Mind the Gap - Book Review

Mind the Gap by Tim Lebbon and Christopher Golden

What is it about:
Always assume there's someone after you. That was the paranoid wisdom her mother had hardwired into Jasmine Towne ever since she was a little girl. Now, suddenly on her own, Jazz is going to need every skill she has ever been taught to survive enemies both seen and unseen. For her mother had given Jazz one last invaluable piece of advice, written in her own blood.

Jazz Hide Forever

All her life Jazz has known them only as the "Uncles," and her mother seemed to fear them as much as depend on them. Now these enigmatic, black-clad strangers are after Jazz for reasons she can't fathom, and her only escape is to slip into the forgotten tunnels of London's vast underground. Here she will meet a tribe of survivors calling themselves the United Kingdom and begin an adventure that links her to the ghosts of a city long past, a father she never knew, and a destiny she fears only slightly less than the relentless killers who'd commit any crime under heaven or earth to prevent her from fulfilling it.

What did I think about it:
I got very mixed feelings about this book. The story starts out really suspenseful and exciting, but then suddenly turns into some kind of Oliver Twist in the Underground as Jazz meets some people who're not as much persons as rather grotesk caricatures. I was really waiting for the moment Jazz would (like Oliver Twist) run into her benefactor and swoon in his arms and was getting a bit disappointed by the story I must confess. Just when I was about to totally lose my patience however a new character turns up and steers the story away from the all too Dickensian plot and towards something more promising. From there on the story does indeed get full of action and suspense once more and leads to a cool conclusion. So.... In the end I did enjoy the story although I could have done without the Oliver Twist caricatures.

(I must say I wonder if Lebbon and Golden meant this whole Dickensian stuff as some kind of tribute as at one point one of the characters is reading a novel by Dickens.)

Why should you read it:
It is well written and if you don't mind the Dickens stuff a good story.