Suvudu Universe

This one’s for the weird ones, the teens whose brains sometimes tilt off-kilter, the people who occasionally wonder if we’re not all characters in some sleeping giant’s dream.

That’s not what’s happening in this book though. And I guess that’s all I’ll say, because for sure one of the creepy pleasures of this book is the gradual reveal of the truly unsettling reason Lirael, at the beginning of the book, lives in a barracks-like cottage with other teenagers, being trained to be ruthless, self-sufficient, and detached.

And you will hear that premise all the time - ‘she’s trained to be a killer, but she finds herself falling for some boy’ bleah, no, and FALSE - but in this book, Lirael’s personality is believably destroyed by her training and supervisors, and her responses to human contact therefore believably conflicted. It’s an excellent examination of identity and feeling like an usurper in one’s own home.

Dreadful, trippy, and magnificently sad. It’s going to make a really cool movie.

Available in September from Greenwillow Books.