Pádraig Kenny

The Monsters of Rookhaven won the 2021 KPMG Children’s Books Ireland Honour Award for Fiction. The Shadows of Rookhaven is a well-crafted sequel that explores themes of family, belonging, loss, and difference. We first meet Billy in the human world where, as a misbegotten, he is an outcast. He lives with the Catchpoles, who are not human, and he has taken Meg, another outcast, under his wing. When this unlikely family unit is captured, and Meg’s safety is threatened, Billy agrees to their captors’ demands so that he can save her.

Mirabelle lives with her unusual family in Rookhaven. She and her family are, to put it simply, monsters. They live in a mansion, hidden away (thanks to a protection spell) from the outside world of humans. However, the nearby village and the Rookhaven monsters maintain a generations old truce: the townsfolk will keep the monsters’ existence a secret, if the monsters promise to never enter the town or hurt one of the humans. However, one night, out-of-towners and runaway siblings, Jem and Tom, accidentally find their way into Rookhaven territory…

In a rickety old house on the edge of a living, breathing forest, the story unfolds. Thirteen-year-old Penny and eleven-year old David have moved here from their sunny London home in an effort to make a fresh start with their father. The family is grief-stricken; their mother ‘arrives’ to the house late on moving day in the form of ashes in a bronze urn that makes its home on the mantelpiece.

Tin takes the reader on a journey through a reimagined 1930s England, an England full of mechanicals. Kenny recreates this historical period convincingly, and the mechanical elements of society are worked into the storyline seamlessly. Christopher, the protagonist, shares the limelight with several other characters – Jack, Rob, Estelle and Cormier – creating a journey full of collaboration. When a terrible accident occurs, the world is turned upside down for Christopher, and Estelle and the mechanicals must work together to save him.