Lambda Literary Award–winning author Klune ( The Art of Breathing, 2019, etc.) has a knack for creating endearing characters, and readers will grow to love Arthur and the orphans alongside Linus. As Linus spends more time with Arthur and the kids, he starts to question a world that would shun them for being different, and he even develops romantic feelings for Arthur. The proprietor of the orphanage is a strange but charming man named Arthur, who makes it clear to Linus that he will do anything in his power to give his charges a loving home on the island. When he reaches the island, he meets extraordinary kids like Talia the gnome, Theodore the wyvern, and Chauncey, an amorphous blob whose parentage is unknown. He is to stay on the island for a month and write reports for Extremely Upper Management, which warns him to be especially meticulous in his observations.
When Extremely Upper Management sends for Linus, he learns that his next assignment is a mission to an island orphanage for especially dangerous kids. Linus clings to the notion that his job is about saving children from cruel or dangerous homes, but really he’s a cog in a government machine that treats magical children as second-class citizens. Linus Baker loves rules, which makes him perfectly suited for his job as a midlevel bureaucrat working for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, where he investigates orphanages for children who can do things like make objects float, who have tails or feathers, and even those who are young witches.
#The cipher kathe koja kirkus skin#
Koja’s prose throughout the book provides a bevy of indelible passages: “He pressed her leg, the bare skin below the edge of her cutoffs his hand was warm, with long strong workman’s fingers, small hard spots like rivets on the palm, his skin a topographic map of his days: cut wood, carry water, name and number and know all the plants in the world.”Īn impressive collection of stories unafraid to explore bleak topics like death and despondency.Ī tightly wound caseworker is pushed out of his comfort zone when he’s sent to observe a remote orphanage for magical children. In it, a morgue janitor in Paris closely observes a female cadaver that he believes holds some sort of mystery. Nevertheless, the highlight of this impressive collection is the Poe-esque “The Marble Lily,” one of two stories herein that hasn’t been previously published. Koja tackles a handful of genres, including SF, somber drama, and sublimely understated horror. Now that Susan has died, Anne wants to adopt a dog, which her mother had never allowed-but getting a puppy from the kennel takes a bizarre, unsettling turn. Anne had cared for her ailing art-collector mother, Susan, for years. Other characters, like Anne in “Coyote Pass,” have trouble simply moving on. Some of the characters in these generally grim stories come to terms with a tragedy they don’t want to face: The man in “Road Trip” has intermittent flashes of a car accident (or moments before), and he not only mourns losing a loved one, but his responsibility for the fatality. This act may be his unorthodox way of understanding his famous architect father’s suicide, which likewise entailed driving into a tree. In “Velocity,” an artist creates his art by running bicycles into trees. These tales have an estimable provenance: “Fireflies” first appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction (2002), “Road Trip” in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 16 (2002), and other stories in similarly respected books. Thirteen dark fantasy stories feature tortured characters whose lives are drastically changing-or will soon end-in Koja’s ( Under the Poppy, 2010, etc.) collection.
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