When I heard rumour that Elizabeth Kay might be coming to our rescue, I quickly rummaged through the monsters’ shelves and bagged myself the copy of The Divide.  No wonder the monsters like her!  She’s created a wonderful world in which many of our more famous monsters – dragons, griffins, vampires, werewolves etc. – can live (for the most part) peacefully with one another.  But there’s more … a whole host of monsters I’d never heard of before live there too.  Shreddermouths (like crocodiles but with longer legs) Sinistroms (sort of devil hyenas) and the amazing Worrits. (like a bizarre sort of dog that kills its victim by making them laugh until they die.)  I sort of like the idea of a monster that will only eat its prey if it dies laughing!  Not much chance of that in here!!

The first book of the trilogy, The Divide, is about a young lad called Felix who suffers an incurable heart condition. His parents have tried everything, but are clearly doing everything in their power to help Felix experience as much as possible during his shortened life span. It is on one of these experiential trips when Felix climbs the path to the divide in Costa Rica – the point either side of which water will run into different oceans. Whilst there, Felix passes out and, according to Ironclaw the brazzle (who would be called a griffin in our world), his heart momentarily stopped beating. In that moment of death, Ironclaw speculates that all of Felix’s ittiebitties (atoms in our language) were equally distributed on either side of the divide, causing him to fall through into another world.

The result of this billion to one chance is that Felix enters a strange new world – where magic is everyday and science is a thing of myth and legend. The main thrust of the story is the quest to find a cure for Felix, but as one might expect this is anything but easy. What’s more, Elizabeth has cleverly worked in a sub-text to this remarkable book that gives an interesting angle on the big multi-national pharmaceutical companies of our world. I won’t ruin the story by giving away any more of the plot, but suffice it to say this is a fascinating story that can be read on many levels.

Elizabeth paints her fantasy world in bright colours, with wonderful touches of humour on just about every page. I simply couldn’t stop turning the pages until my eyes closed from sheer exhaustion at some ungodly hour in the morning. It was a wonderful reading experience.

There is no doubt that Elizabeth Kay is a masterful storyteller. The Divide has to be one of the very best books for young adults that I’ve read. I’d highly recommend it for anyone aged 9-90 (and beyond) who likes a good yarn with lots of humour and fun monsters. Let’s just hope she’s as good with a machine gun and a jet pack as she is with a pen!

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