Plain Kate
by
Erin Bow
This book was not what I expected. I received a newsletter saying that it was a good teen fantasy read. It won a YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults at the 2011 ALA Midwinter conference. It is published by Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic.
When I checked the book out, the cover had a unicorn sticker on it and it was in the YA fantasy fiction section. The image on the cover of the book is of a girl and her cat on a roof of some pre-1900 city.
A) I read the book and don't remember her walking on any city roofs.
B) Most of the book is not set in a city, but in small villages and gypsy camps.
C) This is not a cutesy unicorn book.
D) I would not call this a fantasy book but a horror book.
By the time I got 1/3 of the way through the book about an orphaned girl who can carve wonderful figure the book had clearly taken a turn into a horror book. There is black magic with lots of blood letting and nasty ghost/demons and a twisted warlock. The book is pretty well written, but I couldn't get past the wicked parts. I skim/read the last 2/3 of it to find out how it ended. There were some unexpected twists. It is an original work and the talking cat character is great, but it is more for the Twilight vampire crowd than for the "unicorn" reader and I would not recommend it to readers under the age of 16.
