BOOK REVIEWS
The Hunchback Assignments
by Arthur Slade
Price: $18.99
ISBN: 978-1-55468-354-3
Page count: 288 pp.
Size: 5½ x 8½
Released: Sept.
London in the 19th century was a place of wondrous adventure. Secret organizations flourished, spies were everywhere, and man-monsters roamed the alleyways looking to kidnap children to aid in their nefarious schemes.
At least, that’s how Arthur Slade portrays the era. And while it may not be historically accurate, that hardly matters when the results are so much fun. The Hunchback Assignments, the latest from the Governor General’s Award-winning author, is a full-steam-ahead spy thriller, complete with derring-do, a dastardly villain, and a suitably complex plot that keeps the reader one slight step behind the wily hero.
Modo is a young boy blessed with the ability to temporarily alter his physiognomy at will, but cursed with a natural state as a deformed hunchback. Recruited into the ranks of the mysterious Permanent Association, Modo quickly learns that his talent is ideal for espionage.
Slade’s London is an engrossing mélange of the historically precise and the ridiculously imaginative. Working within the genre of steampunk, a mode of speculative fiction that posits a world of technological invention within the trappings of the Victorian Era, Slade crafts a world in which the sad reality of children “[sifting] through the mud at low tide for coal, bits of rope, anything to sell for a penny” exists alongside fantastic armoured men powered by gyroscopes made of “steel bones, the steam pumping out of holes in narrow iron plates.”
Slade ensures that the fanciful elements never overwhelm the story through his careful handling of the gallant Modo and the canny Octavia, another young ward drafted into action. Modo’s unusual predicament is handled with aplomb, and children will empathize with his role as an outsider who craves acceptance, even as they revel in an outlandish plot that ends with a promise of further tales of danger.
The Hunchback Assignments is a terrific entertainment, exciting and whimsical. Slade’s novel should find ready acceptance among those young readers who crave a touch of darkness in their stories.
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