Is Underground

I love the Edward Gorey cover. Aiken and Gorey go together perfectly well. Aiken and Gorey sounds like the name of some sort of weird and gothic medical drama, sort of like House, if House investigated talking warts and haemogoblins and phantom limbs where you have an extra pair of hands doing unimaginable things you can feel but not see.

Is, half-sister of Dido, embarks on an adventure all her own, a particularly dark one as the children of London have been lured to the new kingdom set up in the north of England where they are enslaved and forced to work in mines and foundries, dying, as the book makes clear, at an appalling rate. True to form, the arch-villain turns out to be another Twite, Is' uncle, Roy, who has set himself up as show more king of an industrial underground nation, busily building up his army so he he can march south and gain more.

A lot of this seems oddly archaic nowadays. The heroine is small of stature, barely educated, but smart, indomitable and fundamentally decent - so she doesn't go around kung fu-ing bad guys and dispensing rough justice. There are also quite a few coincidences in the book forwarding the plot, which wouldn't be tolerated in a modern, tightly plotted, everything-must-have-a-reason novel. Aiken is less concerned in the versimilitude of her plot mechanics than in just getting on with the story, and who is to say she's wrong? I noted the coincidences and then moved on because I cared more about the story than the plot, too.

I really enjoyed Is, and I know there's another Is book before getting back to Dido and Simon, and I'm very much looking forward to it.

Aiken and Gorey. For when your medical problems got problems. Peculiar problems. show less

This eighth entry in Aiken's Wolves Chronicles (excluding Midnight is a Place), is the first of two adventures featuring Dido Twite's younger half-sister, Is. When long-lost cousin Arun goes missing, Is's quest to find him leads her to the northlands, to the breakaway kingdom of Humberland, and the oddly child-free city of Holdernesse (the renamed Blastburn, of earlier titles). Here Is discovers another set of long-lost relatives, and with the help of her newfound psychic abilities, sets out to free the enslaved children who labor away in the nearby mines.

Aiken's concern for the child, always vulnerable in an adult world, runs like a thread throughout much of her work, and is readily apparent here. So too is her preoccupation with the show more notion of a balkanized Britain, something that can also be seen in another of her titles, The Cockatrice Boys. But despite the many clever and original plot developments, despite the intricate ways in which Aiken ties this to her larger body of work, and to the entire Wolves Chronicles, I found Is Underground and its sequel, Cold Shoulder Road, somehow unsatisfying.

This is owing, I'm afraid, to the heroine, who simply cannot fill her sister's shoes. Is Twite would be an engaging heroine, if the reader weren't already acquainted with the incomparable Dido, of whom Is seems like an agreeable, but not entirely convincing copy. She almost satisfies... but not quite. Her depiction seems an odd choice in an author known for her seemingly inexhaustible supply of original characters and plot developments. show less

I liked Is Twite just as much as Dido - at times I forgot she wasn't Dido - but some aspects of this story I didn't like as much as I've liked earlier entries in this series. One being that the villain was referred to as 'Gold Kingy,' another being that I didn't find the eventual victory over said Kingy particularly satisfying.

All the same I have greatly enjoyed this series on the whole.

A familiar read - I've read it at least a couple times before. A very nasty (and stupid) situation - Gold Kingy really hasn't thought this through, about how the 'douls' are going to grow up and make the next generation of citizens. Well, he hasn't thought much through, has he? Idiot. Is is elegantly sneaky, and I love Bobbert, including the revelations concerning him. However, the whole thing with the thought messages seems to be a bit of a copout, or deus ex machina - fantasy not for its own sake but in order to make a difficult-to-impossible problem way too simple to solve. Dunno. For all the grim setting and death and destruction, this book reads rather more YA than many in the series - like a fairy tale.

No one knows why, so Is Twite, younger sister of Dido Twite (from Dido and Pa and Nightbirds on Nantucket), sets out to discover the whereabouts of Arun, her cousin, and Davie, the king's only son -- both missing.
Is soon finds herself aboard a secret midnight train heading north to Playland, a place of fun and frolic and dancing every night, or so they say....
Instead of fun, Is is heading straight into horrible, horrible danger...and exciting, terrifying adventure!

Is, Dido Twite's sister, is shown to be just as resourceful as her older sibling in this alternate history tale of Dickensian England. As with the other novels in the James III sequence (actually a misnomer as the last few books deal with his son and heir Richard IV) there are intended and unintended deaths (many by drowning), child servitude, volcanic activity as a plot mechanism (as in The Stolen Lake and Limbo Lodge) and a dastardly villain who meets a fitting but unpleasant end. There are poetic passages and a cathartic ending in a tightly plotted narrative, and of course a happy ending of sorts. Dense detailing can be both a weakness and a strength but here it was a happy trigger to my seeking out all the other titles in the sequence.

Somehow this just didn't do it for me. I still recommend it though. I think it's better for fans of adventures, those who like fast-paced quests kinds of things. I like character development, humor, and heart.