Stoneheart Trilogy

I am late to the table discovering  this series.   

Stoneheart (Hyperion, 2007) by Charlie Fletcher is a page-turner with an intriguing focus for a fantasy novel.

George , 12 years old, breaks off the head of a dragon carving from the wall of the museum during a class field trip.  Uh-oh.  This action opens the way into an unseen dimension of London where all the statues of the city are good (the spits) and trying to help him or bad (the taints) and trying to kill him. He meets a girl named Edie who has the unwanted ability to see past events. 

For this Anglophile, the most delightful aspect to these books (I am in the middle of the second volume, Ironhand) is identifying the REAL statues and public art in London that are characters in the story.   

 

The cover art for Stoneheart IS the  Temple Bar Griffin or Dragon.

Locating the statues and memorials in the story has turned into a kind of obsession right now.  Some of the ones that I have identified include Boadicea and her daughters, Peter Pan, the Royal Artillery monument,  the Black Friar Pub and more

The audio books are read by the wondrous, Jim Dale. He is so firmly the voice of Harry Potter for me that I do not always enjoy his readings of other books, but this series is OUTSTANDING.  The storyline, characters and locales play to all his strengths as a narrator.  

Fletcher is improving as a writer.  Ironhand is stronger than the first volume. (Must identify the statue on the cover now.)  The final volume Silvertongue should be a cracking read.


Update:  Found the statue on the cover of Ironhand.  It is  the Cnihtengild, Devonshire Square.

More statues:

Terra-dactyl from Natural History Museum (Stoneheart, Silvertongue)

Arial (Ironhand)
Hodge (Silvertongue) 
Wellington Arch (Silvertongue)
Dictionary aka Dr. Johnson 
The London Stone (Silvertongue)
WWI Memorial - the old soldier and the (grand, bloody, panjandrum of the painfully bleeding obvious) young soldier   (outside the Royal Exchange) (Silvertongue)
The Duke with no stirrups outside the Royal Exchange  (Silvertongue)
The Firefighters Memorial (Silvertongue)
Anteros from the Shaftesbury Memorial in Piccadilly Circus (Silvertongue)
Cleopatras Needle Sphinxes- Victoria Embankment - another view and another (Stoneheart, Silvertongue)
Merchant Navy Memorial - Jack Tar (Silvertongue)
Richard the Lionheart and a close-up (Silvertongue)
Queen of Time at Selfridges
Shackleton aka Shack @ Royal Geographical Society
Queen of America and "Bill" the buffalo from Albert Memorial
Is Railway Man Isambard Kingdom Brunel?
The Knight of Wood @ Southwark Cathedral

Renaissance Man holding a feather quill @ Southwark Cathedral

The Admiral
Bulldog
Boy with a Dolphin

Discovering London Statues and Monuments
 By Margaret Baker

The London Eye Mystery

The London Eye Mystery by Siobhan Dowd, Narrated by Paul Chequer, BBC Audiobooks Ltd, p2008. Audiobook downloaded from the public library

This is a splendid YA mystery that I picked because it was on the Texas Library Association, 2009 Texas Lonestar Reading list. This list continues, year after year, to present the most entertaining page-turners out there.

Ted and his older sister, Kat, wait in line with their cousin, Salim to ride the London Eye. A stranger approaches them and offers them a free ticket for the ride. As Salim is the visitor, they urge him to take it and go ahead without them. They watch the glass capsule make the 30 minute circuit, carefully following its progress. As the sealed car empties at the end of the ride, Kat and Ted realize that Salim is not among the passengers. He went up the Eye, locked in a transparent, glass pod but did not return.

What happened to Salim?

This is a very interesting and multi-layered mystery. The most fascinating aspect to the story is the character of Ted who, apparently, has Asperger’s Syndrome. He is fascinated with weather. He has encyclopedic knowledge of clouds and all weather phenomena. Listening to Ted's point of view, I was struck by how he uses something, as seemingly, unpredictable, as weather to help him relate in his own way to his family and the world around him.

In this story, Ted can handle and accept that there are variables to weather. An understanding of the many variables which impact the weather is soothing to him. If he can interpret the variables he can predict the weather. He cannot as easily interpret the swirling emotions of his family and the trauma and horror of a missing child. Of course it is his detached, out of the box thinking, that will solve the mystery of Salim's disappearance.

This is a terrific story and underscores to me AGAIN, how fiction--the genre--can shed light and insight and provide a new perspective.

It brought The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon to mind.

Alas, Dowd died in 2007, what a tragedy. Must check out her other novels.

The Siobhan Dowd Trust

Jimmy Coates: on location

Joe Craig, creator of the Jimmy Coates books takes readers on a trip around London to actual locations in the stories.

He has also mapped the books' events on a London city map.

If you are not familiar with the books, here's author Joe Craig's description of the series: