Why I'm readingI’d heard the title before, and it seemed pretty interesting. I actually went looking for this one, instead of just browsing.
Where I got the book
Greenwich/Overdrive.
Expectations
Harry Potter with less wizardry and a more circus/freak show vibe.
So how was it?
Soooo…. not actually what I was expecting. For one thing, there isn’t really a “school,” in the sense of Harry Potter (which I did find in the Finishing School series). And while it has a lot of YA themes, it didn’t feel constructed the way a lot of modern YA books do. It felt like the books I read (oh god am I about to say this) when I was younger, before YA was such an established genre. It reminded me of Hunky Dory Dairy.
The plot is fun. It requires you to suspend a whole lot of disbelief, but it’s fun. It’s not all that easy to explain without a blow-by-blow, but the basic premise is: there are “peculiar” children who have special powers or mutations (think side-show, not X-Men), who live in time-looped locations, and who therefore don’t age. The modern-day main character stumbles into this situation, after growing up hearing about all these kids from his grandfather, gets crazy confused, and eventually there’s some monster-fighting.
Recommendation
Fans of adventure stories, historical fiction, circus freak shows.
Feels
Fun, imaginative, much more fantasy than scifi.
Favorites
I love that the “peculiarities” are much more freak show than X-Men. They’re not always useful, or at least not always obviously so.
Least favorites
There is pretty much zero logic behind “peculiarities.”
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