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Amazon.co.uk Review
Review
Praise for the illustrated hardback edition:
“ABARAT is more than just a new and major contender. It is (like his earlier book, THE THIEF OF ALWAYS) full of a level of beautiful terror that children are still just able to bear”
Independent
“Always creating and always pushing into the furthest reaches of the human mind, he is an artist in every sense of the word. He is the great imaginer of our time”
Quentin Tarantino
“You’re eager to love this beautiful, heavy, richly coloured slab of a book. And thankfully it’s easy to love…Abarat is a sumptuous and lovely thing. With beautiful pictures of monsters.”
The Guardian
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Customer Reviews
Only more visceral.
Take your classic Clive Barker storytelling from say, Weaveworld or The Great and Secret Show. Cut down the length (Nowhere near the length of Imajica), take out any ultra-gorey-barker-touches, adapt slightly for children, add usual colourful and wonderful characters and there you have Abarat. Fundamentally, it feels like a children's book for adults. It's cheery, much less dark and serious than many other of his books, and essentially works very well.
Starting with the premise of a bored heroine in a boring town, who wanders out of the city and helps a many-headed master criminal (albeit a very pleasant and polite one) escape from an evil assassin. From there she discovers the Abarat, where things are far from boring...
It's an excellently written novel, and the first in a small series (the next of which is published in September). Fantastic!
In Abarat, Barker revisits his persistant theme of strangely familiar hard-to-reach worlds that he used in Weaveworld and Imagica. Barker has a great sense of the naming of things, evoking in a word the enitre personality of a person place or race. Just like in Imagica it is filled with wonderful fantastic places and people, and the ride through Barker's imagination is once again, brilliant.
Disappointngly, this book concludes nothing, and one is left feeling slightly deflated when the end comes and all the tying-up still seems miles away. Admittedly this is the first book in a series, but we know from the Books Of The Art (the Great and Secret Show, etc.) that Barker is not necessarily going to get around to the next part for a while.
Still, this is truly a return to form for Barker, after a run of forgettable and in some cases unreadable material. A dive back into the glorious sea of the imagination of a genius - and this time, with pictures!
True it's a book for young adults, but as an adult myself I really enjoyed the story and found John Mischief and his brothers to be one of the most amusing characters to appear within fiction...A person with several heads on his antlers that each have their own characteristics and personalities makes for interesting reading when they are sorting a problem out or are just arguing...
The Abarat itself is a fantastic world to visit and to meet new creations and peoples and not be lost in alot of horror gore and bloodletting is quite refreshing. The paintings within the book are exceptional artwork and it helps those that may not be as visually inclined to see as Barker sees; but he helps them along with a few brushstrokes here and there to guide them on their way so as they don't miss any details within this adventure.
I for one can't wait for the next volume in the Books of Abarat.
I like audio books, I listen to books most days commuting to and from work. Read more
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