When Meline and Jocelyn are left orphaned in a train accident, they are both shipped off to live with their genius uncle on an island famous for its morbid history of airplane crashes. The two girls have completely conflicting personalities, and their uncle only exacerbates matters by ignoring them entirely. Life on the island is miserable for all involved-- that is, until one fateful day when a revelation occurs to Meline: "I know how to build a plane."
When you start this book, it may seem familiar, as if it were an odd mix of Lemony Snicket's "Series of Unfortunate Events," MT Anderson's "Game of Sunken Places," and Laura Numeroff's "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie." This observation would be entirely logical, because Polly Horvath's plot takes elements from all three of these stories, whether deliberately or not, creating a final work that is unsettlingly recognizable. Horvath's tone is great, easy to read and at times intriguing, but her use of multiple points of view means that even the characters cannot be interesting to the reader, because all are over-explained and become redundant by the end of the novel. The children's uncle is perhaps the best example of where Horvath has missed the mark with her characters-- he is known as an extraordinary genius, but in his eyes and the view of others, he comes across as, at best, eccentric and socially inept. These flaws are even more disappointing when one looks at the potential that the book held-- but it can't be denied that as talented as Horvath is, she has finally created a book that is just plain long.
Reviewer Age:15
Reviewer City, State and Country: Maryland, United States
