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F E Higgins: The Eyeball Collector
Macmillan, 2009


A middle-grade book with boys in mind and part of a series of 'Tales From the Sinister City' (Urbs Umida) a kind of steamy Victorianesque place of gaslamps, cobblestones, pickpockets. The book is populated by characters with names like Lord Mandible, Oscar Carpue and Lottie Fitch. Our hero, the gently brought up and well-educated Hector Fizbaudly, loses everything when his rich businessman father dies after having been blackmailed by the dastardly one-eyed Gulliver Truepin. He ends up on the streets in the wrong part of town and is taken into Lottie Fitch's Home for Exposed Babies and Abandoned Boys where he is befriended by Polly, Mrs Fitch's servant. Swearing revenge, Hector, a clever riddler and quite the survivor, follows Truepin, now calling himself Baron Bovrik, out of the city to Withypitts Hall, the home of Lord and Lady Mandible where there's even more skulldugery going on and not all of it perpetrated by Truepin/Bovrik.

It's told in a mixture of omniscient viewpoint and occasional letters from Hector to Polly providing passages of first person narrative which breaks up the flow, somewhat.

It's an engaging little tale, but not as gruesome as its title suggests since the eyeball collector, Truepin, is only collecting fancy false eyeballs for his missing socket. I'm not tempted to read any more tales from the Sinister City, but I might be if I were a nine year old boy. I like reading children's books. They are generally a rewarding read, but I must admit I found this a little self-conscious. I'm not sure if that's because I didn't start at the beginning of the series, or whether I'm just not a good match for this kind of book.
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