The Ten Riddles of Eartha Quicksmith
Kip huddles on the ‘Midway Branch’ of the ‘Chess Nut Tree’ in self-seclusion from the daily horrors of school life and the dreaded Miss Gubbins, or ‘The Snibbug’. His reversal of her name is an attempt to ward off the continual damage done by her carping. An encoded message drops from the sky, forcing Kip to use his knowledge of chess to puzzle it out.
He arrives at a secret address where he must perform a range of emoticons into the camera of a phantom photobooth to unlock a portal to a transformative school where shared clever thinking of all kinds is encouraged and celebrated. Can solving school- founder Eartha Quicksmith’s ten riddles with his new friends enable him to reach his mother, lost deep inside herself since a lightning strike, or his sister, who vanished the same night?
This novel, Owen’s first, is a joyous celebration of applying multidimensional, multimodal thinking to the solving of properly serious problems. Deeply hilarious and highly intelligent, with intellectual and emotional precocity held in equal esteem, the book’s own multimodality-lists, menus, timetables, quests-with-rewards, switches in perspective, space-and-time conundrums, puns and anagrams are the perfect vehicle for its narrative’s rollercoaster race against time. The exquisite writing offers revelations on startlingly diverse topics to enquiring minds of any age. Streets ahead of Rowling in its intelligence and economy of writing, to my mind the obvious comparison is to L’Engle’s 1962 classic A Wrinkle in Time, not least because of its celebration of the multimodal intelligences and original thought processes of young people.
