The Luck Uglies is a pleasing middle-grade fantasy novel, the kind that starts with a charmingly-drawn map of the place where the book is set, which in this case is a village called Drowning, though really it’s “more of a sprawling town than a village, one built on a foundation of secrets, rules, and lies, but mostly just mud” (3). As the book opens, we meet eleven-year-old Rye O’Chanter and her friends Folly and Quinn, who are running across the town’s rooftops with an accidentally-stolen book, its owner in hot pursuit: it’s clear this is going to be a story with significant amounts of adventure.
The stolen book, though, isn’t really at the center of things, though it does feature a bit in the plot. Drowning has problems, and not just because of the Earl who governs it with heavy taxes, arbitrary fines, and repressive laws. Drowning has a river on one side and bogs on the other, and the bogs have historically been home to dangerous creatures called Bog Noblins—though they’re supposed to be extinct, vanquished by a quasi-criminal gang called the Luck Uglies who were then pushed out of town themselves. But what if the Bog Noblins are still out there? When Rye actually sees one, this becomes more than a theoretical question. If the Luck Uglies are gone, who will protect the town now? Or are the Luck Uglies still around, too?
Rye (who lives just outside the town walls, near the bogs, with her mom and her younger sister and their cat) learns rather more than she expects to over the course of the book, about Bog Noblins and Luck Uglies and also about her family, her friends, and herself. I appreciated the characters and the writing: Riley’s bookish friend Quinn, for example, lives alone with his dad, and we learn that at their house, with its piles of books and other things, there’s “a fine line between hidden and lost” (38). A description of the Bog Noblins, read out by the town crier, is this totally great sentence: “Typical Bog Noblin activities include clawing, biting, growling, consumption of humans and livestock, vandalism, and recreational dismemberment” (124). A library is described as having “a scent that was part mildew, part magic” (254). And I liked the excitement of the plot, even though a few of the revelations were obvious to me well before they become obvious to Rye: I was having enough fun that I didn’t particularly mind. This book is the first in a trilogy, and I’m looking forward to reading more about this world.
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