Changes

It's a bleak kind of fun all told, but it's rich – certainly richer than the genre books I speak of (and those Carey was also responsible for in his earlier career as a comix writer). As if you don't have a most realistic, detailed and visual world to enter here, and as if you don't have a superlatively different kind of heroine, you have the further layering of Melanie's favourite subject at school. For she liked nothing more than to hear Miss Justineau read tales of Greek myth to the class, and that leaches on to these pages. Early on Melanie declares her name should instead be Pandora – the original 'girl with all the gifts'. This carrier of hope comes with so much intelligence, a solid narrative as the myths bore only after centuries of being refined, and almost as universal an appeal. It's a book with compassion it's worth being passionate about; a book with legs that is worth hastening to read before the film gets made; and a genre-busting book worthy of many a comment along the lines of 'you know what, you might not normally read this kind of novel but I think you'll enjoy it'. Because I do.

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