Book Review :: The Book of Dead Days, by Markus Sedgwick

The Book of Dead Days by Marcus Sedgwick
Published by Wendy Lamb Books
on April 11th 2006
Genres: Young Adult
Pages: 273
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THE DAYS BETWEEN Christmas and New Year’s Eve are dead days, when spirits roam and magic shifts restlessly just beneath the surface of our lives.

A magician called Valerian must save his own life within those few days or pay the price for the pact he made with evil so many years ago. But alchemy and sorcery are no match against the demonic power pursuing him.

Helping him is his servant, Boy, a child with no name and no past. The quick-witted orphan girl, Willow, is with them as they dig in death fields at midnight, and as they are swept into the sprawling blackness of a subterranean city on a journey from which there is no escape.

Last updated on 19 January 2022

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The Book of Dead Days, by Markus Sedgwick

The Book of Dead Days, by Marcus Sedgwick, is about the days between Christmas and News Years – the dead days. It follows the story of a magician called Valerian, a boy called Boy (no kidding…that’s his name), and a girl named Willow.

The book starts off in a theatre on December 27th, where Valerian and Boy are on stage, just finishing up their act for another evening. As they head home to their ancient, crumbling mansion later that night, Boy notices that Valerian is acting more uptight and crazy than usual (which is saying something). He later finds out that Valerian has only a few days to live, though the magician won’t say why.

The whole book only spans over 5 days, and Boy doesn’t discover the reason that Valerian believes he’s going to die on New Years eve until the very end chapters. Willow, a servant of a large woman who sings at the theatre, joins them a few chapters in, not wanting to go back to Madame, and having developed a slight crush on Boy, and together the three of them go on a hunt for a book that Valerian believes will help him save himself.

The story takes place in ‘the City’ and ‘Outside the City’ in a time before electricity and hygiene  There are Watchmen who rule the City, sort of like guards; cemeteries with grave diggers; magic that doesn’t really work; underground channels with boats; ugly people who own taverns; and murder. Sounds really happy, doesn’t it? I did really enjoy it though!

The characters are great and certainly, all have their own personalities, even the minor characters who we only meet once or twice, and though I did spend a lot of time trying to figure out what the twist would be (yes there’s a twist…but no, I didn’t give that away – they’ve written it on the cover, so I was expecting it. Grr), it was a nice short book which kept me reading and wondering what on earth was going to happen next.

Despite my praise of it, it had a funny ending. You know how the ‘typical’ book builds to a climax, and then there’s a chapter, or an epilogue or even a page of ‘what happens after that’, so you feel like you’ve calmed down and actually finished the story? Yeah. No. This book built and built and built and then there was the twist and the climax of the story and then…then…nothing. Oh. It’s finished? Yes. Yes it is. I could understand if there was a cliff-hanger and I had to rush out and buy the next book to find out what happens, but there wasn’t. It just sort of finished. Oh well. It’s also not as extreme as the blurb on GoodReads says it is. I think they exaggerated a bit.

There are other books after this one, so I will have to look out for them in the op shop. For a book that I grabbed off the shelf because it had a cool cover (it has textured paper!!), it was pretty cool!