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|title=Ice Angel

|author=Charlotte Haptie

|date=January 2010

|isbn=978-0340894187

}}

Charlotte Haptie creates an extravagant, colourful world by means of a few well-chosen details. The ice cream van the two brothers lovingly restore has a figurehead on the front, as have all the vehicles in the town. It is a wooden statue of an angel, shot through with blue-green aqua-crystal, and it has a disconcerting habit of singing very loudly if a member of the family is under threat. An eccentric office-worker escapes the police by doing acrobatics on a bicycle, an odd boy wanders about at night searching for a lost cat, and a girl detective uses the script of a radio play to communicate with her client. Laugh-out-loud humour, heart-wrenching drama and edge-of-your-seat thrills abound in this truly splendid book, and all the while questions of freedom, identity and loyalty bubble away beneath the surface. People need to be warned not to start reading this book in the evening, because it is enchanted. It is quite impossible to put it down until you reach the very last page, and that you have to you read very, very slowly in order to put off the moment when the story is complete. It is quite possibly one of the best books you'll read this year.

Further reading suggestion: Ellen Renner is another author who creates a whole world in her stories: try [[City of Thieves by Ellen Renner|City of Thieves]] for another brilliant mix of adventure and originality. And the same can be said of the wonderful [[Neversuch House by Elliot Skell]].