Review: Abarat (Abarat #1)
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5 stars. Every couple of years, I crave these books. I get nostalgic for the pure and colorful escape, for the deftly-named characters and the creative world-building. I get excited to travel to new places and meet old friends and face clever, layered villains. I get eager to pour over the brilliant and vivid illustrations, to dive into a true reading Experience-uppercase-E.
But here's the thing: for as many times as I've read and re-read the first book, I've never made it through the third. ACK. I know that Clive Barker intended this to be a quintet, but we've settled for three, and I can't even finish them all! My vague reading challenge for 2020 was to finish what I start (meaning: series) and I totally burnt out on The Expanse by Book 5. So here we are. Should I try to get something right for once? Should I actually cross something off the list?
CANDY QUACKENBUSH. A girl from Chickentown, Minnesota who finds herself in Abarat, a magical land - archipelago, actually - where each island occupies a single hour of the day. Candy meets creatures and monsters and animals beyond her wildest dreams - but something feels off. She's being hunted by Christopher Carrion, the Lord of Midnight, whose interest in her borders on obsession. And as she immerses herself more in Abaratian ways, it all starts to feel ... familiar.
Tasty stuff.
Beyond the basic story (which is essentially just a vehicle for the world-building, which I don't mind at all?), I love the lessons here: Candy's an admirable Alice with a fantastic attitude. She demonstrates compassion and empathy and characters who don't are heartily and happily called out. There's exploration of fate and destiny and bravery and surrender. It's fantastic.
I recall very fondly going online (a slow, loud thing when I was a child in the 90s) and pouring over the Extremely Sophisticated Online Flash Animation on the website for these books. I believe there was an interactive map of The Beautiful Moment, fan art, and more. I painstakingly copied the illustrations with my colored pencils, I even tried to write my own pseudo-fanfiction-y version of the story in a pink spiral notebook involving a protagonist named Kandi and several fierce old women ... lol.
But enough embarrassing shit about me. My point is just to say that these books are/were formative and foundational and special to me.
Fans of fantasy: read this. Fans of world-building: read this. Fans of art: read this. Fans of myths: read this. Fans of fun, creative villains: read this. These books make me fucking emotional, and not just because they offered so much comfort and so much inspiration when I was a kid. This series holds up as something truly unique - something beautiful - something with the potential to be important for generations to come. REMEMBER ABARAT, book world. Let's return together.