Old Gods New Tricks by Thiago de Moraes
| Old Gods New Tricks by Thiago de Moraes | |
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| Category: Confident Readers | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: Distinctive and engaging, this MG fantasy will tick a lot of boxes for just how interestingly it goes about its business – and ultimately the scope of that business. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 288 | Date: July 2023 |
| Publisher: David Fickling Books | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 9781788452953 | |
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Meet Trixie. Forever getting into scrapes, larks and adventures involving flooding the school aircon with fart powder, she could almost be thought a young goddess of nuisance. But just when she's being told that by her one-last-chance-giving headteacher, the world changes. Suddenly, practically everything electronic stops working – a power-out, even of electric cars, hits not just the town the school's in but the entire planet (apart from mobile phones, and all that powers the Internet, just for our convenience's sake). Trixie, luckily, realises what has happened – the ancient Gods have taken the power of power from us. And so she begins her epic quest, to gather all the people that can steal it back – namely the characters from myth that have past form in stealing from the Gods, ie the semi-deities, giants, half-gods and so on known as the tricksters.
With a quote from a real encyclopaedia of myth before every chapter, and with Trixie being fully genned up on all this stuff because of her parents' careers, and with a first task that involves summoning Exu the God of Crossroads, that I am sure very few in the target audience will have heard of, some of this does feel like it's cramming too much research and/or prior knowledge down our throats. The author has presented us with prior myth-centred non-fiction books, after all. But I think this has been balanced very well – Trixie is likeably knowledgable and not smug about it, the book doesn't quite get to forcing knowledge down our throats, and the whole leaves Trixie feeling like a good old-fashioned questor, burdened with x amount of tasks to get to the world-changing place she seeks.
These tasks make the book feel imbalanced as you're reading through, although again not to its detriment. It feels like so much time will be spent on team-building, Trixie having to do this and then that for each godlike helper in turn, that there will be no time for any confrontation with those who removed our power. (And speaking of time-wasting, why is Trixie forced to scurry behind these characters as they lumber across the landscape, when the smallest is at least twice her size? Literally giving her a lift would have saved them all a good few hours near the beginning.)
So I'm forgiving the piece its perhaps over-enthusiastic drip-feeding us details from myth, I'm ignoring the slow-build as the team is assembled, and I'm accepting the dodgy Internet survival, because I found myself very well-disposed to this from the off. The no-power status of the world seemed a high-concept idea such as I'd see in the likes of The Day the Screens Went Blank by Danny Wallace and Gemma Correll, before this left the everyday behind and entered the world of the wondrous and fantastical full-on. And boy doesn't it get fantastical and full-on – the adventure towards the end is so grandiose it just has to be IMAX; mere widescreen just won't do. There's a reason that for all her agency Trixie ends up fainting a heck of a lot more than other characters of her type.
What this doesn't do is riff off old myths in an arch, meta kind of way, tweaking all the old stories just one iota to feel fresh. What this is is a full-on blaze through various world mythologies, mixing and matching at will, and allowing gods from one of our world's regions to know all about those from elsewhere. This harks back to the older days where everything we knew was represented by a god, and you know what? It's fair to say there is a little bit of the godlike about this.
I must very much thank the publishers for my review copy.
That world I mentioned where everything has a deity for it is best seen in Wishful Thinking by Ali Sparkes. And it would be remiss of me to not mention Loki: A Bad God's Guide to Being Good by Louie Stowell, partly because I've worked an event with the author and she's fab, but mostly because the third in her ongoing series is out within weeks of my typing this, summer 2023.
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You can read more book reviews or buy Old Gods New Tricks by Thiago de Moraes at Amazon.co.uk Amazon currently charges £2.99 for standard delivery for orders under £20, over which delivery is free.
You can read more book reviews or buy Old Gods New Tricks by Thiago de Moraes at Amazon.com.
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