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paperprivateer 's review for:
Come See the Fair
by Gavriel Savit
Eva is an orphan who gets by through doing fake seances. She pretends to be loved ones talking from beyond the grave, but she knows that it's impossible. It's a scam she does to survive. But when she hears a voice in her head telling her to go to the Chicago World's Fair, she knows it's very different from the seances. This is real. She meets a boy who has visions of his own and a magician who wants her help to bring magic back to life, but her friend is suspicious. Eva needs to figure out what the magician's plan is and who to trust.
This book had so many of the things I'm always hungry for. World's Fair. Mysterious magical people and places that vanish or can only be accessed by a few people. It's got mystery, friendship, an orphan with the possibility of found family. And maybe those things are why I felt overall disappointed with the book.
The book starts out interesting but turns vaguely confusing around the middle of the book and never comes back. The beginning is a lot of fun, and the descriptions of wandering around the World's Fair is probably the closest you could get to experiencing it yourself. It's well researched and clearly something the author loves.
But once we meet the magician, things get confusing. The magic rules are hard to follow. It's not completely clear where Eva has come from and even what she wants. The setting doesn't seem solid in spite of the historical event as a major point. And one of the most frustrating parts is that the characters don't seem to question things enough. I know a lot of twelve-year-olds who would use more critical thinking than Eva does. The character motivations are never clear and they are generally shallow. Eva starts the book with more personality than she finishes it with.
Worst of all, I read the ending twice, but I am still not completely sure what happened. It depended on characters we hadn't met, and the overall message was "don't trust anything fantastical and wonderful because it will definitely be too good to be true." That could have been an interesting moral, but it felt like talking with the kind of person who discourages children from watching Disney movies in case they get the wrong idea about magic and fairy tales: it's too optimistic and we should all accept how terrible the world is. That's a pretty heavy message for this age, and it isn't handled well. Especially when it does start with such a marvelous sense of wonder.
I guess that moral applies to the book: don't judge a book by its cover because it may sound wonderful and magical from the description, but in reality, it's dark, bleak, and confusing.
Thank you to the author, the publisher, and NetGalley for the advance copy of this book to review.
This book had so many of the things I'm always hungry for. World's Fair. Mysterious magical people and places that vanish or can only be accessed by a few people. It's got mystery, friendship, an orphan with the possibility of found family. And maybe those things are why I felt overall disappointed with the book.
The book starts out interesting but turns vaguely confusing around the middle of the book and never comes back. The beginning is a lot of fun, and the descriptions of wandering around the World's Fair is probably the closest you could get to experiencing it yourself. It's well researched and clearly something the author loves.
But once we meet the magician, things get confusing. The magic rules are hard to follow. It's not completely clear where Eva has come from and even what she wants. The setting doesn't seem solid in spite of the historical event as a major point. And one of the most frustrating parts is that the characters don't seem to question things enough. I know a lot of twelve-year-olds who would use more critical thinking than Eva does. The character motivations are never clear and they are generally shallow. Eva starts the book with more personality than she finishes it with.
Worst of all, I read the ending twice, but I am still not completely sure what happened. It depended on characters we hadn't met, and the overall message was "don't trust anything fantastical and wonderful because it will definitely be too good to be true." That could have been an interesting moral, but it felt like talking with the kind of person who discourages children from watching Disney movies in case they get the wrong idea about magic and fairy tales: it's too optimistic and we should all accept how terrible the world is. That's a pretty heavy message for this age, and it isn't handled well. Especially when it does start with such a marvelous sense of wonder.
I guess that moral applies to the book: don't judge a book by its cover because it may sound wonderful and magical from the description, but in reality, it's dark, bleak, and confusing.
Thank you to the author, the publisher, and NetGalley for the advance copy of this book to review.