Old London towne will get you if you don't watch out.

kw : book reviews, fantasy

Assume for the moment that a mechanism can affect magic. By the time you're halfway through Mind the Gap, by Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon, that's the first premise you'll have to accept. Then, based on the second, that "where magic is concerned, there are no coincidences", the most unlikely sorts of happenstance are seen as foreordained, or at least magically directed. By the end, I was wondering if the human characters were needed at all…until I remembered that, of course, the authors are in complete control, and I was just along for the ride.

Jasmine (Jazz) was raised to be paranoid. Supported by sinister benefactors since her father's death, Jazz has it drilled into her by her mother: trust only yourself; hide yourself. And when her mother is murdered, by those "benefactors", the last lesson, written in her mother's blood, is Jazz hide forever. She attempts to do just that, in (or under) the London Underground.

In a tale drawing together threads from Peter Pan and Oliver Twist, Jazz becomes an apprentice thief, a survivor among survivors. But she is also extra-sensitive to sounds and sights others don't notice, though everyone present notices the occasional "Hour of Screams", a deep-tunnel phenomenon that will drive a fellow mad who doesn't take precautions.

The aforesaid mechanism is intended to allay the magical torment that underlies the Hour of Screams, and Jazz has a central role to play in its use. Pursued by latter-day sorcerers who have learned to track her, helped by a fellow thief she is afraid to trust, relying on her own increasing sense of just where she needs to be, Jazz literally rushes toward the fulfillment of her purpose. As unlikely as the premises seem, the story hangs together well.