Silvertongue

It became quite early on that I should have read this series in order. I had read about half of the book before I got a feel for the characters. The good characters are developed far better than the evil characters. The action is fast paced. It is a good young adult book.

I picked up this audio book and every time I turned it on the rest of my family gravitated to wherever I was to listen in. I've read fantasy books my whole life, but the ideas here were fresh and never felt recycled or trite. The characters were realistic and fully fleshed out, which makes for great reading and promises good things for the sequel. Riddles, suprises, a race against time and enigmatic characters keep the pace of this novel quick and your interest piqued. A litte dark in some places, I wouldn't recommend it for younger children, but decidedly something I would give to any pre-teen or above with high marks.

Book received quickly and in great condition. Price was great and son loves it.

I bought this book because I happened to see it on a store shelf and it happened to have a dragon on the cover and my grandson happens to love dragon books. The premise intrigued me, so I read the book before I gave it to him. And I loved it--for its tension on every page, for its fleshed out, clearly defined characters who are sinister, loveable and surprising, for its use of words to make literary magic, for a tale well told. Bravo.

I had gotten a little backed up on reading my latest purchases of dragon books, and I wondered whether Charlie Fletcher's screenwriting background would translate well to prose, but then I started in on Stoneheart and completely forgot to fuss. It is a VERY good book--in my opinion, Fletcher succeeds in doing what China Mieville wanted to do but didn't quite pull off with Un Lun Dun, which surely got a lot more attention than this book. That is, Fletcher turns London into a quiet fantasy nightmare, an alternate reality, for a couple of kids, George and Edie. (Neil Gaiman would be proud!) The previous reviewer gives you a plot summary, so I won't go into that, but I will point out that Fletcher has a clean, graceful written voice, and he adds depth to his writing with well-placed metaphors, many of which are refreshingly new. Here is a snatch of description about a statue of the Minotaur: "The shoulders hunched massively below a bull's head topped by aggressively pointing horns; and so well had the sculptor shaped it, that the sound of enraged snorting seemed to lurk about it, even though it never--to the normal eye--moved or breathed at all." Of course, one of the eerie things about this book is that to the normal eye, the statues of London are NOT coming to life and menacing (or helping) two children. The normal eye doesn't see that the Raven flying overhead isn't flying at a normal speed; instead, it is "flapping unnaturally slowly, lazily defying all laws of gravity and several of the general advisory guidelines of nature as it did so." When the book begins, George is self-pitying and Edie is cold-hearted; their characters evolve during the course of their adventures, as if Fletcher were undoing a work of dull origami and folding it into a better shape. The other standout character is the Gunner, a statue of a World War I soldier who helps George and Edie survive. Clocker was probably my favorite of the odd, invented characters hanging about the periphery of this tale, but there were others. In general, Fletcher has turned a collection of the actual statuary around London into an astonishing assortment of personalities and monsters. There are so many nice--and creepy--little touches here, like what the evil Walker does to passing pedestrians as he searches for George, and the Raven's penchant for making a stylish entrance, and the fact that many characters are neither one thing nor the other, but a mix of good and evil, reliability and personal agendas. I also like how Edie's magic isn't an easy or simplistically happy power for her to carry. Fletcher doesn't settle for predictable answers in his plot, which rides a growing wave of suspense clear up to the last few pages. Then he leaves you wanting more in just the right way--not because he has to sell another book, but because you truly want to see Edie and George take their suddenly bizarre lives to the next level. I would recommend this book for older children and teens who were comfo

This book was a real phenomenon for my typical bookbuying expeditions. Rarely do I ever buy a hardcover that is not part of a series I like, by an author I like, or sufficiently hyped-up for me to recognize it. STONEHEART was none of these, but the writing sample on the back and the book description made me buy it. When George accidentally breaks off a stone dragon's head from a wall in a museum in London, he awakens a terrifying, murderous pterodacyl that chases him through London's streets and -- worst of all -- is invisible to everyone but him and, it seems, a young girl named Edie, a "glint". His life is saved by the Gunner, a statue that is somehow alive in this alternate London he's accidentally fallen into. With the Gunner and Edie he goes to solve the Riddle of the Sphinx and gets some answers, but ends up with an answer that is more riddle than what he first had to solve. So with time ticking away George and Edie have to navigate this world, full of good statues and bad ("spits" and "taints" to make it easier) and George must sacrifice the stone dragon's head on the Heart of Stone to make this whole nightmare disappear. But what if the Sphinx's answer was ambiguous...? This story was, in a word (and a very British one that you're likely to see several times in this novel) brilliant. The writing, though it deteriorated slightly toward the end, was strong, descriptive, exciting, and dramatic. The characters were excellent, especially Edie and George (Edie had all the makings of a "tough-girl you learn to respect and pity because of her traumatic past" in her, but she overcame that and became an excellent character in her own right) though I would have liked a bit more on die's backstory -- her parents (particularly her father) and what had happened to her as a child. In fact, the only complaint I have against this book is that a book this good surely deserved a better copyeditor. Time after time I would see a quotation mark misplaced or missing, and the same with punctuation. But there were no spelling mistakes as far as I could see, so it really was only those two things. And meticulous copyediting is not the author's job, so you really can't blame Mr. Fletcher for that. Highly recommended. I don't think I've rated a first novel this way since "Fly By Night", but... Rating: Masterpiece