Malice: By Chris Wooding

MALICE

SUMMARY

Everyone's heard of it...but nobody's read it. Luke, Seth, and Kady have heard all the stories about Malice--a secret comic about a strange, awful world full of tricks and traps, and overseen by a sinister master of ceremonies, Tall Jake. But if the rumours are to be believed, the children in this comic are real... Luke is the first to fall into this trap--and Seth and Kady are the next to follow. They have left our world and entered the sinister comic book. The question is--can they make it out alive? From acclaimed author, Chris Wooding, a novel that's half fact, half comic--and all thrills.

REVIEW

Before I say anything else about Malice I have to admit that it is a great idea for a book and Wooding has done an amazing job with it.

In fact one of my only real complaints for the book is that Wooding did too good of a job.

What I mean by this is that Malice was to too intense and scary for me. It is incredibly well written, and combines key elements of horror, mystery, adventure, and fantasy into this action packed comic-book novel. And I couldn’t handle it, some may easily enjoy Wooding’s recent series.

Wooding does an excellent job of combining comic adventures into the novel, breaking up the story into accessible pieces that comic book fans and boys especially will love.

My other problem with the book was that I had trouble keeping some of the characters straight. Wooding introduces a good number of characters at the beginning of the book, and doesn’t bother expanding them until after some of them start dying.

And die they do. If you are squeamish then this is not the book for you. In fact think of this book as saw in comic/novel format. And I think this is the perfect way to recommend this book, for those that this description sounds interesting, I would recommend it, and for everyone else I wouldn’t. It’s as simple a that.

RATING

5 out of 10

INFO

Publisher: Scholastic Inc.

Published: August 1, 2010

Price: $8.99