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|title= Twelve Nights

|author= Andrew Zurcher

|date=April 2018

|isbn=9780141385549

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This story opens on a terrifying note. Kay and Eloise's father is working late at his college, as usual, but when the two girls and their mother arrive to pick him up, they are told he does not work there. In fact, everyone they meet insists they have never heard of him. It sounds like the beginning of a scary murder-mystery, or a cat-and-mouse chase in the style of James Bond or Dan Brown, but what actually lies behind this event is far stranger and more confusing. Later that night Kay hears voices at her window and embarks on a quest to rescue both her father and her younger sister from ruthless beings who are decidedly not human.

So what is this book? To be honest, it's hard to say, and what is most clear is that it is a very difficult book to review. It's like that famous savoury spread people either adore or loathe on their toast, and readers will be similarly divided about it. On the one hand there are dreamlike journeys, courageous exploits, the deadliest of perils and destinies revealed. People have identities hitherto undiscovered and powers they never suspected. But readers who look primarily for speed in their stories, for a sequence of tightly-packed adventures, will be disappointed. Yes, the variety of settings and the fantastical elements are all there, and so vividly depicted that the reader suffers through each successive horror with Kay, but in return the reader must accept that the very richness of language which creates the atmosphere also slows down the pace. Feelings, backgrounds and events are described in rolling, poetic language, words piled on words, and many of them will be way beyond the experience of the average nine-year-old the book claims to be written for. Obscure, too, is some of the background. What precisely are the wraiths ''plotting'' (in their sense of the term) for? How does their world relate to ours? And what has Kay and Eloise's father been doing which makes him such a threat? While the book is in many ways engrossing, many readers will feel that they're missing something, and that some vital explanation which could clear up all their questions has been missed out.

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