Deadman's Castle
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- £7.49
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- £7.49
Publisher Description
For most of his life, Igor and his family have been on the run. Danger lurks around every corner--or so he's always been told. . . .
When Igor was five, his father witnessed a terrible crime--and ever since, his whole family has been hunted by a foreboding figure bent on revenge, known only as the Lizard Man. They've lived in so many places, with so many identities, that Igor can't even remember his real name.
But now he's twelve years old, and he longs for a normal life. He wants to go to school. Make friends. Stop worrying about how long it will be before his father hears someone prowling around their new house and uproots everything yet again. He's even starting to wonder--what if the Lizard Man only exists in his father's frightened mind?
Slowly, Igor starts bending the rules he's lived by all his life--making friends for the first time, testing the boundaries of where he's allowed to go in town. But soon, he begins noticing strange things around them--is it in his imagination? Or could the Lizard Man be real after all?
Iain Lawrence is a winner of Canada's Governor General's Children's Literature Prize and the California Young Reader Medal. In Deadman's Castle, he brings readers a mystery filled with intrigue and moments of heart-stopping danger.
A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A family perpetually flees from a man with a lizard tattoo in this intriguing middle grade mystery. Six years prior to this book's start, Igor Watson's father "saw someone do a terrible thing"; ever since, the family has been on the run, changing towns and identities, and reporting to a witness protection agency, the Protectors, each time an ambiguous character known only as the Lizard Man tracks them down. Now 12, Igor—his most recent alias—persuades his parents that he should attend school. Slowly settling in, making friends, and experiencing bullying, Igor realizes just how restrictive his family's rules are: always be home before dark, keep the curtains closed, lie about the family's background. As Igor's cover story starts to slip and he feels an odd sense of familiarity in his "new" town, he must decide just how far to trust his friends, even as he questions his father's stability and the Lizard Man's very existence. Against a suspenseful backdrop, Lawrence (The Skeleton Tree) pits Igor's longing for normalcy against the precautions he takes to keep his family safe, creating a rapidly moving story with an interesting emotional arc. Ages 9–12.
