My thanks to the nice people at Hodder for sending the book. Older children will take a great deal from the underlying themes of authoritarianism, propaganda, corruption and future regression. I loved it.Īt over four hundred pages, Incarceron is perhaps too long for some of the youngest fans of fantasy, but its smart pace and strong characters will captivate almost any keen young reader of ten and up. By the end, readers are desperately rooting for Claudia and Finn in a barnstorming rollercoaster ride.

And it is this bildungsroman aspect of Incarceron which is its real hook. Their journeys of personal discovery may well be filled with pain, but they are the path to a better future. Yet there is hope, and it lies in Claudia and Finn. Escaping from one to the other is really little more than leaping from the frying pan into the fire.

The Prison is a Mad Max world of feral and failed industrialism while the Outside is stifling, corrupt and unequal. The narrative is tense and fast-moving with a real atmosphere of menace and the twin worlds juxtapose wonderfully to create equally failing environments. In fact, a lot of the time, Incarceron reminded me of Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale in its world's rejection of technology and insistence on archaic and feudal relationships. You can see Alan Garner in these themes, but you can also see adult writers such as Margaret Atwood. Liberty, free speech, propaganda and the search for both personal truths and the truths hidden by those in authority are very contemporary issues but also represent age old debates. Interestingly, Incarceron isn't set in a particular future - it could be Earth, it could be some fictional world - but its themes are both universal and specific. And they set upon a path that will make Incarceron and Outside collide. When both Finn and Claudia find identical crystal keys, they are able to communicate with one another. Claudia, the Warden's daughter, is caught up in an arranged marriage and an assassination plot. The court is a place of intrigue and plot and politics and the only one who knows the truth about Incarceron's failed experiment is its Warden.

Technology has been rejected in favour of an authoritarian and feudal regime which insists on everything in Era - a peculiar regression to the age of lords and ladies, courtly manners and transport by carriage. And in a place where the prison has taken on a life of its own, what hope is there? One young prisoner, Finn, has visions that give him hope. Incarceron is a sealed world of savagery where dreams of escape are the only crumbs of comfort. A century and a half previously, all criminals and dissenters were sent to Incarceron along with seventy of the Sapienti, a caste of mystics, scientists and healers, in order to create a paradise from a hell. Sealed away, it is believed by those on the Outside to be a paradise, the ultimate in rehabilitation theory. Incarceron is a prison - the prison - of the future.

Incarceron by catherine fisher