Although I'm a Blaylock fan, there are a few of his earliest books that I never got around to reading, and this was one of them. It certainly has the trademark Blaylock writing style, and I enjoyed that aspect of it - no one else uses words in such a quirky yet somehow natural-sounding way. The tone is dreamy, atmospheric, surreal and vaguely menacing throughout, which would have been okay, but it's also a bit unfocused. A couple of quotes from near the end exemplify the feeling I got from this story: "As he ran, Jack couldn't help but wonder what, exactly, they were doing.""Journeying through magical lands was adventuresome, surely, but he needed a destination of some sort, a purpose..."Yeah, I'm afraid I felt the same way at times. It wasn't clear just what was driving Jack or Skeezix through this adventure - they didn't seem to have any clear goals, yet neither were they being helplessly and inextricably caught up in the events the way that, say, a Powers protagonist would be. I saw similarities to Little, Big or maybe The Night Circus but this was less engaging or purposeful than either of those.So, not bad, but there are a number of Blaylock books I like better: of the "modern" ones, I prefer The Last Coin or Paper Grail, and I like the classic steampunk ones even more: Homunculus and Lord Kelvin's Machine.One more thing to note: I read the Kindle edition and it has numerous minor typos of the kind that come from imperfect character scanning, like "c" for "e" and things like that. As I said, just minor stuff, but would it really have taken that much time or money to simply ask someone to read through this version before releasing it?
I always forget how much I like Blaylock between books.While reading this I couldn't escape making the comparison to Something Wicked This Way Comes. It's not that they are really that much alike but the "evil carnival" motif drives a sort of parallelism. I wonder if it's generational or if people always felt a sort of uncomfortable undercurrent hiding beneath the frivolity at carnivals. I know as a kid I felt it. My parents took me every year to a large carnival that came to a small city near our farm. We also went to the county fair, but even with the rides, games and shows present, the fair didn't have the same "feel" as the carnival. You always went at night and the "carnies" always seemed to regard the "visitors" as outsiders, good enough to pay for what was offered, but not really to be accepted....Anyway now that I've given you all insight into my own psyche, I'll say that this is a good read. It's view of time and space while far from original is handled well and as the characters and time folds back on itself it comes to a satisfying conclusion. I liked it.
