Quercus ISBN 9781786541123 £9.99
From the author of The Impossible Boy comes another fast-paced adventure hooking the reader in from the start: the writer, apparently suffering writer’s block meets a boy with a tortoise who tells him the following tale. Victor is tired of his endless daily chores In Rainwater, so is delighted by the arrival of a pedlar-inventor. The villagers are less persuaded, so buy nothing, thus unleashing Walter Swizwit’s revenge on their health. As the only one unaffected, Victor must pursue him to seek a cure, accompanied by his faithful giant tortoise. Along the way, they find other villages devastated by Swizwit’s inventions, and so Victor is joined by fearless Elena, clever Mo-Lan and timid Mingus, each determined to rescue their parents. We learn of The Iron Plague, the cruel and creepy collectors, and we break into the inventor’s vast castle to find there is more than one inventor, before undertaking the perilous rescue of the benighted villages.
Believable, flawed child protagonists, humour, but also just the right amount of jeopardy give this story real momentum and make it an enjoyable read. It is also a fable for our time. The writer of the opening acknowledges his time-wasting on his computer and the villages all fall prey to the dark side of technologies, be it pointless games or watching invented realities. There is the issue of spiralling debt, lost skills and how time should be valued and yet this is all cleverly woven into something resembling a traditional tale. UKS2 will find much to discuss.
Sue Barrett