Midnight for Charlie Bone
The Children of the Red King series, Book 1
Jenny Nimmo
Scholastic
Fiction, MG Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: For ten years, Charlie Bone thought he was an ordinary boy - until he started hearing voices from photographs. Suddenly, his nasty grandmother and broody aunts take an interest in him, forcing him to attend the elite Bloor's Academy for "endowed" children: those who, like Charlie, have peculiar gifts or rare talent. Charlie doesn't want to be special, not if it means having to abandon his best friend Benjamin and rub shoulders with unpleasant people like the Bloors... but somehow he's become caught up in a decade-old mystery involving a missing girl, a mystery that itself ties into the centuries-old history of the Red King and his squabbling descendants.
REVIEW: Hidden mages in modern times, a special academy, a boy with perpetually unruly hair discovering a secret family legacy... The comparisons to Harry Potter are hard to avoid, though they are most likely creative coincidence. Charlie's not as dynamic a character as Harry, being almost agonizingly slow on the uptake at several points (his unendowed friend Benjamin's even a little quicker on the draw), and Nimmo's world feels darker, nastier, and less inviting than Rowling's invention in many respects. Not all "endowed" people are bad apples, but the majority seem to be, with cooperation and friendship seeming like rare exceptions. With most characters lining up about as one expects from the first meeting and relatively few twists, a strong sense of pulled punches and deliberately-blunted edges, plus a finale that (skirting spoilers) doesn't involve the main character as much as one might expect, the story overall didn't feel especially satisfying. That said, there are some nice ideas and images here, and younger readers will likely enjoy it more. I guess I'm just a little too old and jaded to succumb to Charlie's simpler charms.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Stoneheart (Charlie Fletcher) - My Review
Mystics #1: The Seventh Sense (Kim Richardson) - My Review
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (J. K. Rowling) - My Review
No comments:
Post a Comment