Ordinary Monsters by J M Miro
Ordinary Monsters by J M Miro has frequently flitted in and out of my attention scape as soon as it released but now that I have read it fully, I frankly believe, that this book deserves a lot more love! It's a mammoth book with a daunting page-count but the lyrical writing, the cinematic action-thrills and the clever juxtaposition of familiar tropes like gifted children and a magical school in a well-detailed Victorian era England, makes the pages fly and helps us make short work of the book. It's a complex, twisted tale that moves across the Wild West of America, the plague ridden streets of Tokyo, finally ending up in the cold windy northlands above Edinburgh in the early 1890's, tracing the lives of two kids - namely Charlie Ovid at Sixteen, a half black kid from Missouri and Marlowe, a young eight year old orphan, found in a moving boxcar next to his dead nursemaid and then brought up in a circus. Because both these boys are gifted with unique 'Talents', the...