What I'm Reading: The Clockwork Terror of Blackglass Island
The second Felix Jones adventure proves just as exciting as the first
How much did I enjoy Malory’s The Weird Map in Mr. Glimm’s Skull? Enough that I paused my re-read of The Lord of the Rings for a few days when The Clockwork Terror of Blackglass Island came out so I could catch up with Felix and William.
In the second installment of the Felix Jones series, our boy genius protagonist is now aware of the fact that his parents are secret agents and quietly giving him permission to follow in their footsteps. We open on a scene of him creating an elaborate device to perfectly forge his mom’s name on a permission slip for a weekend field trip to a historic lighthouse because he’s grounded for not cleaning his room. While he’s at it, his dad disassembles her favorite toaster to check for bugs. Mom, of course, walks in on both activities, but Felix gets to go anyway because they are suspicious about activities on the island, and they want him to report any strange happenings — without getting involved. But if you read Mr. Glimm’s Skull, you know that’s not how Felix operates. (Check out my review of the first book for more.)
Things get weird even before they get to Blackglass Island, with the world seeming to glitch out every now and then. When they arrive, a strange rhythmical ticking begins that seems to turn everyone but Felix and William into zombies, and they have to fight the urge to fall into the rhythm so they can figure out what’s going on.
The Clockwork Terror of Blackglass Island seems a little simpler and more straightforward than its predecessor, but it’s still just as enjoyable. Unlike the first book, where you often weren’t quite sure what the heck was going on, we meet the villain pretty quickly and are almost immediately aware of it. Though still strange and wonderful, Clockwork Terror doesn’t lean into the creepy weird quite as much as Mr. Glimm’s Skull did, either.
The focus remains on Felix, but William really shines in this one. His often-sarcastic responses to our hero’s chosen course of action and his highly scientific calculations of how much trouble they were in kept me rolling with laughter. He also gets his Samwise Gamgee moment as well — and perhaps, in a way, his Gollum moment, too.
As an aside, I will say that the prospect of actually getting the people in Congress to shut the hell up did kind of make me cheer for the villain Rook for just a minute toward the end of the book.
Like its predecessor, The Clockwork Tower of Blackglass Island is a weird and wonderful tale filled with fast-paced adventure and plenty of fun pop culture references. If you know a boy (or even if you’re a boy in his 50s) who likes his stories action-packed and just a little strange, you can’t go wrong with these.