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38 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Rich and Strange, September 19, 2007
I had gotten a little backed up on reading my latest purchases of dragon books, and I wondered whether Charlie Fletcher's screenwriting background would translate well to prose, but then I started in on Stoneheart and completely forgot to fuss. It is a VERY good book--in my opinion, Fletcher succeeds in doing what China Mieville wanted to do but didn't quite pull off with Un Lun Dun, which surely got a lot more attention than this book. That is, Fletcher turns London into a quiet fantasy nightmare, an alternate reality, for a couple of kids, George and Edie. (Neil Gaiman would be proud!) The previous reviewer gives you a plot summary, so I won't go into that, but I will point out that Fletcher has a clean, graceful written voice, and he adds depth to his writing with well-placed metaphors, many of which are refreshingly new. Here is a snatch of description about a statue of the Minotaur: "The shoulders hunched massively below a bull's head topped by aggressively pointing horns; and so well had the sculptor shaped it, that the sound of enraged snorting seemed to lurk about it, even though it never--to the normal eye--moved or breathed at all." Of course, one of the eerie things about this book is that to the normal eye, the statues of London are NOT coming to life and menacing (or helping) two children. The normal eye doesn't see that the Raven flying overhead isn't flying at a normal speed; instead, it is "flapping unnaturally slowly, lazily defying all laws of gravity and several of the general advisory guidelines of nature as it did so." When the book begins, George is self-pitying and Edie is cold-hearted; their characters evolve during the course of their adventures, as if Fletcher were undoing a work of dull origami and folding it into a better shape. The other standout character is the Gunner, a statue of a World War I soldier who helps George and Edie survive. Clocker was probably my favorite of the odd, invented characters hanging about the periphery of this tale, but there were others. In general, Fletcher has turned a collection of the actual statuary around London into an astonishing assortment of personalities and monsters. There are so many nice--and creepy--little touches here, like what the evil Walker does to passing pedestrians as he searches for George, and the Raven's penchant for making a stylish entrance, and the fact that many characters are neither one thing nor the other, but a mix of good and evil, reliability and personal agendas. I also like how Edie's magic isn't an easy or simplistically happy power for her to carry. Fletcher doesn't settle for predictable answers in his plot, which rides a growing wave of suspense clear up to the last few pages. Then he leaves you wanting more in just the right way--not because he has to sell another book, but because you truly want to see Edie and George take their suddenly bizarre lives to the next level. I would recommend this book for older children and teens who were comfortable with the level of intensity and darkness in the later Harry Potter books. A very satisfying read!
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23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliance, June 14, 2007
This book was a real phenomenon for my typical bookbuying expeditions. Rarely do I ever buy a hardcover that is not part of a series I like, by an author I like, or sufficiently hyped-up for me to recognize it. STONEHEART was none of these, but the writing sample on the back and the book description made me buy it. When George accidentally breaks off a stone dragon's head from a wall in a museum in London, he awakens a terrifying, murderous pterodacyl that chases him through London's streets and -- worst of all -- is invisible to everyone but him and, it seems, a young girl named Edie, a "glint". His life is saved by the Gunner, a statue that is somehow alive in this alternate London he's accidentally fallen into. With the Gunner and Edie he goes to solve the Riddle of the Sphinx and gets some answers, but ends up with an answer that is more riddle than what he first had to solve. So with time ticking away George and Edie have to navigate this world, full of good statues and bad ("spits" and "taints" to make it easier) and George must sacrifice the stone dragon's head on the Heart of Stone to make this whole nightmare disappear. But what if the Sphinx's answer was ambiguous...? This story was, in a word (and a very British one that you're likely to see several times in this novel) brilliant. The writing, though it deteriorated slightly toward the end, was strong, descriptive, exciting, and dramatic. The characters were excellent, especially Edie and George (Edie had all the makings of a "tough-girl you learn to respect and pity because of her traumatic past" in her, but she overcame that and became an excellent character in her own right) though I would have liked a bit more on die's backstory -- her parents (particularly her father) and what had happened to her as a child. In fact, the only complaint I have against this book is that a book this good surely deserved a better copyeditor. Time after time I would see a quotation mark misplaced or missing, and the same with punctuation. But there were no spelling mistakes as far as I could see, so it really was only those two things. And meticulous copyediting is not the author's job, so you really can't blame Mr. Fletcher for that. Highly recommended. I don't think I've rated a first novel this way since "Fly By Night", but... Rating: Masterpiece
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Here be dragons, December 7, 2007
If you're into Neil Gaiman and Jonathan Stroud, you'll probably like this book, which is the first part of an intended trilogy. The second book is due out in May 2008. Though not as twisted as Gaiman, and lacking the humor of Stroud in The Bartimaeus Trilogy, Stoneheart explores some of the alternate worlds of London through the experiences of twelve year old George Chapman. George usually keeps to himself, but during a school outing, he gets into trouble (initially) through no fault of his own. However, the trouble really begins when he vents his anger on a stone carving of a dragon on a museum wall. Little does he know that his small act of vandalism has awakened the statues of London, and soon he's fleeing for his life from formerly inanimate gargoyles and a hungry pterodactyl, and wondering why he's the only one seeing them. Fortunately for George, not all statues are made of the same stuff, and when one of the good guys shows up in the nick of time, he learns a little more of the predicament he's in. Along the way he meets a girl named Edie, who has been seeing stone people all her life, and together they face an alternate world of sphinxes and dragons, and spits and taints, and glints and weirdies, and things that go bump underground, and much, much worse. The anticlimactic ending only slightly mars an otherwise enjoyable (albeit a little too long) reading experience, which is good to the penultimate chapter. Amanda Richards, December 7, 2007
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