Review Detail

This guy can really write. I've been reading YA books lately, for a variety of reasons which didn't initially include inclination, but now I am finding the good stuff. I really really loved DIma Novak's Pushing Pawns. MacKenzi Lee's Regencies are amusing and Adam Silvera keeps you reading like good chick lit. Katherine Arden and the recent debutante author Hafsah Faiza can write the genre of romancy magic fantasy historical they have chosen. (So that's me the beholder there.) But this one, like the Dima Novak, is in another class. The publisher advertizes its stuff as real old style pulp, racy, unredeemable penny dreadful shlock. The guiltiest of pleasures. But this carnival barking is both true and untrue in good ways. We kick off with a bloodbath (too comic to be sadistic or really scary, but with stakes) and as much shoot em up as anyone could want from the first moment, but there is also heart -- somewhere in the pages, if not necessarily immediately apparent in the chest of Ian the seemingly borderline sociopathic protagonist obviously baptized after the creator of James Bond -- and social consciousness. The book is at once mining a library of great pulp and doing something very unusual, a hybrid I never saw before, tho there is something of the bathos and fizzy comic incongruity -- domestic life and coming of age amidst the capers of a pulp fiction genre -- made popular by the Sopranos, Weeds, Analyze This, Last Action Hero, etc.. The romantically inexperienced teen boys meet cute when (moderately) rich boy from Spy Dynasty deftly resets poor boy's bully-busted nose with a practised battlefield flair, and the crack of the cartilege in this case provides the rom-com sparks flying. I'm tempted to call it a satirical YA Peter Temple, having recently read and hugely enjoyed Identity Theory.