![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Abarat review
Oct. 27th, 2010 10:55 amOn the current OU course I'm doing, we're encouraged to post bits of writing to the forum to have the rest of the tutor group comment on them. I posted up a very short story I wrote a while ago (based on an idea from Dave, as all my best stories are) and one of the group said it reminded him of Clive Barker. I'd never heard of this writer, so I went to BookMooch to see what books of his might be available. Abarat turned up in the post a few days later.
I don't think Abarat is the kind of Clive Barker book my fellow OU student was talking about when he said my story reminded him of Clive Barker, since it's one of Barker's children's novels, and thus the style is more simplistic than I think is found in his adult books. However, it's wildly imaginative and makes good use of the classic premise of ordinary high school kid gets transported to magical world where she has an important destiny. It pushed the boundaries of weird for me, though this may have been because of the quite unsettling pictures that accompanied the text in places. It's difficult to say if I would have found some of the creatures the protagonist encounters so disturbing if I'd only had my own imagination to furnish their appearances. The other issue I had with the book was that it was basically a series of set pieces, once Candy arrived in the Abarat - she would get captured, interact with her captors, escape and be chased, then get captured by someone else, and so on.
It all went by very quickly and was mostly entertaining, but I don't think I'll be pursuing Candy on any more of her Abarat adventures. I do think I might try a different type of Clive Barker book at some point, though, to see what he does with more adult themes.
I don't think Abarat is the kind of Clive Barker book my fellow OU student was talking about when he said my story reminded him of Clive Barker, since it's one of Barker's children's novels, and thus the style is more simplistic than I think is found in his adult books. However, it's wildly imaginative and makes good use of the classic premise of ordinary high school kid gets transported to magical world where she has an important destiny. It pushed the boundaries of weird for me, though this may have been because of the quite unsettling pictures that accompanied the text in places. It's difficult to say if I would have found some of the creatures the protagonist encounters so disturbing if I'd only had my own imagination to furnish their appearances. The other issue I had with the book was that it was basically a series of set pieces, once Candy arrived in the Abarat - she would get captured, interact with her captors, escape and be chased, then get captured by someone else, and so on.
It all went by very quickly and was mostly entertaining, but I don't think I'll be pursuing Candy on any more of her Abarat adventures. I do think I might try a different type of Clive Barker book at some point, though, to see what he does with more adult themes.
