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The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


American teenager goes to British boarding school, gets involved in the hunt for a supernatural Jack the Ripper copycat.

I made some assumptions based on the text, so I was feeling condescendingly pat pat about this book, all, aw, it's your debut, how nice. And then I googled the author, realized this is actually her ninth, and went . . . oh. Oh dear. Whatever, it's not terrible, I've just seen all of this before, and I've definitely seen it all done better.

But the thing I actually wanted to say was that this story takes place in a strange alternate universe that looks exactly like ours in every respect, but in which Harry Potter was never written. Nothing else could explain the pathological lack of references from our narrator as she, you know, attends British boarding school and learns about a magical world. Even on the Doylian level, Johnson feels it necessary to explain to us what school prefects are, as if there's a single American reading this book who hasn't picked that up. It was so glaring and bizarre a choice, and so patently ducking engagement with the still dominant magical British boarding school story, that it overshadowed nearly everything else for me. I dig texts that engage with other texts, so you can see how I didn't respect this choice.




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