Take a photo of a barcode or cover
bookishwendy 's review for:
Abarat
by Clive Barker
So I bought this book for it's cover...so call me shallow! But the roughly 100 colorful oil paintings gracing this book's glossy pages are marvelous! It is certainly a beautiful book to look at.
Unfortunately, this only conceals the sloppy prose and absence of plot for the first third of the story. It was this first third I enjoyed most: the main character Candy Quackenbush doing research on her home of Chickentown, Henry Murkit's mysterious suicide, Candy's escape from classroom to prairie. I loved how, as she walks toward a windswept ridge, she begins to find pottery shards, shells and dry fish carcasses. An ocean in Minnesota?? But then...the book gets a bit weird. Umm, make that a LOT weird, as in hallucinatory drug-induced weird. Sea skippers? I can buy that. A 7-headed fugitive? Okay... But as for squid-goggles, crawling disembodied eyes and a glass-jar-headed villain??? Over-the-top craziness with no ensemble of structure!
Arabat is a fantasy world with no rhyme, reason or rules. Anything the author can mentally conjure up goes. But what bugged me most was that the main character Candy had no motivation or quest in Arabat except to stay out of the way of Lord Midnight. She wanders (or floats) about aimlessly, wondering "why am I here?" The question is never answered...neither does she grow or undergo any sort of change for the better. I was starting to think she deserved to be sent back to Chickentown USA. Maybe an actual plot will be revealed in book two of the series, but I hardly have the patience to find out.
Unfortunately, this only conceals the sloppy prose and absence of plot for the first third of the story. It was this first third I enjoyed most: the main character Candy Quackenbush doing research on her home of Chickentown, Henry Murkit's mysterious suicide, Candy's escape from classroom to prairie. I loved how, as she walks toward a windswept ridge, she begins to find pottery shards, shells and dry fish carcasses. An ocean in Minnesota?? But then...the book gets a bit weird. Umm, make that a LOT weird, as in hallucinatory drug-induced weird. Sea skippers? I can buy that. A 7-headed fugitive? Okay... But as for squid-goggles, crawling disembodied eyes and a glass-jar-headed villain??? Over-the-top craziness with no ensemble of structure!
Arabat is a fantasy world with no rhyme, reason or rules. Anything the author can mentally conjure up goes. But what bugged me most was that the main character Candy had no motivation or quest in Arabat except to stay out of the way of Lord Midnight. She wanders (or floats) about aimlessly, wondering "why am I here?" The question is never answered...neither does she grow or undergo any sort of change for the better. I was starting to think she deserved to be sent back to Chickentown USA. Maybe an actual plot will be revealed in book two of the series, but I hardly have the patience to find out.