Novella Review – Lucretia and the Kroons by Victor LaValle (3/5 stars)
Reading Level:Adult
Genre: Horror/Fantasy
Length: 108 pages
Publisher: Random House
Release Date: July 23, 2012
ASIN: B008C84HH4
Stand Alone or Series: Stand Alone book
Source: Borrowed ebook from Library
Rating: 3/5 stars
“Lucretia’s best friend and upstairs neighbor Sunny—a sweet pitbull of a kid, even as she struggles with a mysterious illness—has gone missing. The only way to get her back is for Lucretia to climb the rickety fire escape of their Queens tenement and crawl through the window of apartment 6D, portal to a vast shadowland of missing kids ruled by a nightmarish family of mutants whose designs on the children are unknown. Her search for Sunny takes Lucretia through a dark fantasyland where she finds lush forests growing from concrete, pigeon-winged rodents, and haunted playgrounds. Her quest ultimately forces her to confront the most frightening specter of all: losing, forever, the thing you love the most.”
Series Info/Source: This is a stand alone book. I borrowed this on ebook through my library.
Thoughts: I really enjoyed LaValle’s “The Ballad of Black Tom” and “Lone Women” novellas. So, I was excited to read some of his other works. This was not nearly as good as the other novellas I have read. This was a fairly simple story about a girl who enters a shadowland in search of her sick friend and ends up finding a number of horrors there.
This was fairly simple and feels reminiscent of many middle grade stories you have read before, it does have a bit more of a horror feel to it. Lucretia enters a portal in the top floor apartment to find her sick friend Sunny. While there she confronts many horrors and is forced to face a hard truth about her friend.
While this feels like a middle grade story, some of the horror and gore make it more appropriate for older readers. The story just didn’t have anything all that special to it. It was predictable and rushed and just left me feeling very indifferent. I didn’t hate reading it but I also won’t remember it.
My Summary (3/5): Overall this was not an excellent example of LaValle’s writing. To be fair, this is an older story from him. I am not sure I will check out his older books/stories after reading this but might just keep an eye out on his future works. This was just too similar to other stories, too predictable, and not all that interesting.
