Reviewed by Hanna

I recently finished reading Catherine Fisher’s Incarceron, a YA fantasy flavored with darkness, dystopia, and a touch of Steampunk. As Mary Quattlebaum of the Washington Post says, “…nothing, including the final scene, is as it seems in this eerie, elegant fantasy…Intricately plotted and richly imagined, this novel holds the attention as inexorably as Incarceron holds its prisoners.”

As you may have deduced, Incarceron-for which the book is titled-is a prison. And it is alive. Finn is a prisoner within it, and as he struggles to find a way to escape, he also wrestles with his conviction that, unlike most everyone else inside the hellish and endless Incarceron, he is from Outside. And when he finds a crystal key which doubles as a highly technical communication device, he begins to uncover the truth-and it is stranger than he ever imagined.

Claudia Arlexa is the daughter of the cold and calculating Warden of Incarceron. Outside, bound by a society intentionally stuck in a world without any progress-imprisoned by what the rulers call Protocol-she is desperate to escape her own prison: a life of manipulation (and marriage) at court. And when she steals her father’s crystal key, a copy of Finn’s inside the prison, she begins to uncover a web of lies and deceit that lead her to shocking truths… about everything she has ever considered certain.

Not only is the book fresh and dazzlingly original, it is stacked with layers of depth. While the plights of Claudia and Finn arrest the reader to the point of making the book almost unputdownable, Fisher builds up her fantasy world with a masterful hand, and sows in subtle hints of philosophy; questioning freedom, faith, self-understanding, and the presence of good an evil within each individual. While archetypal figures are sprinkled in as secondaries (ie., the Sorceress Queen, the obsession-driven Mentor, the foolish Prince, and the kind Scholar), Finn and Claudia are new types altogether, and raw enough to be quite real. Finn, for example, is a compulsive liar with a good heart; while Claudia is cunning and several times described as “haughty”. Neither one is portrayed as entirely good, and yet they are presented as the protagonists with which the reader should identify.

By both defying and embracing archetypes, Fisher creates a story that is surprising even without plot twists. (And be assured: there are still plenty of those.) The prose is sinuous, glittering, even breathtaking at times, making each sentence a pleasure to read. The book ends with a clear path pointing toward a sequel, but it still stands alone well enough. For those readers with darker tastes, this book is a wonderful choice. It hints vaguely at a Hunger Games-type feel, with its mix of old-fashioned atmosphere and high-technology, and should therefore appeal also to Steampunk and dystopian junkies. (Comparable authors include Garth Nix, Suzanne Collins, Nancy Farmer, and Scott Westerfeld.)

Though the United States only published the book this past January, Incarceron has been a worldwide, award-winning success since 2007; and its sequel, Sapphique, since 2008. Sapphique will be published in the U.S. by Dial Books this coming December.

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