This was an enjoyable surreal story with amazing artwork. Unlike some of the other reviewers, I didn't find the story confusing or hard to follow. ( )

Like Jan Svankmajer doing Grange Hill, this sets up a bizarre but kind of recognisable world that has its own internal logic and very little in the way of explanation. Scarper Lee is a schoolboy doing normal schoolboy things in a place where your dad might be a steam-powered boat on wheels and it rains knives on a regular basis. He's got three weeks to live and he knows this because everyone knows when their deathday is. Then things start to change when he meets new girl and agent of chaos Vera Pike. It's hard to explain where things go from here because it only makes sense if you read it (and you have to read all three books in the trilogy to get anything like a complete story), but the worldbuilding and character development are top notch. ( )

I just want to start off by saying that this book was super weird and I loved it.

Honestly, it was so bizarre and a little difficult to understand at first. It wasn't until I was about half way through reading this book that I began to understand the world and it's rules. But that is most likely because Scarper Lee is an unreliable narrator. He doesn't know everything that is going on and he easily misses out information because he's a very closed off character. By having him as the narrator it left me feeling like I wanted to know more about the world and I did feel a little frustrated that I didn't know what was going on, but it made me keep reading because I needed to know more.

This world has similarities to our own, kids go to school, they complain about their parents and sulk about homework. But the weather can be deadly, rather than rain they have knifes falling from the sky, or can send you mad, laughing winds that you don't want to get caught in outside. They have a daily wheel that they watch that tells them the weather, has shows, ect., a little like TV.

But one of the most intriguing things about this world and this story was people's mums and dads. Rather than the parents creating the child, the child created the parent. Parents that were like robots, animals, abstract shapes, none were like the other. You could tell that they had come from a child's imagination. I also like how they can't remember how they made their parents or even where they made their parents. It's adds a level of mystery to the story. Especially when Scarper, Vera and Castro go on the hunt to find Scarper's dad and the Motherless Oven.

I really loved how the events of this story was over the course of about 2 weeks. Each day meaning that it was getting closer and closer to Scarper's deathday. I really enjoyed the fact that there was a deadline (no pun intended) to this story. If Scarper didn't find his dad, or if they didn't find the Motherless Oven, or do any of what the 3 of them set out to do, then Scarper would never do any of it. And I thought that was such an interesting concept. I also loved that by the end you don't know if Scarper's alive or dead. Which makes me want to read the next book asap.

The art style I think is very interesting. The stark black and white art made me think of mangas rather than the usual colourful western graphic novel. I thought that it made it seem a little more creepy, as the story already is a bit creepy, I felt that the black and white heightened it. It's very visually appealing and highly stylistic.





I really enjoyed this graphic novel. It was fun and quirky, it was so different to other graphic novels I've read before and I would recommend this o anyone that likes graphic novels and want to try reading something different and a little unexpected. ( )

Strange. ( )

Weird and inconclusive but in a good way. ( )