Author: Joe O'Neill (unable to locate as website)
Publisher: Black Ship Publishing (unable to locate a website)
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new novel is reward aplenty!
(Note: don't confuse this writer with the Irish writer Joseph O'Neill or freelance writer Joe O'Neill!)
This novel, set at the beginning of the twentieth century, is about four young (middle-grade) children who have been kidnapped for slavery: Aseem, Fez, and Tariq are Arab boys of different skin hues from light to very dark, who were kidnapped in Tangier. They all end-up being taken to the kasbah (pretty much the same as a castle, but note that kasbah is actually an Indian, not a Middle-Eastern, term per se) of Caid Ali Tamzali to be trained as jockeys to race camels for the entertainment of the desert tribesmen.
Margaret is an English girl who was kidnapped into white slavery to be given as a gift to the son of Tamzali. The four children meet each other and from a blood-bond of friendship. They begin planning their escape immediately, but fail to take advantage of several opportunities, which was not only frustrating to me, it made me doubt both their sincerity and their chops! It's only when they reach the kasbah and begin training and racing that a plan comes together, and they escape with the help of a rebel tribe.
That was as far as I got. I didn't like this story for several reasons, not least of which were the graphic depictions of brutality which seemed to me to be inappropriate for the intended age range. While we know that slavery even today is brutal and appalling, I don't need to read that for entertainment in a novel, in gory detail yet, and children certainly do not need this kind of detail.
Even had that not been a factor, I would still have disliked this novel on technical grounds because while it began in an exciting manner, it kept periodically slamming the brakes on the story to tell the back-story of many of the characters which not only destroyed the excitement and flow of the narrative, but bored the pants off me.
I began routinely skipping the chapters which had these back-stories, but even aside form those, there was too much detail in the action sequences to let them flow properly. I found myself wanting to jump a sentence here and a paragraph there in order to get on with the action, and this is never a good sign for me!
When we reached a chapter which was a back-story not of one of the main characters but of another character who was helping the main ones, I said "Check please! I'm done." I really didn't care. I wasn't interested in going back and forth like a bouncing bungee for the main characters, so why would I be interested in learning the history of one of the incidental ones tossed right into the middle of the narrative flow?
I'm a parent of middle-grade kids and I think these fictional kids could have been truly interesting and had a worthy story told about them. This was not that story and I will not recommend it. You need to do more than put kids in an exotic location to make a story worth the telling.
