Dreadful Fates by Tracey Turner

Dreadful Fates by Tracey Turner
Buy Dreadful Fates by Tracey Turner at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Children's Non-Fiction
Reviewer: John Lloyd
Summary: A great collection of trivia facts for the morbid pre-teen.
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 112	Date: March 2010
Publisher: A & C Black Publishers Ltd
ISBN: 978-1408124215
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Imagine the delight you get, as a book reviewer, when you chance upon a title that stands out, by filling a nice handy gap in the market you'd never even noticed, and doing it so well you want to alert as many people as possible. This is such a time, Dreadful Fates is such a book, and as for the gap… This book hits upon the darker corners of all those copious 'highlights of history for the kids' books, touches upon The Darwin Awards compilations of stupid people dying in stupid ways, and merges with those collections of famous last words and epitaphs some of us like flicking through now and again – and does it all for the under-thirteen audience.

It does look morbid – a compendium of death, a memento mori for the primary school library. But it's great fun. Here in our comfy chairs we can raise a frown at people dying in strange ways, like the wannabe bomber, trying to transport her explosives, until her Rottweiler sits on them and sends them both ski-high. We're safely removed from a host of bizarre things that happen to dead bodies – you wouldn't guess at how many people get embalmed or buried, only for someone else to come along later and find bits missing.

Here is a chocolate coffin, the travels of Einstein's brain, and more. So much more, in fact, there are trivia here I didn't know of – such as the kidnapping and ransom demand over Charlie Chaplin's remains, and the so-called Cucumber King of Burma.

There are quite a few foodstuffs in these pages, considering it's a book about corpses and what we do to them. Which brings me a little to the flaw I find here – in the end it is just “too” random, too scattershot. There are at least three people dying from bananas – and not all in the way you might think. The layout of packing so many short paragraphs on the page as possible, in a nice, cosy style that is never much more complex than a tabloid headline, is excellent, but a greater coherence would be better, when there are so many instances of things that could be strung together.

Beyond that personal opinion, there is no reason for me to not recommend this book. Suitably ghoulish, in style, design and content, it should not scare off any adults wanting to browse, and it succeeds its remit of educating in an entertaining way. It certainly fills that unexpected gap I mentioned very nicely.

File this next to the same author's Deadly Peril and How To Avoid It - a book on how not to die so easily.

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