
Goblin Secrets by William Alexander
My family and I were just quasi-playing a game called Booktastic the other night (quasi as in just reading questions from the cards rather than actually playing the game), when the question came up to name an award-winning book whose awarding you just didn’t get. I believe I chose an entire year of finalists one year for the National Book Award (All five. Every one.). Now though, I’d have to add this year’s winner for Young People: William Alexander’s Goblin Secrets. Alexander’s debut novel isn’t by any stretch a bad book, but it is, in my mind, under-developed and unfocused and in the end, unsatisfying.
Goblin Secrets (2012) is set in Zombey, a beguiling creation of a city split into two parts: upper class, clean Northside, with its straight streets laid out in a grid, and lower-class, cluttered and crowded Southside, full of winding, twisting lanes and a... Read More