The Carnival of Lost Souls: A Handcuff Kid Novel

by Laura Quimby

Overview

For one charismatic kid, the dangerous world of the Forest of the Dead becomes the setting for the ultimate escape trick in this exciting debut novel.

 

Jack Carr has been shuttled from foster home to group home to foster home his entire life. The only constant has been his interest in magic, especially handcuff escapes like those mastered by his hero, Harry Houdini. When he’s placed with the Professor, however, he feels like he’s finally found a home—but his new guardian is hiding a dangerous secret.

 

Years ago the Professor bartered his soul to the undead magician Mussini, and when the payment is due, he sends Jack in his place. Jack must travel with Mussini to the Forest of the Dead, a place in between the real world and the afterlife, where he’s forced to perform in Mussini’s traveling magic show. If he stays in the Forest long enough, he’ll die himself. To find his way home, he’ll have the help of Mussini’s other “minions”—kids stolen just like Jack—and his wits, nothing more. Can he follow the example of his hero, Houdini, and escape the inescapable?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781613120064
Publisher:	ABRAMS
Publication date:	12/31/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Lexile:	750L (what's this?)
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Laura Quimby graduated with a degree in English literature from Towson State University, in Maryland, where she lives with her family. This is her first novel. When not writing, she likes to do yoga, travel, and hit the trail near her house. Laura also enjoys cooking, eating, and lounging about reading and watching movies and way too much television.

Editorial Reviews

Quimby's entertaining if slight debut offers homage to Houdini filtered through the lens of traditional fantasy tropes. Twelve-year-old Jack, a diehard Houdini fan, has bounced his way through the foster care system and seems to have finally found a good home with a professor. However, the professor, whose name Jack doesn't quite catch, actually sold his soul to an evil magician named Mussini 50 years earlier, and has taken Jack in only to sacrifice the boy in his stead. Now trapped in the Forest of the Dead with the other members of Mussini's traveling magic show, Jack is forced to use his skill with handcuffs to entertain audiences of dead people even as he plots his escape. Quimby stumbles with her adult characters--Mussini is a classic mustache-twirling villain who appears to be evil for the sake of being evil, and the professor's manipulation of Jack is never reconciled with his otherwise moral behavior. Her ending is largely unsatisfying as a result, but Jack and his fellow prisoners/performers are fun characters to follow. Ages 10–14. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Gr 4–6—Jack Carr has never really belonged. A foster child who has been bounced from home to home, he has one constant in his life: his obsession with Harry Houdini. Jack's luck changes when he goes to live with the professor, an old eccentric who is looking for a boy interested in magic. But all is not as it seems at the idyllic house. The professor had sold his soul to the Amazing Mussini, a magician of the dead. Jack suddenly finds that he is going to the Land of the Dead in place of the professor and is part of Mussini's Traveling Carnival. His only wish: to escape before he joins the dead. But in his way are his own success at performing his handcuff act and the brilliant mind of Mussini himself. Quimby keeps readers feeling Jack's tension and danger throughout the story. The Land of the Dead is a unique world with minotaurlike guards and bored dead people. The chapters are interspersed with excerpts in verse of a biography of Houdini. Though a little distracting, they do reflect what is going on in Jack's mind and are perhaps supposed to represent the book Jack always carries with him. Readers are sure to look forward to future adventures of the Handcuff Kid.—Clare A. Dombrowski, Amesbury Public Library, MA

School Library Journal

Failing to live up to its melodramatic title, this debut sends a multiply-fostered teen into a Land of the Dead that (except for some minotaur enforcers) isn't much different from the land of the living. Forced by some never-explained ploy into the clutches of an evil magician, Jack Carr is whisked over the border into Purgatory to join a mixed band of living and dead children as a performer in a traveling show—for spirits who seem to eat, drink, work and play just as they did before their deaths. Being a big fan of Houdini, Jack becomes an escape artist on stage even as he plots a getaway back to the living world. Mixing in irrelevant free-verse poems about Houdini, the author grinds out a slow and predictable plot, shows little imagination in concocting her setting or supporting cast and, despite walls of illusory fire, origami animals coming to life and like manifestations, has her protagonist conclude that "real magic was man-made. Anyone could do it." There are some good individual lines, but it's disappointingly flat overall. (Fantasy. 11-13)

Kirkus Reviews