputin and beguiling the humans with song, and by turning a blind eye to the whole sacrificing babies thing, like they do.
The dark side of the fey, or faeries, whatever you want to call them (Yovanoff resists naming them, so I am just going to call them "the fey" because it's a good blanket term) is well-mined territory in YA literature; finding a new take on them is a challenge, and I think Yovanoff succeeds in doing so. This debut novel creates its own mythology of changelings and the underground world where the fey live, while still using many common folkloric tropes. Discovering the dark, moody town of Gentry and their unnatural patrons is what kept me reading, even when I was semi-annoyed with suspect character motivations or the rushed ending. While I hesitate to call this a horror novel, because it’s not nearly scary or disturbing enough, it has horror undertones that make for a nice contrast with the current crop of more romantic paranormal YA books.
Here, at least, the fey and their world are not seductive: while they can appear beautiful (some of them, anyway), it’s not their natural state, and when they pass among humans, they disturb more than entice. The fey in this book are mostly creepy: some of them are revenants (the “blue girls”), and the alive ones appear almost human, but there’s always something off, like a mouth full of needle-sharp teeth, or red-rimmed eyes and lashes crusted with sickly yellow gunk. Even Mackie, the Replacement (changeling) who survived against all odds, is described as not being quite right -- he's too pale, too hollow-cheeked, and his eyes are too black (never mind the inconsistency that this supposed "ugly" boy seems to fit in so well at school one minute and then stand out as a freak the next, depending on what's convenient to the story). Humans aren’t swooning around the fey in sexual stupor, basically, which is refreshing in a genre that is overfull of super-hot, super-fly supernatural creatures. The fey don't seem to be all that powerful on their own, and it's obvious that they are struggling to survive, a species on the brink of dying out.
The two warring sisters who rule the fey, the Morrigan (in the form of a little girl) and the Lady (in the form of a beautiful woman), live underneath a slag heap and a dump hill respectively, and though their homes are grand and cavernous, they're also filled with disturbing things, like an insane revenant girl floating in a pool, or collections of pinned butterflies and stuffed birds. Despite their shared creepiness, the Morrigan and the Lady have different agendas for ensuring their hold over the town stays strong: the Morrigan sends up her musicians (posed as a rock band Rasputin) to make the town adore them, but that's not enough for the Lady, who needs blood sacrifice of the town's children. While the Morrigan disagrees with her sister's methods, she's unwilling to put herself and her people at risk to stop her, so instead she turns a blind eye, much like the humans in Gentry.
The relationship the fey have with the town of Gentry is parasitic at best: while both prosper whenever the bond between them is renewed, the times have changed so much over the centuries that even the sacrifices have lost some impact. Nobody's really prospering anymore; they're enduring instead, and none of them seem truly happy. The town is just as complicit in this relationship as the fey are. Every seven years a human baby disappears with a sickly fey baby left in its place, and nobody does anything. They wait for the fey baby to die, as it invariably does in its new inhospitable environment, and the family buries this replacement baby as if it were their own, even though they know it isn't. It's a culture of fear and silence and secret ritual, where parents hang scissors and other metal implements over their babies’ beds in the hopes of keeping the fey away. An interesting exercise for me was wondering how many of the townspeople accept this on a conscious level -- knowing that this is what it takes to honor the deal -- and how many just go along with it because it's the way it's always been, without allowing themselves to make the disturbing connections.
This makes Mackie's relationship with the town, and with his family and friends, particularly interesting, as he’s one of the only Replacements to grow up. Up front, no one seems to know that he isn’t anything other than what he pretends to be: Mackie Doyle. At first, he doesn’t even know he’s a Replacement, at least not consciously, but he feels there’s something secret going on that he’s involved in without understanding what it is. He feels as if the whole town is in on it, but at the same time, that the town doesn’t know about him . . . yet. He worries that eventually he'll do something wrong, something to make his unnaturalness stick out, and the town will take retribution, conveniently making him a scapegoat for their own ignorance and complicity. (There's even a very interesting local legend about such a man, who lived among townspeople for years but was eventually blamed for all of the children's deaths in his time and murdered, that Mackie worries will parallel his own fate.)
This immediately makes Mackie a sympathetic character, for me. He doesn't really want to know what's going on. He'd like to just pretend he's normal, but he worries that eventually the fiction will come crashing down when he least suspects it, and he'll be at the mercy of an angry mob. I think that fear motivates him more than anything else in the book; while he eventually comes to care about Tate and her baby sister, Mackie goes after the Lady who's killing children because he's afraid of what will happen if he doesn't. Even when he keeps talking about "what's right" (as in "it isn't right to kill babies just so you can be powerful"), and he has a world's worth of moral outrage on his side, I still think it's motivated a little more by desires to save himself. That's just my take on his character, though; I'm not sure it's intended.
Mackie's parents and sister were interesting side characters, the only side characters I think behave totally consistently. Mackie's parents have adjusted their household to his “allergies” to iron and concocted lots of cover stories for his aversion to blood and consecrated ground (event though his father is a pastor), but they never discuss the reasons for them. It’s so taboo that it’s clear they know a lot more than they let on, and one of the things I found most interesting to contemplate is whether his parents have grown to love Mackie for who he is or whether they are merely making the best of a bad situation by refusing to admit he isn't really their son. It adds a whole layer to the idea that you are supposed to love and trust your family, no matter what. Once you find out more about his mother and her childhood as a "pet" underground with the Lady, it's even more interesting -- Mackie is one of the very creatures she loathes, and yet, he's her son.
His sister Emma, on the other hand, clearly does know and in fact remembers the night the original Mackie was taken (while the replacement baby starts off looking like the original, the glamour wears off quickly, leaving a sickly, monstrous baby with sharp teeth behind). Despite knowing the truth, though, Emma is unwavering in her loyalty and devotion to Mackie, who has been her brother long enough to be the only one she really remembers. Her unconditional love has sustained him over the years and is the main reason Mackie has survived as long as he has. Emma may come off as a little too perfect, but I liked her relationship with Mackie and how it contrasted with everyone else's; she has a big heart, she's nonjudgmental (she recognizes, like Mackie does, that not all the fey are monsters; some are just victims of circumstance, like the humans), and she doesn't shy away from the truth.
Mackie's friends, on the other hand, are a weird, uncertain force in the book. His three closest friends are described in such an odd way that it seems like they know more than he does, particularly his best friend Roswell, who comes across as quite cagey. Tate seems to also know something, given that she seeks out Mackie for help when her baby sister is Replaced (Why else would she go to the weird guy she's never spoken to before? Why would she keep pestering him even when he said he didn't know what she's talking about?), but what she knows is never made certain. She looks to Mackie for proof that her baby sister is still alive, and seems sure that he will get it. I didn't really get where their romance came from -- it seems more of a product of convenience rather than actual feelings (they're working together on something dangerous, so they become too interested in each other), but it also feels like something just for the YA market, where there has to be a romance, even when it doesn't really fit. This book would have been fine without a love interest for Mackie; better, I would argue.
When Mackie finally "comes out" to his friends, they all accept the news with such ease that I’m still not sure if I was supposed to assume they already knew, or if that's just poor characterization, so that Mackie doesn't have to deal with any extra (but more realistic) drama just when he needs a support system the most. I suspect it's the latter in most cases, but I could be charitable, since one of the whole points of this book is that everybody knows Gentry has a dark secret they refuse to talk about, so some details are left for Mackie to figure out on his own. Still, his friends all eagerly agree to storm the Lady's underground home and kidnap back Tate's baby sister two seconds after learning about the town's bloody history and without having much of a plan for how to get back out once they get in. They are so willing, and so supportive, it feels like there was a shortcut in there, like we went right to the top of the skyscraper without bothering to check the foundation because, if you can get to the top of the skyscraper, well the foundation must be there, right?
Not in fiction, baby.
Of course their plan fails miserably, but they still win, thanks to a couple plot contrivances that play out very quickly. The worst is when Cutter, a monster who, as has been established over the course of the book, loves to torture with knives and is amazingly strong and fast, dukes it out with Tate and actually runs away because she gives him a bad scratch! Okay, okay, he retires chagrined from the field of battle, prepared to fight another day, with a "let's go another round someday soon" parting threat, but c'mon. He just leaves? It feels like Yovanoff wrote herself into a corner, with all of the kids captured and being held in the graveyard by creatures much stronger than them and the Lady about to murder Tate's baby sister, and realized if it played out honestly, they were all going to die. And that would suck.
However, the part of the ending I did like is how Mackie finally defeats the Lady (with a major assist from the Morrigan, of course). The connection between love and the survival of the fey is one made several times in the book (Emma's love kept Mackie alive into his teen years, and like him, the rest of the fey are sustained by worship and adulation of the town) and has a big part to play in the ending, when Mackie realizes the love of his friends and family make him stronger than the Lady, who is diminished by her inability to truly understand what love is. She equates love with the kind of worship that comes from fear, and her inability to understand the more purer forms of love is what gives Mackie the edge. Though I complain that the ending is rushed, I did like how this theme ultimately plays out. It didn't feel like a cheat, nor did the fairly pathetic nature of the Lady's death, with the Morrigan tutting over her corpse.
Overall, I complain, but I enjoyed reading this eerie story. I loved the setting of Gentry and its secret underside, its intriguing history, and the complex and frighteningly inhuman nature of the fey (especially on the Morrigan's side). I thought Mackie was a sympathetic character, given all the secrets he has to unearth before he can feel safe, and I liked his relationship with his sister. I may not have bought his romantic feelings for Tate, but I did believe that he loved his sister Emma. The writing itself isn't super distinctive -- it's kind of "see-through" writing that doesn't have its own style and just tells the story in a direct way -- but it's strong enough, particularly in describing the creepier aspects, that I have high hopes for Yovanoff's next book, especially if she continues the semi-horror route.
adventurous
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
mysterious
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
This is a four star book because it is NOT a series, I didn't want to put it down, and because it felt new and different. The story is creepy and while it is horror/fantasy it isn't too scary. This is the story of a small sleepy town with a dark secret and one teenage boy who knows he's not quite human.
In a fading steel town, the people don't talk about the missing children. But for Mackie Doyle, having spent his whole life trying to avoid being noticed, the neighbor's kid is the last straw: He's know Tate his whole life, and she tells him that her little sister didn't just die, but in the months before she died -- she wasn't even herself.
Mackie doesn't doubt the story because he is himself a changeling child left in place of the human Mackie Doyle as an infant. He's allergic to blood, iron, consecrated ground, and he's about to meet his own kind. Under the slag heaps at the edge of town, there are two camps of otherworldly folk, and he'll have to summon all his will and resources to get Tate's baby sister back above ground.
Fun take on modern Faerie, with plenty of moody teen-age angst.
Mackie doesn't doubt the story because he is himself a changeling child left in place of the human Mackie Doyle as an infant. He's allergic to blood, iron, consecrated ground, and he's about to meet his own kind. Under the slag heaps at the edge of town, there are two camps of otherworldly folk, and he'll have to summon all his will and resources to get Tate's baby sister back above ground.
Fun take on modern Faerie, with plenty of moody teen-age angst.
Premetto che mi aspettavo molto da questo libro, e alla fine ne sono rimasto quindi in qualche modo deluso. Aspettative troppo alte, probabilmente.
L'idea dietro la storia è bella, con una cittadina "protetta" da un antico patto con delle entità inumane (i Buoni Vicini, il Piccolo Popolo... le creature fatate, insomma) che da tempo immemore vivono di sacrifici umani.
E così fanno anche qui, rapendo ogni sette anni un bambino per sacrificarlo, donando in cambio protezione, prosperità e sicurezza alla città. Una legge non scritta che tutti conoscono, di cui nessuno parla, che tutti scientemente fingono di ignorare.
E al posto del bambino rubato, un altro viene messo al suo posto.
Uno del popolo fatato, malaticcio, debole, moribondo. Lasciato a impersonificare l'altro per qualche tempo, finché il mondo intorno a lui -un mondo crudele pieno di ferro e di cose sante, dove queste creature vivono male- non lo uccide.
Ma tutto questo sta per cambiare, a causa di Mackie.
Un liceale. Un "sostituto" arrivato fino a questa età, che interessa alla Morrigan -l'entità che sembra guidare questi reietti sopravvissuti in qualche modo alla loro stessa morte- e che al tempo stesso è legato a sua sorella, la Signora, l'oscura Dea che richiede i sacrifici rituali.
Un ragazzo consapevole di essere diverso ma desideroso di vivere come tutti gli altri, amato dalla sua famiglia ma al tempo stesso eterno ricordo del loro vero figlio morto, un ragazzo con dei veri amici che non si fanno problemi per la sua natura ma coi quali non può confidarsi.
Fino a Tate. Fino alla morte della sorellina di Tate. La morte della "sostituta" della sua sorella.
E Mackie deve scegliere se continuare a vivere così, o sfidare le antiche tradizioni e le divinità per salvare una bambina.
La storia, come dicevo, è bella. Intriganti gli spunti. Buona anche l'atmosfera.
Però il taglio è troppo YA per quanto mi riguarda, non solo nel protagonista e nei suoi amici ma anche nella semplicità delle vicende , nell'accettazione di tutto da parte degli amici di Mackie, nella giovanilità estrema delle dee e delle loro Corti.
Per non parlare di Roswell, talmente atipico e superiore da far pensare che lui stesso sia una creatura soprannaturale, come la Morrigan o addirittura un angelo di qualche sorta... invece niente.
Non so, questa semplicità delle caratterizzazioni e delle vicende mi ha un po' allontanato dal libro.
Comunque una lettura rapida e piacevole, un buon YA a tinte horror.
L'idea dietro la storia è bella, con una cittadina "protetta" da un antico patto con delle entità inumane (i Buoni Vicini, il Piccolo Popolo... le creature fatate, insomma) che da tempo immemore vivono di sacrifici umani.
E così fanno anche qui, rapendo ogni sette anni un bambino per sacrificarlo, donando in cambio protezione, prosperità e sicurezza alla città. Una legge non scritta che tutti conoscono, di cui nessuno parla, che tutti scientemente fingono di ignorare.
E al posto del bambino rubato, un altro viene messo al suo posto.
Uno del popolo fatato, malaticcio, debole, moribondo. Lasciato a impersonificare l'altro per qualche tempo, finché il mondo intorno a lui -un mondo crudele pieno di ferro e di cose sante, dove queste creature vivono male- non lo uccide.
Ma tutto questo sta per cambiare, a causa di Mackie.
Un liceale. Un "sostituto" arrivato fino a questa età, che interessa alla Morrigan -l'entità che sembra guidare questi reietti sopravvissuti in qualche modo alla loro stessa morte- e che al tempo stesso è legato a sua sorella, la Signora, l'oscura Dea che richiede i sacrifici rituali.
Un ragazzo consapevole di essere diverso ma desideroso di vivere come tutti gli altri, amato dalla sua famiglia ma al tempo stesso eterno ricordo del loro vero figlio morto, un ragazzo con dei veri amici che non si fanno problemi per la sua natura ma coi quali non può confidarsi.
Fino a Tate. Fino alla morte della sorellina di Tate. La morte della "sostituta" della sua sorella.
E Mackie deve scegliere se continuare a vivere così, o sfidare le antiche tradizioni e le divinità per salvare una bambina.
La storia, come dicevo, è bella. Intriganti gli spunti. Buona anche l'atmosfera.
Però il taglio è troppo YA per quanto mi riguarda, non solo nel protagonista e nei suoi amici ma anche nella semplicità delle vicende , nell'accettazione di tutto da parte degli amici di Mackie, nella giovanilità estrema delle dee e delle loro Corti.
Per non parlare di Roswell, talmente atipico e superiore da far pensare che lui stesso sia una creatura soprannaturale, come la Morrigan o addirittura un angelo di qualche sorta... invece niente.
Non so, questa semplicità delle caratterizzazioni e delle vicende mi ha un po' allontanato dal libro.
Comunque una lettura rapida e piacevole, un buon YA a tinte horror.
I really enjoyed this book. I was a little hesitant about reading it because of some of the reviews that I read but I really liked it. I really recommend it if you're into creepy things.
This book was amazing. It was so creepy and engaging and I loved it. I think I'll be avoiding dumps and slag heaps from now on. Review to come.
Extremely creepy novel about a town where, every seven years, a young child disappears, and is replaced by "another" one. When Malcom, one of the others, takes on the challenge to discover his origins, he opens up a terrifying reality. Sleep with the light on after this one....
Weird and kind of creepy, but good! Once again, I find myself saying positive things about a faerie book, but this one gets points for never actually mentioning the word faerie (or any of its spelling variations). Also points for interesting characters and an original version of mythology. Only real complaint is that the build up was really great, but once the action started it seemed to happen really fast and resolve too quickly.
I love it.
I enjoy the character interactions, and I love how the romance aspect doesn't take center stage. The overall atmosphere is creepy and kept my attention. My only grip is I wish she'd have included more world building/ lore in regards to her version of the fae and changlings.
My only real complaint plot wise is the bad guys were strangely easy to defeat. Guess we can chock that up to mind over matter and to teenagers being kinda dumb.
This book is what got me into Holly Black , I wanted to find an author that's writing had similar vibes.
I enjoy the character interactions, and I love how the romance aspect doesn't take center stage. The overall atmosphere is creepy and kept my attention. My only grip is I wish she'd have included more world building/ lore in regards to her version of the fae and changlings.
My only real complaint plot wise is the bad guys were strangely easy to defeat. Guess we can chock that up to mind over matter and to teenagers being kinda dumb.
This book is what got me into Holly Black , I wanted to find an author that's writing had similar vibes.