Saturday, July 10, 2010

Abarat - Clive Barker

A.K.A. Candy’s Adventures in the Abarat, where a dazzling array of the weird and the wonderful is paraded before our eyes.


Candy Quackenbush lives in Chickentown, Minnesota when a chance meeting with John Mischief and the assassin Mendelson Shape send her swimming in the sea of Izabella that comes rolling in across the plains. She arrives at the Abarat Archipelego which is made up of 25 islands, 24 of them represent each hour of the day with the 25th representing the past present and future.

To Candy’s surprise and to those that she meets she is not overwhelmed by what she sees and this leads to the question has she been here before?

The evil Christopher Carrion believes that she has. He lives on the Island of Midnight which is also known as Gorgossium and hires The Criss-Cross Man to find Candy, but she manages to elude him with the help of the creature Malingo.

However, there is war on the horizon, Mater Motley, Christopher Carrion’s grandmother is busily sewing her stitchlings, creating the vast souless army that will march on the islands of daylight.

Where wizards are evil, dragons roam the seas and snakes sing the longest word in the world, this is the first book of what will be an epic series.

A mix of Alice in Wonderland and Harry Potter but much darker and far wackier. I read the paper back version but will most certainly be buying the hardback which includes original paintings of the Abaratian Archipelago and it’s characters by Clive Barker.

The second book of the Abarat is ‘Days of Magic, Nights of War’; I can’t wait to read it.

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