Abarat - libri usati

Paperback. Pub Date: 2002 Pages: 288 Publisher: Harper Collins It begins in THE most boring place in the world: Chickentown USA There lives Candy Quackenbush her heart bursting for some CLUE as to what her future might hold. When the answer comes. it's not one she expects. Out of nowhere comes a wave. and Candy. led by a man called John Mischief (whose others live on the horns on his head). leaps into the surging waters and is carried away. Where To the ABARAT: a vast archipelago where every island is a different hour of the day. from The Great Head that sits in the mysterious twilight waters of Eight in the Evening. to the sunlit wonders of Three in the Afternoon. where dragons roam. to the dark terrors of Gorgossium. the island of Midnight. ruled over by the Prince of Midnight himself. Christopher Carrion. Candy has a place in this extraordinary world: she is here to help ..., With Abarat, Clive Barker begins an ambitious sequence of fantastic novels aimed at a young audience as well as his adult fans. There is as much sense of threat to the world here as there was in the horror novels with which he made his name. But the worst almost never happens here--and there is whimsy and charm along with a carefully judged and measured sense of the nightmarish. Young Cindy Quackenbush finds herself transported from the boredom of a Mid-Western chicken-packing town to the 25 islands of the Abarat--islands torn between the evil magician Christopher Carrion and the equally power-hungry rational capitalist Pixler. Each of the islands has a nature determined by an hour of the day--part of the pleasure of the book is seeing how Barker works this conceit out as Cindy travels from peril to peril. The book is literally a book of hours--in the Medieval sense; it's lavishly illustrated with over a hundred of Barker's striking paintings--much of its imagery was conceived of pictorially and then reinvented as story. This is a fine book--it is also a beautiful and charming object. --Roz Kaveney