Pastworld

By Ian Beck

What if Victorian London were an amusement park where the inhabitants were actors hired to entertain visitors from the twenty-first century? Now imagine if Jack the Ripper was a planned attraction gone horribly wrong. Life inside the park, Pastworld, is all Eve has ever known. But then she meets a tourist in terrible trouble. Their adventure through this dark and dangerous theme park is sure to grab teens.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Nov 9, 2010
• ISBN: 9781599906973

Ian Beck

Ian Beck is well known as an illustrator as well as more recently a writer of young fiction with the publication of the very succesful Tom Trueheart titles by OUP. This is his first foray in to the world of teen fiction. Ian lives in West London. He began his career as an illustrator working on album covers including the still in-print classic cover for Elton John's album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.

Book preview

2050

.

chapter1

It was the cold hour before dawn. The streets of Pastworld City were laid out below the Buckland Corporation passenger airship like a map. At first little, if any, detail was visible through the early morning gloom and fog. There were just the regimented lines of grey slate roofs, with their yellow London brick stacks, and smoke curling up from artfully distressed terracotta chimneypots. Flocks of mech pigeons were tucked in neat, dormant rows under the eaves of buildings. Few sounds were to be heard at that early hour, only the drone of the airship’s engines and the mournful moans of the foghorns, which seemed almost to be searching for one another, somewhere along the silvered and twisted ribbon of river. Further away in the distance, from the deep, slumbering darkness at the centre of the city, could be heard the faint tolling of a single church bell.

There was little human movement.

Much nearer to the centre of the city, at the very hub of things, an eagle-eyed passenger would have spied a lone and sinister figure moving fast through the twisted streets and alleyways. He was the virus of the place, infecting the veins and arteries of the city. The shape and detail of his figure were hidden by the flapping of his long black cloak and his tall black evening hat. Every so often he turned and looked behind him, and the street lights caught in dazzle on his eyeglasses, which contained nothing but plain glass, for his vision was more than perfect. The lower part of his face was hidden behind a layer of dark silk, a scarf perhaps or a foulard, intended as a mask. He carried something bulky across his shoulders, well hidden beneath the folds of his cloak.

Ahead of him another figure, a piece of city shadow, suddenly detached itself from the shelter of one of the stone doorways and darted out on to the cobbles before him, blocking his way. The masked man quickly registered the outline of a youth: a pair of long skinny legs in shabby trousers, and a pair of worn boots; in fact the typical legs of a street urchin, a dip or a pickpocket. The boy’s skin, in the almost-dawn light, was as grey as the surrounding stone, his face as sharply sculpted. He was a simple, cheerful-looking ruffian of about seventeen. He wore a butcher-boy cap pulled down tight on his head. Its peak, which was broken down and worn by use, cast a deep shadow over the boy’s face.

‘Spare us a copper then, mi—’ the boy started to say in a cheerily casual sort of way, but then he sputtered into silence when he saw the figure who stood in front of him.

‘Nothing with me, I’m sorry,’ said the cloaked man, hesitating, and with a hint of the mechanical response in his voice. There was something about the boy, something familiar. He riffled through his mind, and a flurry of boys like this one, so many boys, flickered through his head, but there was none that matched him, just an inexplicable image of an old black book. He dismissed it, shook his head and moved on swiftly.

The boy stood stock-still, frozen to the spot. He waited a moment and then he let out a sudden cloud of breath in relief. He watched the cloaked figure melt away into the fog. The boy shook himself and briefly laughed out loud. He must be slipping, the boy thought. He saw me close to and didn’t realise who I was.

A Buckland Corp. passenger airship, the first of the morning, passed low overhead, its gondola lights briefly rippling across the street. The boy watched the ship pass right over him on its way to the Arrival Dock. Then he set off, his boots clattering across the cobbles. The metal heel tips scraped and rang, and he ran away as fast as he could.

While he ran the contours of the fog shifted and swirled around him. To Japhet McCreddie, known to all as ‘Bible J’, the fog was a living thing. The fog was his friend; he thought of it as his ‘familiar’. It was a faithful beast, which prowled back and forth with him all day, followed him on his various quests around the city, shielding him, and all the other thieves (and worse) who thrived together in the shadows of Pastworld. It loomed all over the centre of the city, only too happy to swallow everything up, to make and keep secrets, and to smother the truth.

Not a hundred yards ahead of him was the exact place where the denser fog started, pumped up unbeknown to him through grilles from a system of pipes and ducts somewhere below the pavement. It hovered in a single, mechanical and severely straight line, right after the bridge. It nudged against the railings and the iron lamp posts with its beast back. In the fog there seemed to be no backwards, no place where he had come from, and no forwards, no visible place where he was going to, and that always suited Bible J’s purpose. For the moment, time and place were suspended; he was just a very lucky boy hidden in the fog.

The cloaked figure hurried on. The streets widened and the bright pools of light from the gas lamps became more frequent. By his movements, by the sudden lurches and flits of his figure, he appeared both young and vigorous. The bulky thing that he carried across his shoulders did not seem to slow him down at all. He made his way up a rising street towards some temporary hoardings that surrounded a towering building.

He had just left a butchered and dismembered body, minus the head, in plain view. Its various parts were spread out wide in the shape of Vitruvian man down in the area of the city known as Shoreditch. It was a reminder to all of his followers, and to anyone else, of his ruthlessness at dealing with attempted betrayals. It was also part of another message, an elaborate signal of his return from the dark, from the wilderness, a sharp return to business as usual that he would soon confirm to the Inspector, and to all the other fools who were after him.

The cloaked figure stopped in front of a plain wooden door set into the hoardings.

was printed in thick black lettering inches high on hundreds of identical posters pasted in rows all over the temporary walls. The entrance was lit from above by a single lantern. He looked around, waited for a beat, then furtively prised open the door. Once inside he shut the door, and set off in the darkness across the wasteland and then into the building itself.

He ran up a wide stone staircase. The stairs, once brightly lit, were in almost complete darkness, but did not slow him down. His cloak billowed and rustled as he climbed. The whispers of sound were reflected back from the surfaces around him, from the marble-clad walls and the metal banisters. He crossed a landing and climbed higher. Here there were service stairs, wooden and bare. He did not need to stop to catch his breath. He climbed another staircase and then another, and on, higher and higher.

Finally he reached a narrow hallway. There he stopped and pulled an iron carbide official police issue lamp out from under his cloak. He shone the light around the walls and across the ceiling above him. Its beam bounced back on to his white shirt front, which was splashed over with red.

There was all the evidence around him of preparations for the coming demolition. The hallway floor was covered in fragments of fallen ceiling and lengths of aluminium ducting for the coils of now mostly dead and useless cable. This was the last of the old twentieth-century ‘new builds’ and now the tallest building in the city, its once proud modernity was reduced to scattered lumps of decaying plaster.

This was where he thrived best: in a lost or secret place. Either somewhere very high or somewhere deep underground. In the murk and dark, in the chaos of half completion, of hasty closures, of sudden blocked-off passageways, dank tunnels and dangerously high roofs.

Dust motes floated in the lamp beam. He disturbed some nesting pigeons; they were real pigeons too, not Buckland mech birds. They flew up and hit the ceiling in their panic. The confusion of their wings caused fresh falls of plaster dust. A large, sleek brown rat scuttled across the floor. It stopped in front of him, as if barring the way. It lifted its head, its eyes seeming to glow red, and opened its mouth to reveal two rows of even, sharp teeth set in a fixed grimace. Then the rat said menacingly, ‘No entry. Restricted area. Restricted area.’

.

chapter2

FROM EVE’S JOURNAL*

.

I am Eve. I have no mother that I remember and no real father either, unless you count Jack. My memories of being little, or of being a child at all are few if any. At present I am five feet and seven inches tall and as far as I know I am seventeen years old.

I will try to write down all of the things of interest that happen, as slowly and as carefully as I can. I feel I must record my story. Others perhaps will read it. I cannot know of course who they will be.

It is early morning and the sky is filled with tumbling, ragged white clouds. I watch the clouds chase and rush after one another, and as I watch them I am almost bursting with love for all of Nature’s creation. I cannot bear to think that the day will come when I will see all of this no more.

From the earliest days that I can remember Jack has always been there. I suppose I assumed he was my father, but of course I found out that he wasn’t. He said he was my guardian, that I am an orphan. Imagine a shabby, rounded man, with thick glasses. Jack has terrible eyesight and is nearly blind, and he is so tender to me. Sometimes he is like a grumpy old toy bear that growls when you turn it over.

He is always fearful of the big city outside our windows. I have only the haziest memory of going anywhere else at all, although recently I have experienced what appears to be a returning memory or sensation. It is the smell of a particular kind of smoke and of myself jumping over some sparks and flames. Odd but it seems very real to me. Despite everything, despite the blank slate of my past, I somehow manage to understand almost the whole world around me. Perhaps it is just that Jack told me so many things, taught me so well in his way, because I often feel as if those spoken memories, those shared conversations, make up my entire childhood.

I seem to have just woken up a couple of years ago as a fully grown fifteen-year-old.

I remember one particular day very clearly. I stood at our attic window and noticed everything around me as if my eyes had just opened for the first time. I remember I watched a great passenger airship as it sailed past, and Jack said to me, ‘Here they come. Do you see?’ and he pointed at the shape as it crossed the grey sky. I nodded and repeated, ‘Here they come.’ Why that is so clearly imprinted I have no idea, unless it was because that day there was another man in the room, and as a rule we never have any visitors at all.

I remember that our visitor, a well-dressed man (‘our smart visitor’ I called him) took me by the shoulders, turned me away from the window and looked into my face, then he said, ‘My, those eyes, Jack. She’ll break hearts with those,’ and Jack agreed and sighed.

.

I pass my days and nights calm and steady and quiet in our attic rooms. I do think it strange that I am never ever allowed to go out on my own. I am only ever allowed out with poor, fearful Jack.

‘This is a big and dangerous city,’ Jack says.

‘Dangerous even for me?’ I asked once.

‘Yes, dangerous for a girl like you – double dangerous,’ he replied, scrunching up his face with anguish. ‘You have no idea,’ he added, ‘there are people out there who would mean a girl like you nothing but harm.’

I accepted his explanation, but inside I feel a strange confidence that I will be safe, invincible, if ever I do go out on my own. And oh, I want to do so very badly.

Jack keeps me close to him always. As time passes, measured by the ticking of our mantel clock, he seems to become more and more scared for me. On the rare occasions when we go out it is always now in the evening.

I am sure that the two of us are barely visible to passers-by on the dark, crowded streets. We walk together in the fogs that seem to arrive exactly on cue. Jack’s eyesight is getting so bad that I have always to lead him by the arm. A strange couple we must seem to anyone who cares to notice us. The halting, rounded Jack, and myself tall – ‘willowy’, Jack says.

I am always eager to explore everything. I am tempted to be wild: I am fidgety, and constantly dream of running away, slipping the leash in the fog, and escaping. I want just to run, skip and jump.

On our walks Jack looks around us. Peers as best he can into the cold gloom, ever fearful, ever worried, and never relaxed. Sometimes he stops and talks to an acquaintance; there is a woman we sometimes see who must live in the maze of streets somewhere near to us. I call her the lady with the cat.

‘Chilly this evening, Jack.’

‘Yes, indeed it is, my dear.’

‘Out with your girl, then?’

‘Yes, she’s very kindly walking with me, poor old dog that I am.’

‘You’re an old dog, Jack, and I walk a cat. Not very well matched, are we?’

Jack chuckles nervously at comments like that, but I can tell he just wants to tuck his head down into his collar and keep walking.

.

Later

Everything has changed. I will explain as best I can.

Jack went out early alone and he came back trembling and agitated and preoccupied. He sat me down, and squinted at me as best he could through his thick glasses.

‘I have to tell you something, Eve,’ he said, in an unsteady voice. ‘You may often have wondered why I look after you so carefully. The truth is that someone is after us. They have been for a long while now. I have deliberately kept this from you, Eve, just for your own protection. I have always been so very, very careful for you, but anyhow this bad, bad person has got a sniff of you, and as soon as it can be arranged we will have to move somewhere else. Somewhere far from here.’

He stood and paced up and down in a twitching panic. I could make no sense of it at all. Here was my mystery.

‘How would such a dangerous person know anything about us?’ I said.

‘He knows,’ Jack said nodding. ‘As I said, he’s got a sniff of you.’

Something alerted me in those repeated words: ‘a sniff of you’. That surely means it is not ‘us’ at all but just me alone, myself – someone is especially after me. It was suddenly clear to me.

I am a deep secret.

I am a hidden person.

I am to be kept safe for ever. I was a fairy-tale princess, like Rapunzel, locked away from the world in her high tower.

Except of course that when I caught a glimpse of myself in the overmantel glass, I saw that I am not a fairy-tale princess at all. I have no cascades of golden hair to spill out of our window all the way down into the cold street below. No, I am just myself. It was just me I saw looking back. Me, all drab in my plain cinnamon-coloured day dress, standing in our shabby attic rooms, with poor half-blind Jack to protect me.

‘Why,’ I said, ‘would anybody even know about me, let alone wish me any harm?’

Jack shook his head. ‘There are some things you are not ready to know yet.’

.

A few days have passed and the mysterious friend of Jack’s, the smart visitor, has been to see Jack once again. This time they sat together talking urgently while I stayed very quiet and made, at his request, a nice pot of Assam tea. I watched them but I said nothing. They spoke in careful, low voices, and the smart visitor was clearly as agitated as Jack. It was then that I found out something strange and new about myself. If I watched their mouths very closely as they spoke, I could read their lips. I could make out and read the words as if they were unrolling inside my own head on a printed page.

JACK: ‘I’m that attached now, I couldn’t do it, and I can’t go back, surely you can understand? You’ve got a child yourself.’

THE SMART VISITOR: ‘I do understand, of course I do, but you can’t compare the two. It’s either that or one day he’ll come for her and you will be in the way, and that will be the end of you.’

After an awkward taking of tea during which our visitor simply stared at me and shook his head, he finally made to leave. He shrugged himself into his overcoat and they spoke again hurriedly in the little vestibule that led to the staircase but now their backs were turned and I could make out nothing more of what they said.

I said nothing to Jack about my sudden ability to read lips.

When the visitor had gone and Jack turned his face back to me he looked collapsed, vanquished, twisted in grief at whatever the smart visitor’s news had been.

I went to the window and looked down on the busy street below. I watched all the bustling people going to and fro. When I finally turned away from the window and looked at Jack, he was sitting with his back to me, slumped and cowed in our dingy room. Jack turned awkwardly in his chair, squinting at me against the bright light from the window.

‘Sorry, Eve,’ he said.

‘Why should you be sorry?’ I replied.

‘Can’t explain,’ he said quietly.

In the evening we had a cold supper of sliced mutton, pickles and bread. We ate in silence. Our cutlery clattered on the plates. Jack breathed heavily not looking at me.

Since that day Jack has remained in a watchful and preoccupied state.

.

‘He’ll come for her,’ the smart visitor said, ‘and you will be in the way.’ Who is going to come for me? I wish it could be my rescuer. At last my own gallant knight on a white charger will come. But it seems more likely from the fear on Jack’s face that he will be our nemesis. An evil enchanter, another kind of pale rider altogether, who will destroy poor Jack and take me away with him. These thoughts leave me both excited and fearful. They have also concentrated my mind and I now know just what I must to do. I have to save myself and poor Jack from such a fate at all costs.

Jack spends his days now poring over the daily newspaper and the weekly magazines. He holds his reading glass in his trembling hand over the pages, as close to the light as he can get, very obviously looking for something. He won’t explain to me what or why. He mutters as he reads, ‘Phantom, all over the phantom,’ and ‘Damn my failing eyes.’

I am resolved. Tomorrow I will simply go. I will vanish, run away and take my chances. I will at least spare Jack the fear, the danger of discovery and destruction. I will rescue myself from my high tower and spare Jack any more responsibility.

It is something I have never ever done before; I will go out and away, alone.

.

I have achieved it, so much has happened. I must write it all down very carefully.

The very next morning after I determined to run away, I looked out across the rooftops and I saw that snow had fallen in the night. It was soft and thick and spread evenly like a dimpled sheet across the roof tiles. I opened the attic window a little and breathed in the frosted air, and I looked forward in excitement to running away, out into that bright white morning.

I had planned carefully what to take. I would need to wrap up warmly, so I took my winter coat from its wooden hanger and untied the camphor bag that protectedit from moths. I packed a small leather bag with a change of clothes and all of my own money from the savings jar.Then I left the coat and bag tucked behind a chair in the parlour.

Jack went out early to the nearby grocer’s shop, and he was soon back with a packet of tea and a few rashers of bacon. As he patted the snow from his coat, he said, ‘My, it’s brisk out today, Eve,’ and then he unfurled his morning paper as usual and studied it near the even white light from the window.

I made a pot of strong tea, and some toast, and griddled the bacon for our breakfast.

I said, ‘Shall I read to you some more this morning?’

‘Yes, that would be lovely, but no more of Mr Sherlock Holmes, he’s a bit too close to the bone. Mr Dickens, I think.’ Eventually after breakfast he settled himself in his high-backed chair, and put his feet up on a cushion. He crossed his arms over his rounded tummy and nodded for me to begin.

‘Great Expectations. chapter1.

‘My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip . . .’

As I read on through the hour I saw Jack’s eyelids begin to droop and flutter. Then the familiar little parps and snorts of his snoring began and in a few pages more Jack was fast asleep. I kept on reading aloud while I pulled from out of my bodice the note I had already written. I propped it up against the now cold brown teapot.

.

Dear Jack,

.

I am going away.

Don’t worry about me.

Don’t look for me.

Protect yourself.

.

Your loving Eve

.

Then still reading aloud I struggled my way one-handed into my warm coat and picked up the bag. Then I stopped reading, lay the book down and let myself out of the door very quietly, shutting it with just the slightest click. I was sure that no one from the downstairs lodgings or the shop below saw me leave as I slipped . . .

. . . out into the street.

I had resolved to run away to the circus. I had no plan in my head at all except to find a circus. I would vanish into the big city

Reviews for Pastworld

[knochenherz · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

** spoiler alert ** In the beginning the book was really thrilling. The idea of a victorian theme park (like larp) in a futuristic world is really great and I haven't read something like that before. Ian Beck managed to write the story in a way that it never got boring, because the reader gets only a few information about the characters and how the main characters are sticked together. My bad rating results from the female main character. At first she was really cute and I sympathized with her, but after she realiz...more In the beginning the book was really thrilling. The idea of a victorian theme park (like larp) in a futuristic world is really great and I haven't read something like that before. Ian Beck managed to write the story in a way that it never got boring, because the reader gets only a few information about the characters and how the main characters are sticked together. My bad rating results from the female main character. At first she was really cute and I sympathized with her, but after she realized that Pastworld isn't the real world (she thought Pastworld would be a real town, her hometown) she became really annoying. She doesn't react as someone, who was just told that everything she ever believed in was only an illusion. (It was like: "Oh... it's only a themepark? Well okay! Whatever, let's go!)Oh, and before I forget: She can lip read, she can see in the dark (it isn't a magic book or something like that, where darksight is normal), she is perfect in walking the wire (but she neeever knew; of course), she can run so fast normal people only see a dark shadow and she has the ability to slow down the time for herself. Of course every male main charakter (ecxept the old ones) loooves her, because she is so perfect and wonderful and her bright blue eyes are so unique. Oh and she loves everyone of them too, and she really wants to get killed by two of them ... yeah... oh .. and of couurse at the end she is pregnant and happy and everything is SO GREAT!It was a fight to read the last pages really, i didn't expect that such a good beginning ends so horribly bad.

[lilibrarian · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In the near future, an-all powerful corporation has set up a recreation of old London, circa 1800, which is run as a theme park. Tourists, called Gawkers, get the chance to see how people lived then and interact with them. But old London is a dangerous place, both for those who live there and those who visit.

[jcshoffitt_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I feel bad that it took me so long to read this one. It was picked out for me as part of the January 'Buddy Books' challenge and I was super excited to read it. The idea was so cool- I mean turning London into a Victorian era theme park?? And there's a creepy murderer on the loose?? That's awesome!! Unfortunately, the idea was better as just that: an idea. I started reading Pastworld and thought that it was just a little slow to get rolling. So I kept reading. And kept reading. And then read Matched. And then read a little more Pastworld...then read Vampire Academy...and then a little more Pastworld. You get the point. I just could NOT get into the book. It seemed like there was a ton of dead story that was trying to weave together a couple different plot lines, but it just feel totally flat. I forced my self to keep the faith and wait for Beck to finally get to the point, and he finally did on page 282. If you are reading this and have a deep burning urge to read Pastworld, then skip the next few lines because I'm about to spoil the whole book for you. The Fantom is essentially a genetically engineered Jack the Ripper (named Adam) and Eve is a genetically engineered 'perfect victim' created for him to hunt down and kill over and over again as the ultimate Pastworld spectacle.The part that drives me CRAZY is that this book could have really been spectacular if Beck had lead with the whole Jack the Ripper thing and built the story out from there. As the reader, it would have been much more interesting to know that this Jack the Ripper incarnate was out after a girl who was totally clueless. But that's just my opinion.I wasn't a huge fan of the author's writing either. It seemed choppy and read almost like a machine gun fire of words: 'He walked into the room. Then he saw her in the corner. She was looking at him.' The most interesting quote in the whole book came from Buckland, and he was only present for 20ish pages in the whole book. "I fear the forces of reaction are biting at our heels."Overall, I found Pastworld to be a total snooze. It's pretty bad when it takes me 3+ weeks to make my way through a book...especially when I manage to read 4 others in the same amount of time.

[callmecayce · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A fascinating novel about a world post-pandemic where London has turned into a Victorian themepark. It's a little bit dystopian and a little bit steampunk and a lot enjoyable.

[adpaton · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

After a devastating pandemic, London in the mid 21st Century has been transformed into a vast living theme park, a recreation of the Late Victorian city, teeming with hansom cabs, thieves and tourists. Eve knows only London and believes the simulation to be reality until her guardian Jack is cruelly slain by the sinister Fantom, a serial killer, and she barely escapes his clutches: fleeing for her life, she gradually discovers she has hidden powers.The story has a wonderful premise, is full of thrills, intrigue and colourful characters, but ultimately this ‘mystery of the near future’ proves disappointing – the writing simply isn’t up to the standard of the plan.

[pmlyayakkers · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In the near future, an-all powerful corporation has set up a recreation of old London, circa 1800, which is run as a theme park. Tourists, called Gawkers, get the chance to see how people lived then and interact with them. But old London is a dangerous place, both for those who live there and those who visit.

[gaskella_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Dickens' London meets the Truman Show ... Welcome to Pastworld. Imagine that London has been reinvented as a theme park; that Dickensian London has been recreated in every detail. Rich tourists undergo immersion training, get costumed and are then brought in by airship to become 'gawkers' in this new, old world. Caleb, son of Lucius Brown, one of the park's original imagineers, is due to arrive for his first visit with his father.Pastworld is peopled by the 'residents', most of whom officially live and work there as Victorians, giving the punters an authentic experience. But there are also some unofficials - pickpockets, fences and entertainers, plus 'The Fantom', who has taken on the unofficial role of Jack the Ripper and is working with a band of 'ragged men' to strike terror throughout the city. The park's owners are very, very worried indeed, and they send in a detective to hunt him down.The last piece of the puzzle is seventeen year old Eve who lives with her father Jack; she has no memories of anything before the age of fifteen. In Truman Show style, she doesn't know she is living in a theme park. However she is never allowed to go out on her own and is beginning to wonder why. Jack returns from an excursion out and starts to explain a little to her:'I have to tell you something, Eve' he said, in an unsteady voice. 'You may often have wondered why I look after you so carefully. The truth is that someone is after us. They have been for a long while now. I have deliberately kept this from you, Eve, just for your own protection. I have always been so very, very careful for you. But anyhow this bad, bad person has got a sniff of you, and as soon as it can be arranged we will have to move somewhere else. Somewhere far from here.'He stood and paced up and down in a twitching panic. I could make no sense of it at all. Here was my mystery.'How would such a dangerous person know anything about us?' I said.'He knows,' Jack said nodding. 'As I said, he's got a sniff of you.'Something alerted me in those repeated words: 'A sniff of you'. That surely meant it is not 'us' at all but just me alone, myself - someone is especially after me. It was suddenly clear to me.I am a deep secret.I am a hidden person.I am to be kept safe for ever. I was a fairy-tale princess, like Rapunzel, locked away from the world in her high tower."This is the first novel for young adults from children's author Ian Beck, which has plenty for grown-ups to admire too. I thoroughly enjoyed its cultural touchstones, murderous action and twisty plot. I particularly liked the interleaving of the futuristic and Victorian milieux which resulted in much more than a straight-forward melodrama. Without spoiling anything, there is plenty of room for a sequel (please?).If you've read The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters by G W Dahlquist and enjoy teen fiction, you'd certainly like this book. (9/10)

[alexia561 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Was well worth it, as I think it's a very original story, with a twist I should have seen coming but didn't!One of the things that I enjoyed about the book is that each chapter is narrated by a different character. We have excerpts from Eve's journal, then the next chapter might be from Caleb or Bible J or a policemen, then back to Eve. The different voices weren't hard to keep track of, and I thought having several different viewpoints only enhanced the story.Found the whole idea of turning an old section of London into a giant theme park for the rich remarkably believable, and thought Beck was able to keep the story moving along nicely even when switching from narrator to narrator. Don't want to give away too much of the plot as there were a few nice surprises along the way, but I will say that I liked most of the characters and that the unlikable characters were all villains.Gave this book a 4/5 rating. Thought the writing was very well done, the characters were all well developed, and the plot was original and compelling. I've seen a few comparisons to The Truman Show, but I didn't think they were similar at all. I don't think that this was too violent for a YA book, as video games are much more violent and bloody. All in all, I'd recommend this book!

[vernefan · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Steam punk Victorian London Horror ThrillerIn the year 2048, London has created a theme park called Pastworld, in which the whole city of Victorian London is rebuilt under a vast dome. Life as it was in the 1800s is recreated for tourists to experience, complete as if time stood still. Visitors arrive via large airships that float above the dome and lock on to a hatchway that deposits them into an environment where they will experience history as they could never have imagined. Tourists must pay costly ticket fees and pass tests of authenticity to enter Pastworld. They must dress in period clothing and carry nothing inside that is from the future. This is a high security environment, and tourists breaking the law will be subject to criminal justice as it was at the time. If you are unlucky to be found guilty of any crime, you will be tried and jailed if not hung for your misdeeds. Complete with automatically timed fog, night twinkling stars, sunrise and sunset, visitors to Pastworld feel every nuance of Victorian life and will not believe they are within an artificial world. Authentic vendors, street merchants, clopping horses pulling carriages on cobblestone streets beneath gaslights, pick- pockets, prostitutes, and rag and bone men, all walk the streets as paid residents providing the show. Nightly thefts, muggings and even staged murders complete the picture as one blends into the past of London as if that era never ended. We readers along with the tourists, also enjoy, or are horrified by, a black cloaked mysterious killer, a Buckland creation gone horribly wrong that was intended to allow a first hand encounter with a Jack-the-Ripper-like madman called the Fantom.The main plot of this wonderfully creative story revolves around a girl named Eve. She is a pretty blond blue-eyed young woman raised by a man named Jack who cares for her and protects her. She is never allowed out alone, and must never venture into Pastworld without him. She oddly has no memories of her childhood and lives in fear, as Jack warns her often that there are people out to harm her. Feeling constricted she one day runs away to join the circus, and soon realizes, all within Pastworld is not what she was taught. Her circus friends give her a rude awakening as they inform her that she is living in a faux world. Jack never told her the truth, that this London was a sham, and that another world outside the dome existed. The other side of this tale regards a father and son who arrive as visitors. Lucius Brown, an original imagineer of Pastworld who created a lot of the early mechanisms and side effects for the park, is here on a mission to contact Jack about an urgent threat to Eve and to the success of Pastworld. His son Caleb never knowing the details about his father’s early work here, soon learns the cold hard facts as within their first day, his father is kidnapped and he himself is accused of murder. Many mysteries are served up to the reader as to who Eve is. How she is tied to Caleb and linked to some extraordinary and horrifying experiments from the early creation days of Pastworld, will have you flipping the pages quickly as this story is quite inventive and engaging. The lives of Caleb and Eve become seriously threatened. Much chaos, murder and mayhem have them fighting for their lives against the Buckland organization and from the famous Fantom who is hunting them down. This is a creative and marvelous blend of The Phantom of the Opera, Ridley Pearson’s Kingdom Keeper, and Herve Jubert’s Dance of the Assassin. I loved this entertaining novel and hope the author pens more for a series of other Pastworld themes. Part Victorian mystery, part horror, part Sci-fi Steam-Punk, this was 100% fun.