The Alarming Career of Sir Richard Blackstone
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Twelve-year-old Henry Hewitt has been living by his wits on the streets of London, dodging his parents, who are determined to sell him as an apprentice. Searching for a way out of the city, Henry lands a position in Hampshire as an assistant to Sir Richard Blackstone, an aristocratic scientist who performs unorthodox experiments in his country manor. The manor house is comfortable, and the cook is delighted to feed Henry as much as he can eat. Sir Richard is also kind, and Henry knows he has finally found a place where he belongs.
But everything changes when one of Sir Richard’s experiments accidentally transforms a normal-sized tarantula into a colossal beast that escapes and roams the neighborhood. After a man goes missing and Sir Richard is accused of witchcraft, it is left to young Henry to find an antidote for the oversized arachnid. Things are not as they seem, and in saving Sir Richard from the gallows, Henry also unravels a mystery about his own identity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Doan (the Berenson Schemes series) presents a witty mashup of farce, mystery, and fantasy, opens in an unspecified time in London's past, where Henry Hewitt has been living on the streets, fleeing his ruthless parents, who are determined to sell him into an indentured life as a chimney sweep. In the first of several strokes of luck, Henry is whisked to the countryside after he's hired as assistant to Sir Richard Blackstone, an aristocratic scientist who admits he was knighted "by dumb luck" when he accidentally invented the paper clip. Straight away, Henry discovers that one of his employer's experiments (which "only went in two directions nowhere or wrong") has enlarged a tarantula to gargantuan proportions. A dominolike string of mishaps and discoveries ensues after the beast escapes, leading to Blackstone's unearthing of an important footprint in a cave, his arrest for witchcraft and murder, and the unveiling of Henry's true identity. As the story zips between poignant and preposterous, Doan's characters whether kind, bumbling, or nefarious are uniformly entertaining and, in Henry's case, entirely endearing. Ages 8 12.
