Talents. That’s what Dr. Berghast called them. She had seen disturbing things, biblical things: flesh rippling like water, altering the face of a child into another’s; a little boy, laying hands on a corpse and raising it, boneless, into a hulking flesh giant. Two years ago she had listened as a girl of twelve — a bone witch as Dr. Berghast had described her in a letter — whistled a skeleton up out of its coffin and into a clattering dance. The stuff of nightmares. Margaret Harrogate had no such talents herself, thank the good Lord. Nor had her husband any, when he was alive. And the truth of it was, she wasn’t even sure now whether she thought what the children could do was natural or unnatural, a right thing or a wrong one.
I have to admit I’m a bit disappointed with this. When I learned that an author I admire was releasing his first Fantasy novel under the pseudonym J. M. Miro, I was excited because even if I’m not a regular reader of Fantasy, excellent writing typically transcends genres. But Ordinary Monsters didn’t quite do it for me. Miro nails the historical elements (as he has in other novels), creates well-rounded and relatable characters (in particular, the women), and sets up an intriguing and dramatic premise, but I found the details to be a bit cinematically cliché, as though the most breathtaking scenes (a fight on a moving train that carries up to the carriage rooftops, being stalked through the gaslit fog of nighttime Victorian Whitechapel, a Nosferatu-like zombie that can spider along the ceiling towards you) were all sequences that I had seen in movies before. Having said that, however, I was never bored by this book (despite its nearly 700 pages), will probably continue with the series, and think it would make a popular movie franchise (wishing the author much success with this series, because literary fiction probably doesn’t pay the bills.) [Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.]
One April afternoon in Chicago when she was six she had been caught in a thunderstorm and she had felt something like it then, the electricity helixing all around her. Her mother had run out to her that day and bundled her inside with her swollen knuckles and had toweled her dry while the wood in their basement room hissed in the stove and lightning flashed in sheets over the lake. A scent of burning cedar. Rose-hip tea from Boston in chipped mugs. The oil and grease smell of her mother’s skin, which Alice had not smelled in a quarter century. That. She was crying. She stood in the darkness of that tent and wiped at her eyes with the inside of her wrists. She saw in the blue glow the faces of the men gathered there were also wet with tears and she raised her eyes. The shining boy grew brighter. And then brighter still.
Basically: Sometimes children around the world are born with “talents”, and for their training and protection, agents are sent to collect them and bring them to a mouldering boarding school in northern Scotland, the Cairndale Institute. Ordinary Monsters opens with the collection of two such children — Charlie (a sixteen-year-old Black orphan being held in a Mississippi jail) and Marlowe (an eight-year-old British foundling who was spirited away to a travelling circus in America) — and as the detectives (a ginger-whiskered British man, Coulton, and a weathered American woman, Alice) evade the characters and forces that might try to prevent their success, the reader is brought up to speed with this world and its dangers. I haven’t seen/read X-Men or The Umbrella Academy (both of which I’ve noted other reviewers are comparing this to), but Marlowe is reminiscent of the Boy Who Lived and Cairndale isn’t unlike Hogwarts. What’s unique to this story is the isolation that these children experience — every child who is brought to Cairndale is an orphan, overcoming a lifetime of fear and revulsion for their inexplicable “monstrous” talents — and the heartache, trauma, and gruesome fight scenes elevate this beyond children’s fiction. This becomes a story of finding family and purpose, but as so much is presented in shades of grey, it’s hard for the reader, let alone these children, to see who’s really good and who is an agent of evil. And again, I appreciate the rounded female characters that Miro has created: Brynt, the tattooed guardian; Alice, the grizzled detective; Mrs Harrogate, the widowed middleman between Cairndale and the outer world; Miss Davenshaw, the blindfolded teacher who “sees” more than most — any of them would risk their lives for the children, and I believed and appreciated it. The plot reaches a completely satisfying conclusion, while setting up the rest of the series.
“Thing is", he murmured, “you waste all this time dreaming of where you came from, cause you know no one comes from nothing. And you tell yourself, if you only knew, then maybe you could see a reason for how you got to be the way you are. Why your life looks like it does. But there isn’t any reason, not really.” He worried the ring at his knuckle, feeling the bite of it.
Despite the similarities to other magical-children-at-boarding-school-tasked-with-saving-the-world type novels, you never forget that these are children being put at risk — and especially Marlowe, the shining boy who everyone wants to save — and that creates a satisfying emotional connection: not like I identified with the children but, as was the case for the strong female adult characters, something maternal and protective was drawn out of me by these “ordinary monsters”, and that’s a satisfying sensation. Three stars isn’t meant to suggest that I didn’t like this novel, I just honestly didn’t love it (and as I gave two stars to the phenomenally successful The Name of the Wind, my enjoyment level may not be typical). And once again: wishing much success to the author.
