I just started “Ingo,” a 2005 Young Adult novel by Helen Dunmore, but it’s so good I thought I’d start recommending it already.
I don’t even know yet if this first-person novel is a fantasy; in other words, the hero (a girl named Sapphire) hasn’t left her ordinary world yet.
At 328 pages, this book (by yet another British writer) is almost exactly the length of Ark Angel which I recently reviewed. But “Ingo” is better. As I continue to read, I feel like I’m in the hands of a master storyteller. But if the novel turns out to be a let-down (like Tuck Everlasting does), I will add an addendum to this review.
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December 4, 2006 at 6:19 pm
colin
Well, the end is a slight let-down, but I still highly recommend the book and will be reading the two sequels.
the only criticism I can think of (and it’s a slight one):
If it’s your nature as a writer to be poetic (dunmore is a poet) as well as observant (poets are generally observant), the risk of writing from the viewpoint of a child (as dunmore does in “Ingo”) is that it subverts verisimilitude.
what I mean is that dunmore (who is also able to get into the mind of a child) creates narration in one paragraph that sounds like the authentic voice of a young girl. but in the next paragraph the child might come up with an observation like “the world of smells for a dog is like being in library with a million book.”
only a genius child would be able to come up with observations like that time after time. and I would bet that not even shakespeare (at the same age) could have done it w the regularity that the narrator in “Ingo” does.