This is one of the few fantasy books I've ever made it all the way through and very possibly the only one that ever made me want to buy sequels. I'm not entirely sure I agree that it's an "all ages" read. Maybe high all ages. It does have a socially permissive slant, but then, if you didn't know that by the author's name on the cover, you probably missed the eighties. ( )

Would make a good read-a-like for Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials. They are both quests of young girls who meet strange creatures. They both seem to have deep symbolism and commentary underneath the obvious story. However, the tone of the evil in this one is more gruesome. The creatures more nightmarish amalgamations. Barker's imagination is also more bizarre, weird, and twisted. However, the more gruesome the appearance, the purer the heart -- so far.

It doesn't feel like horror to me, nor like the intent was to frighten the reader the entire time. The fright is more like suspense in short bursts. ( )

Susan says:This book was not even close to one of my favcrites, although at least it read faster than the first one did. In this book Candy Quackenbush is traveling throughout the islands of the Abarat, trying to escape Christopher Carrion and the people he sends to catch her. There are many fantastic characters and settings in this book, but at 500 + pages, it is too long and too expansive. There are too many people to keep track of, and unfortunately you can see the plot points coming from a mile away, and there are not enough of those either. This book feels like it has been regurgitated out of Clive Barker’s dreams, and it should have been pared way down, or at least put into some appendixes to the main plot. I’m looking forward to moving on to something else!

This is my second time reading Abarat, and I think I felt the same about it the first time I read it – not that impressed. This is not my style of fantasy at all – Abarat is a series of islands far removed from our world. Candy Quackenbush is transported from Minnesota to Abarat through a chance encounter and a magical sea. What she finds there seems to be the regurgitation of everything in Clive Barker’s imagination – there are so many detailed descriptions of unusual characters that you really can’t keep track of who everyone and everything is. However, we are reading the second book in the series next week, so I felt like I needed to reread this. I am glad I did because I am not sure I would have remembered what I needed to for the second book, but on the other hand, it took me forever to read. It is a long book, and the descriptions of Abarat seem to take forever. I hope the next book will build on this and not expand on it. ( )

Summary: Candy Quackenbush is a fairly normal, if unhappy, teenager who feels trapped in her life in the stiflingly boring Chickentown, Minnesota. One day, after a fight with her teacher, she follows a strange impulse and takes out walking into the grasslands outside of town. When she gets near a ruined (and landlocked) lighthouse, she meets John Mischief and his seven brothers (who are heads sprouting out of his antlers, and are all named John). He convinces her to climb the lighthouse, and so call back the sea - and also to take the mystical Key, an object of great power that is being sought by the evil Christopher Carrion, into her protection. Together, Candy and Mischief are swept away by the sea, towards the islands of the Abarat - a fantastic place that seems as though it may have sprung from Candy's dreams, where peril lurks around every corner. However, despite the strange lands she encounters and the even stranger people she meets, she feels strangely at home...

Review: Reading this book felt a lot like slipping into a dream. Of course, that's got both good and bad connotations. Abarat is undeniably fantastically imagined, incredibly creative, and surreally vivid. The lavish painted illustrations on nearly every other page help create the dream-like atmosphere. They're gorgeously done, and really add to the reading experience, but man alive, the inside of Clive Barker's head must be a strange, strange place.

Unfortunately, the dream-like quality of this book also extends to the plot and the pacing. One scene doesn't always connect to the next, and more effort is spent introducing characters and exploring the fantastic world in which they move than in actually telling a story. The end of this book doesn't actually wrap anything up and so seems like a somewhat arbitrary break - it could have ended a few chapters earlier or a few chapters later, and regardless, you'd still have to read the sequel to get the whole story. That's not particularly satisfying, especially given that the fractured dream-logic feel of the rest of the book kept me from getting particularly involved in the story or the characters.

Overall, it's a lot of very pretty, very imaginative, very well-written wrapping surrounding a pretty minimal plot. It was pretty enjoyable as escapist reads go, and it's definitely worth flipping through if just for the illustrations, but I came out of it wanting a little more cohesiveness to the story; if all I was after was a bunch of bizarre jumbly dream sequences, I'd have taken some Nyquil and had a nap. 3.5 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: I can see it appealing to younger readers (younger than me, I mean - maybe mid-teens?) who like the creepy and the bizarre. For the rest of us, it's worth reading for the times when you need a little bit of dark escapism, as long as you're okay with a setting-driven book that's somewhat light on plot. ( )

I was a little thrown off by this book when I saw the cover. My mum bought it for me and I just kept it in a basket because I had no interest in it. Then I had read all my books in my room, except this one, and decided to read it. I saw the cover and thought it was interesting. Now, I love it and when I finished it, the secound book was about to come out, so of course I was over ecstatic! Definitly interesting. I love how Abarat upside down spells Abarat and how the oil paintings were made before the book! ( )