Book Recommendation: The Nine Pound Hammer
The Nine Pound Hammer, John Claude Bemis’s first book of his Clockwork Dark series (released just last year), shows a new direction that middle grade/young adult fiction is heading in. It is an adventure story taking place in the 19th century South where swamps, nearly endless forests, and very odd but interesting people tend to rule. At the start of the book, the twelve-year-old orphan Ray sneaks away from his sister and fellow orphans who are being taken to new homes on an ornate train. He is following the pull of a loadstone that his father gave him before disappearing years go. The loadstone will help him, his father said, and Ray believes in it enough to wander for days without food or shelter in a wilderness. Ray eventually meets up with a traveling medicine show and learns about the Gog, a person of tremendous evil who intends to rule the world through an all-powerful machine. No one knows what the machine is, though a previous one was destroyed by John Henry. Bemis peels back myths to reveal an alternative reality, a world of powerful yet secretive Ramblers and the Gog’s demonic agents. Their battles are the backdrop of many American tales with the fate of the world in the balance. › Continue reading
