Obernewtyn
Isobelle Carmody
Elspeth has mental talents that she must keep secret from a post-apocalyptic world. She can hear the thoughts of humans and animals, and change those thoughts if she needs to. But she can’t protect herself from being proclaimed a misfit and sent to Obernewtyn. Things are not what they seem there, and freedom is not everything it could be.
Elspeth goes from a lonely loner to someone who dares to have friends. Funny how losing everything seems to do that to a person. She progresses rapidly from someone only concerned about saving herself to someone who can and will help others. It’s that transformation that brought me back to this novel over and over again.
I always wonder what might have happened about Jes if things were different. There’s more powers than seem obvious, and I’m certain that given more space (which could happen since Isobelle has promised me a sequel!!!) there could be more explanation of this. Evolution keeps happening afterall.
This is one of my favourite Carmody books. I’ve never reviewed it before because it’s just a given for me that it is fantastic, and what more can I say about it? But my girlfriend had never read it, so we set about having me read it to her as a pre-sleep ritual. Reading it out loud made me appreciate again the gentle nuances of language and foreshadowing of the rest of the novels.
I in fact own two copies of it (the pictured illustration and the plain Penguin classics version). So that totally suited us when we were travelling between two houses and wanted to keep up our reading each night. Note to self though, after I’ve been reading aloud for at least 2 chapters, I start to stumble over words.
5 stars. You expected? Of course I love this novel, and I’ve lost count of how many times I have reread it. I started in high school, and spent the last 15-odd years waiting for the series to be finished. You can read my review of ‘The Red Queen‘, the last book in the chronicles.
I always wanted more. It wasn’t enough for me that Stephanie’s brother was dead. I wanted the gruesome details. And it wasn’t enough that her mother wept, or that there was something interesting going on in the deal with her grandparents, that we never found out about.
The back of the novel simply didn’t pull me in, but I took it with me somewhere and I couldn’t sleep, so of course this got read! It should have said something more about past lives, and then it would have gotten me straight away.
I didn’t feel a distinction between the perspectives of Lowell and Lycaea. This is a common complaint of mine. Also, for a couple of chapters I didn’t realise that Lowell was a boy. Honestly, I thought it could have gone either way. Lowell isn’t depicted as a fighter, and Lycaea certainly breaks any stereotypes of a passive woman. Kick-ass!
I put off reading this novel because it sounded like yet another ‘Spiritual Quest’ novel that wanted to tell me how to live my life. Instead I found a fiction that was just how the blurb announced it. The only problem was that the blurb read more as an advertising brief than a quick summary of the text.
Oh man, oh man. Where do I get started with this? The jazz and soul music promised to me by the author, or the attractive cover? Or both? I found myself hooked in, with the music and lyrics speaking to me and tying in nicely with the delicious cover. I didn’t feel ashamed of taking it out in public, and in fact read it instead of doing house renovations!
I’m pretty sure rescuing her mother from alcoholism in this method would be illegal… And I’m not sure how it would work. But in the context of the novel? Hell yeah! Bossing! Good work Kirra. For a stressed and ‘weak’ person such as Kirra, she has a real spine when she needs to. She just needs to be reminded that if you’re at the bottom, the only way is up.
This was impressive because Petraitis had obviously done her work well (as she has in her other books, which I now want to get my hands on), and she places the emphasis on the human touch. Humans are fallible, and criminal ones even more so. The book also highlighted the impact on police officers’ family lives in the days after a crime.
So you’ve seen the movie six dozen times (or maybe seven dozen, if you’re my age and it played on the weekend TV every week). But the book is the best, and the two movies don’t do justice to Roald Dahl’s world. Something that this novel has over the films is that you get to see illustrations of the four other children after they have been returned to their approximate original selves.
At the end of the first novel, there is a hint about what will happen in this one. I didn’t get the hint, even with this novel sitting on my shelf. This time we see the evolution of the