Book Review - G.P. Taylor's The First Escape
The First Escape by G.P. Taylor
Published by: Tyndale
Publication Date: 2008
Format: Paperback, 282 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy
Sadie and Saskia Dopple are the queens of the Isambard Dunstan School for Wayward Children. They rule all the girls in the orphanage with cunning ruthlessness. Until one day the headmistress is a little more crafty then they are. Saskia gets adopted by one Muzz Elliott, who will have one or none. Being a prestigious donor to the school she gets her wish and the twins are separated, much to the headmistress's delight. So Sadie stays behind while Saskia goes to live in the mysterious home of Muzz Elliott out on Hampstead Heath. She is given her own room in the tower where she mustn't ever answer the phone. Meanwhile, back at the orphanage, one of Sadie's pranks badly backfires and she's locked up for the night without food or water. But the school's only boy, and odd job man, overhears the mistress saying that Sadie will be off to prison for her stunt so Erik Ganger risks his neck and releases Sadie so that they can flee across the Heath to Saskia. Of course a rescue can never be as easy as that when you flee across Hampstead Heath at night with bloodhounds baying at your heels and a psychotic magician named The Great Potemkin offering concealment, if you'll only help with one little experimental magic trick that may or may not kill you. But things aren't going well for Saskia either. There's a mysterious painting she may not look at, a seance to recover a lost fortune, and a Muzz Elliott doppelganger out to kill them all. How will these three kids reunite and save the day?
It's interesting what remains after time. I read G.P. Taylor's Shadowmancer so many years ago now I don't even remember when it was I read it. I do remember how much I hated it. In fact I'm more often to remember why I hate a book than why I love a book but Shadowmancer is that rare book that I hated everything about it so much that I have blocked as much of it from my memory as possible as a precautionary measure. So it's kind of the definition of insanity to pick up another book by G.P. Taylor, but what am I if not slightly mad? When I first read this book five years ago I was impressed by how much I didn't hate it. Re-reading it five years later I see that perhaps I shouldn't base my opinions on a book by how much it didn't suck in comparison to another book by the same author. Because the truth is, this book is flawed. Very flawed. Yes, it's a fast read and has the nice comic versus prose structure of a Brian Selznick book. But seeing as I just read a Brian Selznick book recently, the yawning divide in quality is readily apparent. It makes me queasy even trying to place the two in the same category, but it has to be done no matter how disparate they are. Yet what nags me most about this book and in fact this whole series, or at least how much of it I've read while typing this, is that I have no idea when it takes place. It's almost Dickensian with lost inheritances, mistaken identities, evil twins, and ever so polite ghosts. Yet there is more modern technologies, like cars. So while I want to say Edwardian, it's actually more interwar, making me scratch my head. In the end I just have to throw up my hands and say that it lacks identity but at least it's not Shadowmancer.
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