The Book of Dead Days Pdf Summary Reviews By Marcus Sedgwick

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The Book of Dead Days Pdf Summary

THE DAYS BETWEEN Christmas and New Year’s Eve are dead days, when spirits roam and magic shifts restlessly just beneath the surface of our lives. A magician called Valerian must save his own life within those few days or pay the price for the pact he made with evil so many years ago. But alchemy and sorcery are no match against the demonic power pursuing him. Helping him is his servant, Boy, a child with no name and no past. The quick-witted orphan girl, Willow, is with them as they dig in death fields at midnight, and as they are swept into the sprawling blackness of a subterranean city on a journey from which there is no escape.

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The Book of Dead Days Review

Dan Thompson, Author

4.0 out of 5 stars The Book of Dead Days

Reviewed in the United States on May 29, 2015

The Book of Dead Days was the book that first introduced me to Marcus Sedgwick, and after rereading it, I find I loved it even more. I appreciated the narrative so much more – Boy’s lack of understanding of the world and his place in it. Boy is a courageous protagonist, and a lonely one too, and when he teams up with Willow – a fellow theatre performer – to save his Master from certain doom, you can’t help but get pulled along the gothic City and dark, eerie catacombs.

This a young adult novel on the cusp of technological discovery – where magic and trickery could indeed be magic and trickery. And when Valerian’s deal with the dark entity comes to life, you just know that Boy’s life is in peril. The Book of Dead Days has a nice pace to it, uncomplicated and enjoyable, without the need to be commercial.

N. S.

5.0 out of 5 stars Richie’s Picks: THE BOOK OF DEAD DAYS

Reviewed in the United States on October 12, 2004

“Offstage, Boy pushed the lid of the cabinet up with his head until there was enough space to lift it with his hands.

” ‘Out you come, then,’ said a stagehand. Boy took the man’s hand gratefully…”

THE BOOK OF DEAD DAYS has nothing whatsoever to do with Jerry Garcia. Nevertheless, you’ll find yourself tiptoeing amidst a rather healthy crop of skeletons if you dare to follow a pair of young orphans, and a magician on his last legs, as they race the clock through the dark recesses of a fantastical old European city in the final, frigid days of a year set on the verge of the modern scientific era.

“He climbed out and stood for a moment in the wings, rubbing his sore calves and watching as Valerian began his grand finale.

“The Fairyland Vanishing Illusion.

“Boy was not needed for this part of the act. He watched Valerian from the side of the stage.

“How many times has he done this? Boy wondered. He had forgotten how long he had been working for Valerian, but it was years. Boy could only guess at how many thousand times he had hidden in boxes, pulled levers, set off thunder flashes and opened trapdoors. He helped Valerian with trick after trick, week after week in the Great Theater, which was as much of a home as anywhere to Boy.”

The “dead days” of the title are those five or so days of the year that mess up what would otherwise be a neat and orderly calendar of twelve 30-day months. Both the ancient Egyptians and the Aztecs shoved those leftover days into an ominous no-man’s land at the end of their calendar year.

THE BOOK OF DEAD DAYS is a tense drama in which Valerian seeks to save himself in those last days before the tolling of the new year, by tracking down a powerful old book that is somewhere hidden away. In the process, we are led through the underseams of some of the most claustrophobic settings that I’ve encountered.

It was, in fact, from a rather small hiding place that the orphan, known only as Boy, had fallen many years earlier when he first came eye to eye with the magician:

“Small, cramped dark spaces had filled Boy’s life. Long ago, he had even been hiding in one the day he was found by Valerian in an old church, St. Colette’s. Boy had crammed his narrow frame into a space at the top of a pillar in the nave…

“Even then Valerian looked haggard and pale. His nose, long and fine, twitched in the dusty atmosphere of the old church. His skin was gray, so was his hair. He looked like a dead man walking. But his blue eyes were full of life, and his gaze roamed the dark spaces around him.

“Then Boy had heard his midnight rumble of a voice, so deep the stone he was clinging to shivered with it.

” ‘The doctor,’ intoned Valerian, ‘pronounced me either dangerously sick or dead.’

“It was while trying to understand the strangeness of those words that Boy lost his grip and plummeted to the flag floor of the church, where he lay looking up at Valerian, scratching his nose nervously, his short-cropped black hair sticking up at interesting angles the way it always did.

” ‘O-ho!’ Valerian had said. ‘What have we here?’ “

Now this unusual pair embark on a life-and-death search through, beneath, and around the outskirts of that City. Accompanied by Willow, an assertive young woman who falls in with them during these Dead Days, they are alternately aided and impeded by Kepler, a brilliant inventor who has been an acquaintance of Valerian’s since their years together at the Academy, The unceasing echo of the clock ticking dictates that false moves be avoided, and that the horrors encountered be taken in stride.

“He looked down at what lay within, and his jaw dropped. He had listened intently to what the old woman in the pillar had said about the Master of Burials and his animals, but nothing could have prepared him for what he saw now.”

THE BOOK OF DEAD DAYS will leave you bent over breathless and back aching as you try to adjust to the light in hopes of determining just where you are now. And once you catch your wind and your bearings, you’ll be wondering impatiently just how long the wait is before we get to return to the City in Book Two.

About Marcus Sedgwick Author Of The Book of Dead Days pdf Book

MARCUS SEDGWICK Author Of The Book of Dead Days pdf Book was born and raised in East Kent in the south-east of England. He now lives in the French Alps.

He is the winner of many prizes, most notably the 2014 Michael L. Printz Award for his novel Midwinterblood. Marcus has also received two Printz Honors, for Revolver in 2011 and The Ghosts of Heaven in 2016, giving him the most citations to date for America’s most prestigious book prize for writing for young adults. Other notable award winning books include Floodland, Marcus’ first novel, which won the Branford-Boase Award in 2001, a prize for the best debut novel for children published in the UK each year; My Swordhand is Singing, which won the Booktrust Teenage Prize for 2007, and Lunatics and Luck, part of The Raven Mysteries series, which won a Blue Peter Book Award in 2011.

His books have been shortlisted for over forty other awards, including the Carnegie Medal (seven times), the Edgar Allan Poe Award (twice) and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize (four times). He has been nominated for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award three times, in 2016, 2017 and 2018.

Marcus was Writer in Residence at Bath Spa University for three years, reviews for The Guardian newspaper and teaches creative writing at Arvon and Ty Newydd. He has judged numerous books awards, including the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and the Costa Book Awards. He has illustrated some of his books, and has provided wood-engravings for a couple of private press books.