Tin by Pádraig Kenny (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Tin by Pádraig Kenny
Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-338-27755-5 $16.99
E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-338-27757-9 $10.99
Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 5-7
In Britain, engineers create robot creatures known as mechanicals in the form of [End Page 300] children (adult forms have been outlawed). Christopher, an orphan with spotty memories working at a scrapyard of misfit creations, learns that he’s not, in fact, a boy but a special class of mechanical, a result of Refined Propulsion (illegal ensouling). Christopher is subsequently kidnapped by a skillful yet despicable engineer with dreams of an ensouled army to make Britain “great again,” and the scrapyard’s ragtag gang of young mechanicals plus a human girl seek out Cormier, the only other engineer with the know-how necessary to get Christopher back. Kenny cleverly imagines a world with as much techno-magical innovation as bureaucratic intrigue and places his kids at its core. Scientific, historical, and political details are dispensed like breadcrumbs throughout but never overwhelm this story of juvenile protagonists seeking some truth about what it means to be real.
