D- It's a good book, but it hasn't really "stuck" with me, and although I have the sequel, I haven't read it yet. ( )

This is one of my favorites by Barker. The detailed worlds he created and the wonderfully illustrated pages which i flipped back to several times while reading just added to the overall fantasy feel. ( )

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! ( )

I love Clive Barker, he is an awesome author, dark, complex and subtle plots blending from extreme horror to fantasy with a dark touch. My favourite Barker trait is that no matter what supernatural or plain unnatural beings are involved it is the humans, or at the least the human aspects that contain the real good and evil .It's at the moments when his protagonists are most like us that we are most appalled and awed by them, and that's a real talent. The Abarat books are childrens/young adult books, the lead character is a young girl and she is drawn out of dull old Chickentown into a strange world with an island for each hour fo the day. Quite aside from the fact that i know drive my fiance mad with the "hamster tree" song every christmas, these books are witty, affectionate, entertaining and dark! I recommend the hardcovers, i wouldn't normally but Barker's art does add something to these books. Go, buy, read, enjoy! ( )

This is a novel of epic proportions, over 11 hours on mp3. The cast and lands of the Abarat are rich and fully developed, as is the prose of Clive Barker, full of vivid description and extensive vocabulary, as in this description of the Yebba Dim Day,

It was a city, a city built from the litter of the sea. The street beneath her feet was made from timbers that had clearly been in the water for a long time, and the walls were lined with barnacle-encrusted stone. There were three columns supporting the roof, made of coral fragments cemented together. They were buzzing hives of life unto themselves; their elaborately constructed walls pierced with dozens of windows, from which light poured.

There were three main streets that wound up and around these coral hives, and they were all lined with habitations and thronged with the Yebba Dim Day's citizens.

As far as Candy could see there were plenty of people who resembled folks she might have expected to see on the streets of Chickentown, give or take a sartorial detail: a hat, a coat, a wooden snout. But for every one person that looked perfectly human, there were two who looked perfectly other than human. The children of a thousand marriages between humankind and the great bestiary of the Abarat were abroad on the streets of the city.

Richard Ferrone’s voice on the audiobook version is as rich and varied as the world of the Abarat. A fantastic book! Highly recommended. Ages 12 and up. ( )

http://nhw.livejournal.com/1053965.ht...

A YA novel about a teenager from a boring American town who is sucked into a fantasy parallel world which she must save. I enjoyed a couple of Barker's fantasy novels for adults many years ago; wasn't really so grabbed by this one, kindly lent to me by mr_renaissance. The illustrations, which I guess are Barker's own from the lack of any separate credit, are a bit jarring as well. ( )

My relationship with Clive Barker's books tends to run hot and cold. I will either finish the book and it will automatically become one of my favourites or I will enjoy it at first but at some point over the course of my reading it becomes tedious and I have trouble finishing it. Well Abarat is a first for me I enjoyed it and I finished it but it's not one of my favourites.

Candy Quackenbush of Chickentown Minnesota is bored. She is sick living in an unhappy home, sick of the endless boring prairies and not to mention she HATES chickens. After a disagreement at school over an assignment about Chickentown (but not about chickens) Candy just gets up and walks out of class and out of Chickentown. Once outside the town Candy meets an interesting individual with eight heads (all named John) who gives her a key and charges her with keeping it safe from the creature who has been chasing him or them. Candy jumps at the chance to abandon her previous life and follows the Johns to the world of Abarat which is rapidly heading towards an apocalypse.

The world of Abarat is probably the reason this book didn't make it to favourite status. Abarat is absolutly nothing like the world we live in and trying to picture the creatures and lands of this world continously pulled me out of the story. I understand there is an illustrated version of this book and had I read one that I'm sure my final grade would have been different.

Candy is a thoroughly likable heroine and I'm looking forward to seeing her character grow over the course of the series. Although she is young and a bit niave she's also got some grit to her and takes everything that happens in stride. The secondary characters (or creatures) even the minor ones have all been very well fleshed out and have obviously come from a very fertile imagination.

The plot is quick paced and alot of fun but like I said previously I probably would have enjoyed it more and been more "into" the story had I read the version with the illustrations.

All in all I did enjoy the story and will definitly look for the second installment the next time I'm in the book store.

If this is your first time trying Clive Barker I would recommend reading the Thief of Always first it is a stand alone young adult fantasy and in my opinion is far more engrossing story. ( )

This is the first Clive Barker I've read (I'm just too much of a wimp to be a proper horror reader), and the available Abarat sequels have gone straight onto my want list. Yes, the conclusion of book one is blatant cliffhanger-for-sequel, but when the world explored is as lavish as this one, who cares? You're happy to get more.

Candy is an appealing heroine, sensible and resourceful, while still naive and full of wonder and prone to mistakes. Barker describes her allies and enemies with equal sympathy - while we know our villains must be stopped, we know they have their own cares and frustrations.

Barker's lavish paintings are an added bonus, aiding our visualisation of this fantastic world while still leaving some things to the imagination. Glyphs, for example - flying machines made of pure magic - are as yet tantalisingly unillustrated... ( )

Let me just first say that the illustrations in this book are nothing short of amazing. But, Barker has always been one of my favorite artists, so that didn’t exactly come as a surprise. I get a feeling, though, that the paintings preceded the story, which is an interesting artistic choice in that the text almost comes to illustrate the images, but which makes the text a little lacking in that the story gets “forced” into fitting the images. I love Barker’s worlds - I have since the first time I picked up Books of Blood - and the characters are as imaginative as ever. The one thing I find a little hard to like is that the storyline is so meandering that you easily lose your place in the (sometimes clumsy) transitions and forget what each character’s goal is – and there are a lot of characters to keep track of! My main enjoyment out of the book was to see each new character’s description and the accompanying painting, but the main story didn’t captivate me enormously. It is a YA novel, though, and a YA reader may be a little more forgiving.

http://boklista.livejournal.com/48103... ( )

Andy Quackenbush isn't having a great day, or a great year for that matter. Life takes an interesting turn when her teacher assigns her the tasks of discovering interesting facts about her hometown, Chickentown. Andy learns of a mysterious suicide, but her teacher reprimands her for reporting this. Andy stomps out of class to the edge of town. There she meets John Mischief and his brothers (whose heads are perched on the antlers growing from John's head). Andy helps and John and his follows him to the unusual world of Abarat, where her adventure begins.

Other books to try: Golden Compass, Sabriel, Stravaganza, The Ropemaker, The Wind Singer, Water Series, Wizards of the Game

Site for the series: www.thebooksofarabat.com ( )

http://bookchronicle.wordpress.com/20... ( )

The Abarat is an odd sort of world, a world where anything and everything is possible. Candy Quackenbush, the main character, ends up in the Abarat, seemingly by accident. The book covers her adventures through the world. The paintings distribuited throughout the text are wonderful and add tremendously to the quality of the book. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that this is one of the best books i've read all year. ( )

Please keep in mind that this is an adult rating of a children's book. Children have their own compass when it comes to what they do and do not enjoy. My 12-year-old daughter finished this one, but she didn't ask for the second in the series. ( )

In Abarat, accomplished novelist and artist Clive Barker turns his considerable talents to creating a rich fantasy world for young adults.

The novel begins with a rather cryptic scene of three women on a "perilous voyage... [emerging] from the shelter of the islands." The action then shifts to Candy Quackenbush of Chickentown, Minn., who hates her life as the daughter of an alcoholic father and a depressed mother. One day, humiliated by her teacher, Candy skips out of school and heads for the prairie, where she stumbles on a derelict lighthouse and a creature with eight heads, John Mischief. The opening scene and the thrust of the novel gradually connect, as Candy begins an adventure to a mysterious archipelago called Abarat. Skilled at fantasy, Barker throws plenty of thrills and chills at readers. Candy becomes a pawn between Mischief and the man (Christopher Carrion, "Lord of Midnight") from whom Mischief has stolen something of great value. However, by the middle of the novel, readers may feel that Barker pulls out too many stops; he floods the pages with scores of intriguing characters and a surfeit of subplots (some of which dead-end, perhaps to be picked up in one of the three planned sequels). The author's imagination runs wild as he conjures some striking imagery ("Dark threads of energy moved through her veins and leaped from her fingertips" says one of the three women in the opening scene) and cooks up a surreal stew of character portraits (rendered in bold colors and brushwork, they resemble some of Van Gogh's later work). But much of the novel feels like a wind-up for the books to follow and, after this rather unwieldy 400-page ride, readers may be disappointed by so many unresolved strands of the plot. ( )

http://bookdweeb.wordpress.com/2007/0... ( )

A seemingly ordinary girl gets whisked into an alternate world full of bizarre creatures, which is under attack by the forces of evil, and discovers she's a "chosen one" that must help save the world. ( )

This is one of those rare post-Harry Potter fantasy books that can stand on its own; it's a great read!
Abarat has a great combination of real life emotions and unique quirks in all of the characters. Candy Quackenbush, the heroine, is completely believable and her adventures through the land of Abarat just drew me in.
Clive Barker has created such an amazing magical world: the realms of Abarat, a collection of islands. Each island has its own personality-- and time of the day-- which makes the land truly original.
Recommendation: This book is a thrilling read for any fantasy-lover, and the wonderful illustrations make the book a good family-read-aloud book. Enjoy Abarat! ( )

Definitely a young adult book but I was able to still enjoy it. The destiny of Candy is sure to unfold thruought this proposed series. I enjoy when things are much more than what they originally appear.

The illustrations were actually good enough that I felt they enhanced the story. ( )

Teen Pick: The creator of “Hellraiser” has put together one of the most unforgettable series ever. When Candy, a young girl, stumbles across a strange man her entire world is flipped upside down. A wave carries Candy into the world of Abarat, where everything is strange, no one is normal and, unfortunately for Candy, everywhere you look is trouble. Stick by Candy’s side as you slip through close calls and visualize things you would normally never imagine!

Reviewed by: Jacquie

I liked this book, I liked Candy and the John Brothers and Christopher Carrion. I liked the illustrations and the idea that a sea could appear in the middle of Minnisota when called for properly. But that's about all I can say for it, I liked it, it's a likable book. I'll read the rest of the series as it comes to find out what happens but I might not reread. ( )

I started this book with mixed feelings. The cover and the illustrations inside didn't agree with me. The first chapter of the book was situated in the fantasy world of Abarat and serves as a teaser. What follows is the first part of the book. Here we return to Earth and meet Candy Quackenbusch, a young girl living in Chickentown, Minnesota.

Now I have to admit I stopped reading after the first two chapters. This doesn't happen often, but the style and the creatures that start to appear about then didn't do it for me. It is supposed to be a good book, but it isn't my taste. Try it for yourself and make your own judgement. ( )