I finished Dark Cities Underground by Lisa Goldstein last night.
It was better than I expected it to be, but I hadn't been expecting much. I was expecting a quick loose read at best. And it was still a quick read, but it held together much better than I thought it would.
The story in a nutshell:
There is a boy, Jereremy Jeremy Jerome Gerontius Jones, who has grown up to be a man called Jerry. When Jerry was young he would tell his mother stories about a world underground and a secret door in a tree. His mother made these stories into best selling childrens books, claiming the stories as her own. Fast forward. Jeremy is Jerry living a quiet little life. 2 people visit him in one day asking questions about his childhood. Ruth Berry and Sattermole. Devling back into his much repressed childhood memories, Jerry starts to realize that the stories he told to his Mother might have been real. That maybe there is a door in tree an entire hidden world underground.
The book weaves legends and myths into its own story rather nicely. From Egyptian myths to childrens stories like Peter Pan and the Wind in the Willows. The story is surprisingly credible, and the author writes with authority on the subject. I'm not an expert in Egyptian legends, or childrens books, so I don't know if her authority is the result of knowledge, or the ability to bluff like a celebrity hold 'em star. Either way, it pulls you quickly through the story. The end is left a little open, but that's okay. There is only one loose end that still bugs me. I'll leave myself a comment (that way it's like someone is actually reading this) and mention it there.
All in all, even though Dark Cities Underground was hard to find - I ended up having to special order it - and the cover art was bad enough that I hid it when I was reading in public, I would reccommend it for fans of "Urban Fantasy", or "Elfless Fantasy" as I like to call it. Fans of Gaiman's Neverwhere will enjoy it. Fans of Mieville's Perdido Street Station might like it, but will probably find it a simplified version of a story that is being retold quite a bit these days.
5/10
okay... off to peruse the book shelves and pick my next book.
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About Me
- Johnny Panic
- I'm just a guy... pretty boring over all. Nothing all that special. Frustrated and growing older (I've hit 30, but i think i'm in denial). I work a job, middle management I guess. We are always broke though. Got a wife, and a daughter, love them both more than i've ever found the words to express. I go to church, sometimes. I bike to work, if i get up on time. I like the rain, always. But I have this nagging feeling that there should be more to life than this...
1 comment:
The Gaurdian Dog (Anubis), and to a lesser extent, the Dragon. What the heck happened to them? They were 2 of the most interesting aspects of the story for me. The Gaurdian Dog had his part, but dissapears halfway through the book. Didn't he have some unfinished business with Sattermole (Set)? And shouldn't he have been tied more closely to the eye? It did leave the underworld near the end of the book after all.
The Dragon is never really fully explored. Why did the Dragon say that he would protect the child Jeremy? I know that's just how it came out in his mothers story, but everythign else from those stories had a basis in Jeremy's real life. Seems like the Dragon should have played a bigger part.
Maybe that would have just been too much to cram into one book though.
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