|
|
Reviewed by: Anita Lal |
|
|
Reviewed by: Anita Lal |
Michael Bedard's Painted Devil is printed by Lester Publishing Ltd. It tells the story of 14-year-old Alice Higginson and the rest of her family. Life is going along fine, until Mr. Dwyer, her boss at the local library, finds an old collection of puppets housed in the library and asks Alice to help him stage a puppet show. As they begin to practice, strange and unsettling changes start to take place in Mr. Dwyer; changes that just can't be logically explained.
At home, Alice's elusive and eccentric Aunt Emily, who has come to help around the house during Mrs. Higginson's difficult pregnancy, is shrouded in her own mystery. One that goes back nearly thirty years, when she was enticed into the black world of a sinister magic show. Fuelled by her fear that darker magic will recur on the date of the original show, she is driven to find out how and when to stop the relentless, tormenting evil threatening to consume them all...
The description of the storyline intrigues the reader to pick up the book, but the writing style is jumpy and sloppy, and the attempts to startle or frighten the reader are unsuccessful, comical. The plot is loosely pulled together, and the fantasy angle of a demon living inside an inanimate object is both too far-fetched to be believable and too overdone to give any reading enjoyment. Not worth the time, or the money.
