A Jewish boy is plucked from the tenements of New York's Lower East Side to help catch magical criminals, only to find that he has to investigate the very people he loves, in this imaginative story set in the 1880s.
When 13-year-old Sacha blurts out that he sees his neighbor doing magic, the New York Police Department handpicks him to be an apprentice to their top detective, Inquisitor Maximillian Wolf, charged with preventing the misuse of magic.
This New York City is a magical melting pot, where every ethnic group has its own witchcraft and magic gangs. Although it is not illegal to be a wizard or Kabbalist, it is against the law to use magic for ill and the powers-that-be try to curb magic when they see fit, sometimes to their advantage.
J.P. Morgaunt, a manufacturing tycoon, wants to make magic obsolete for the working class so he can sell more machines. Without magic to do get things done, workers would have to rely on mechanical means. But he also thinks wizards like himself are above the law and should be allowed to use magic whenever they see fit.
Right from the start, Sacha finds himself in the thick of a criminal investigation. He and fellow apprentice, Lily Astral, are assisting Wolf in a high-profile case involving the attempted assassination of Thomas Edison, the Wizard of Luna Park. And the alleged culprit? A dybbuk. The demon from Jewish folklore who takes over a human body.
Morgaunt, who commissioned the witch detector, contends Edison's invention would expose Houdini for the fake he is. He says Houdini's act is done with magic, not illusion, and that if Edison were able to finalize the detector, it would instantly identify Houdini as a spellmonger and
Written by Kenneth Oppel
$17.99, ages 12 and up, 304 pages
When twin brother Konrad falls ill, 15-year-old Victor scrambles to find an elixir of life to save him and awakens his obsession for alchemy, in this grim and marvelous take on Frankenstein's youth.
Victor, born just minutes after Konrad, has always felt inferior to him, in schoolwork even sword play, but now Konrad is sick and doctors are bleeding him pale with leeches. As Konrad sees it, it's up to him to save Konrad, and to do that he must turn to darker means.
Against his father's wishes, Victor, his cousin Elizabeth and their friend Henry sneak into a forbidden lab deep beneath the Frankenstein castle for answers, and discover a book of ancient spells with a cryptic recipe for eternal life.
When they initially discover the lab, after accidentally dislodging books in Father's study, Konrad is still well, and Father has warned them never to go down there again. But Victor can't shake his fascination with what he sees.
There are oddly-shaped glassware, metal instruments and shelves groaning with ancient books in Latin, Greek and languages they've never seen. Normally books held little interest for Victor, but these have "dark luster," titles about the occult and pictures of gruesome bodies.
Until Konrad's illness, Victor has no reason to return. But now with doctors baffled about how to cure Konrad, Victor decides he has no other choice but to defy his father. Spurred by his own impulsive nature, he convinces Elizabeth and Henry to help him search the underground chamber for a cure.
There on a shelf, the three find a book with the elixir, but it's written in a bizarre language, the Alphabet of the Magi, and searching further, they find a charred translation of the alphabet by Paracelsus. Realizing they cannot decipher the recipe, they set off in search of a translator, an alchemist named Julius Polidori.
Polidori, who is bound to a wheelchair and lives with an eerie pet lynx, relucta
The Monstrumologist, Book 3
Written by Rick Yancey
$18.99, ages 14 and up, 560 pages
Torn between the dark world of monster biology and his loathing of it, Will Henry must decide how far he's willing to go to save his mentor, in this third and final book in the riveting series Monstrumologist.
Over the last three years Will has transformed from a naive orphan to the world-weary apprentice to a monstrumologist, and felt his conscience waver and even go numb in the presence of all manner of dissections on the necropsy table.
Now, with the arrival of gruesome package at Dr. Warthrop's house, 13-year-old Will begins to confront his morality once and for all. Inside the package is a nest fashioned from human remains that, if touched, turns man into a monster.
It arrives in the night in the hands of a bedraggled courier, who is mad with panic because he thinks he's been poisoned. Dr. Kearns, a friend of Dr. Wathrop's, has said he's injected him with a toxin and that he must deliver the box safely to Dr. Warthrop if he wants the antidote.
Bursting inside the house, the courier demands a cure, unaware that Kearn's threat was only a trick. But by then he's already made a fateful mistake. In a moment's curiosity along the way, the man has opened the box and touched the specimen inside.
In making contact with the highly toxic specimen, linked to a deadly Nidus ex magnificum, he's poisoned himself and set in motion a gruesome transformation. His body has begun to devour itself and transform into a reeking, soulless beast far stronger than man.
After a near-death struggle with Will, the beast is killed, but it is only the beginning of Warthrop's obsession to find the nidus, the holy grail of monstrumology, a terrifying beast that rips apart human flesh and rains the remains down from the sky.
As days advance, Warthrop gets distracted by his ego and his desire to hunt down the nidus, and al
The Lost Youth of Edgar Allan Poe
$15.99, ages 8-12, 208 pages
Imagine a demon filling a boy's head with dark thoughts and that boy using them to write some of the greatest horror stories ever written, and you have the basis of Scott Gustafson's marvelous biography of young Edgar Allan Poe.
Spinning the truth into a fantastic narrative, Gustafson imagines a young Poe listening to and engaging a real-life Imp of Perverse as he writes his first horror stories and poems. At his side is also a talking Raven who tries to moderate the imp's wily influence.
An Imp of Perverse, as Poe fans will remember from his short story by the same name, is a spirit who causes people to commit morally questionable acts. Here, however, the imp, named McCobber, doesn't corrupt Poe into doing dangerous things, but rather gives him fodder for his imagination.
The tiny goblin-like spirit shows up on Poe's shoulder the night his childhood begins to unravel. Poe's father is drunk, and he's slipped into Poe's bedroom to kiss him goodbye before deserting his family. At that moment, the imp jumps from father to son, a bitter-sweet gift that will change Poe's life forever.
In a brief introduction, Gustafson explains the meaning of the imp much as Poe did in his short story: "If you have ever stood at the window in a tall building, or on the brink of a scenic mountain overlook, you may have heard a small voice whisper, 'Go ahead, jump!' Then, most likely, you also felt that chilling jab in the gut as you, just for a moment, imagined yourself plummeting over the edge."
Of course most people dismiss these feelings of the macabre, Gustafson adds, but Poe was different. He listened to his imp, they "lingered on the edge and peered over. And then they got creative," imagining each of them crashing down to a grisly, horrific end. And it's that devilish sensibility, Poe's desire to poke around in the dark side of his imagination, he continues, that made him extraordinary.
Along with the imp, Gustafson introduces the raven from the poem that ma
.jpeg?picon=3103)
