School Library Journal Review
Gr 3-6-Christopher Rowe's life has changed for the better. For the past three years he has been apprenticed to Master Benedict Blackthorn to learn the apothecary trade. Having grown up in an unhappy and sometimes violent orphanage, Christopher is extremely grateful for his kind and patient master and the knowledge he is gaining from him. However, when a mysterious group begins torturing and murdering London apothecaries, Christopher's course takes a terrible turn. He finds himself in the fight of his life and must solve a series of complex codes left for him by his master. Combining a touch of humor with codes, puzzles, mystery, and a heavy dose of edge-of-your-seat suspense, this is a riveting tale from start to finish. Reader Ray Panthaki does a skillful job building on this already masterful tale with his pacing and compelling voices. His vocals present Christopher as a thoroughly likable character for whom listeners will be rooting from start to finish. VERDICT This compelling adventure is a winner. ["An excellent story for middle grade readers who enjoy puzzles, action, and fantasy": SLJ 8/15 starred review of the Aladdin book.]-Deanna Romriell, Salt Lake City Public Library, UT © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
New York Review of Books Review
WHEN CHRISTOPHER ROWE, the central character of Kevin Sands's "The Blackthorn Key," is taken from a miserable life at an orphanage and apprenticed to the gentle, absent-minded apothecary Master Benedict Blackthorn, he displays both curiosity and intelligence. Other than an unfortunate incident involving gunpowder and a stuffed bear, his master is happy with him. But soon apothecaries start turning up dead all over London. After Christopher's master is pulled into the gruesome affair, the boy tries to learn who is behind the murders. His loyal and often unappreciated best friend, Tom, accompanies him on a quest that tests both boys' mettle, their ability to solve complicated riddles and the strength of their friendship. In this impeccably researched debut, Christopher learns that there was much more to his kindly, distracted master than he realized - and that his own intellect and confidence are the strongest weapons against evil. Sands's representation of the teeming, stinking streets of 17th-century London is remarkable in its detail. We meet paranoid politicians, witness the casual abuse of children and hear the ubiquity of Christian idioms and ideologies. It all feels very real, despite fantastical touches like a mystical cult and a substance that harnesses "the power of God Himself." Though Sands avoids, for the most part, the dreaded fantasy-novel "info dump," the early narrative is occasionally slowed by Christopher's flashbacks. But the story gains a relentless momentum in the second half, when Christopher shines as a humorous narrator who is flawed enough to be relatable, but not so flawed that we can't imagine him succeeding in his quest. Perhaps the most refreshing aspect of the book is the trust Christopher's master places in him. In a genre where many adults are either dead, detached or outright villainous, a caring adult with complete faith in his charge's savvy is a nice change. The true villains of the book are cleverly concealed, resulting in a puzzle-filled, satisfyingly twisty tale. "The Doldrums," by Nicholas Gannon, presents readers with an entirely different kind of puzzle: the question of how the novel's imaginative but insulated protagonist will ever escape his painfully unadventurous life. Like "The Blackthorn Key," the story is absorbing, the characters memorable (though both books do suffer from a marked ethnic homogeneity as well as a dearth of positive female characters, neither of which reflects the diverse readership of middle-grade novels). Archer B. Helmsley, the grandson of two unabashed adventurers, lives in a brownstone filled with souvenirs of their globetrotting. Growing up in such a fascinating home understandably gives the boy a desire for adventures of his own. Unfortunately for him, he lives with an ineffectual father and a mother with a Dursley-esque aversion to strange "tendencies." She rarely allows him to leave the house, but his grandparents' disappearance on an iceberg in Antarctica offers him his chance to escape his tedious existence. Archer decides to find out what has happened to them by visiting Antarctica himself and enlists the aid of his reluctant neighbor Oliver and his mysterious new friend Adélaïde. None of the children in the book are perfect. While they can be clever and generous, they are also, on occasion, selfish and deceitful. The narrator's acknowledgment of this endears them to the reader further, as if to say, "Well, really, when you were growing up, were you any better?" The adult characters lack the multidimensionality of their young counterparts. The villainess is pure evil, the grandparents idealized. But perhaps this reflects Archer's mind-set: As such a sheltered child, he doesn't have the life experience to recognize much depth in grown-ups. At its best, "The Doldrums" brings to mind the authority and panache of authors like Roald Dahl and Beatrix Potter, though without quite those authors' skill at narrative propulsion. At least the leisurely pacing allows the reader to pore over Gannon's stunning, full-color illustrations instead of hurrying to the next chapter. And it's clear that "The Doldrums" is not meant to be a breakneck tale of adventure; it is more a meditation on the idea of adventure. As such, it is a dreamy charmer of a book, full of clever wordplay that practically demands it be read out loud. SABAA TAHIR is the author of the novel "An Ember in the Ashes."
