Review: Lucretia and the Kroons by Victor LaValle

Title: Lucretia and the Kroons

Author: Victor LaValle

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau /Random House

Published: 23^rd July 2012

Ebook ISBN: 978 08129 84378

Rating: 4/5

Lucretia and the Kroons is a novella about two friends’ relationship and also deals with a few sensitive subjects such as teen cancer and death.

I wasn’t sure if I would like Lucretia after her behaviour in the first chapter.  Lucretia acts like a spoilt brat, and although she knows her best friend has cancer and has been seriously ill, she tries to carry on as normal regardless without thinking or asking Sunny, her best friend.  I think this is pretty true to life though, and a coping mechanism for many of us in the same situation.

I thought this packed a lot in a fairly small package.  The Kroons enter the story at just the right time, making a death of a teen from cancer easier to read about.  The way they are described as being horrible, to almost the point of being zombies (that’s how I envisage them anyway), certainly meant I wasn’t dwelling too much on the sad side of the story.  It made Sunny’s death seem less harsh and more bearable.

This is a very quick read, and one which, given the subject matter, surprisingly didn’t affect me too much emotionally which I was grateful to the author for.

Book synopsis:

Lucretia's best friend and upstairs neighbor Sunny-a sweet pitbull of a kid, even as she struggles with a mysterious illness-has gone missing. The only way to get her back is for Lucretia to climb the rickety fire escape of their Queens tenement and crawl through the window of apartment 6D, portal to a vast shadowland of missing kids ruled by a nightmarish family of mutants whose designs on the children are unknown. Her search for Sunny takes Lucretia through a dark fantasyland where she finds lush forests growing from concrete, pigeon-winged rodents, and haunted playgrounds. Her quest ultimately forces her to confront the most frightening specter of all: losing, forever, the thing you love the most.

Lucretia and the Kroons is a dazzlingly imaginative adventure story and a moving exploration of the power of friendship and the terror of loss. This all-new novella serves as the perfect companion piece to The Devil in Silver, a thrillingly suspenseful work of literary horror that continues the story of Lucretia. 

Source: Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley, a digital copy was recieved in return for an honest review.