But this month's choice was absolutely magnificent!
Written by Christopher Edge, The Infinite Lives of Maisie Day tells the story of it's titular character.
Maisie wakes up to the sound of her alarm clock at 9 am on the morning of her 10th birthday. She goes downstairs to find things aren't quite right. Her family are missing, there's no sounds, no indication of where they might be and when she opens her front door to look there is nothing but a vast blackness. Her entire world has been left blank.
But then Maisie wakes up to the sound of her alarm clock at 9 am on the morning of her 10th birthday. She goes downstairs to find mum, dad and her sister getting ready for her special day. Things should run smoothly from there, so it's a sucker punch when the reader is thrown back into the alternate world with the alternate Maisie.
As the two worlds of Maisie and Maisie unfold, events start to steam roll, leading her and her sister Lilly (the book's other central character) towards a climactic collision of epic proportions.
This book had me going from the very first word. The language is simple but effective. It is almost as though the author carefully selected every single word for the biggest impact. It isn't a long book; only 155 pages in fact. The pace moves along smoothly and quickly, yet at no point did I feel rushed through it.
The sibling rivalry between Maisie and her older sister Lilly is tense, made all the more gripping by the stark contrasts between them. Maisie is a shut in, being a child genius who has achieved a college level education and is on to doing degrees through the Open University at the tender age of 10. She stays at home and is tutored privately but suffers from the lack of interaction with the outside world.
Lilly on the other hand is a typical teenage girl (I use the word typical in a very loose sense as I know that every teenager is unique). Lilly's problems largely stem from the same root source: the fact that her 'genius' sister is considered by others to be a freak.
I never saw the plot points coming, which was a massive bonus for me. I love it when a book offers me something new and surprising. This book had me gasping out loud (sorry if that sounds like a bit of a spoiler).
The research and science behind the book is astounding and shows real dedication to combining knowledge with imagination. I found myself at one point looking up M.C Escher's 'Ascending and Descending' just to help me visualise a particular scene!
There is so much I would love to say about this book; I feel as if I could go on forever! But I won't because if I do, I will simply spoil it by giving away too much.
If you get the chance, please give this book a read. It is a credit to it's creator and a masterpiece of children's literature (and I really don't use those words lightly).
Book 19 of my 52 book list and this counts as my book by a male author. And it's all thanks to Twitter's Primary School Book Club
( #primaryschoolbookclub ). Check it out.
No comments:
Post a Comment