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The Dark Lady

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Written with the kind of lyrical dexterity and power that one would expect from Akala, The Dark Lady references the Bard's sonnets as well as crafting an uncompromising of street life in Renaissance England' - All About Ipswich Henry had a magical gift; one he’d used to help Joan – but could it get him out of the dire situation he was now in? The stinking streets of London no longer seemed safe to him. The book reads like an incredibly long intro and spends inordinate amounts of time on pointless exposition, long-winded and repetitive descriptions of London and life in Tudor times (which I ought to have found interesting, given how much the subject generally fascinates me), and scenarios that contribute little or nothing to story or character development. Fifteen-year-old Henry lives in poverty in the care of a pair of apothecary sisters. A skilled thief and writer of sonnets, he has an additional extraordinary gift — he “can close his eyes and read languages”. Letters become “colours, shapes, sounds and musical notes. Always a different pattern emerged and it was endlessly beautiful”. And, with brown skin inherited from his absent Beninese mother, Henry is subject to racism, with England’s insularity and prejudice pertinently portrayed — the rhetoric of foreigners “stealing jobs” is all too familiar. I enjoyed the historical setting, I enjoyed the poetry that grows and evolves throughout, and I enjoyed the mystery to this story surrounding Henry's mother, the woman haunting his dreams, and those bold paragraphs in between each chapter - paragraphs that felt out of place with this book at first, but now that I've finished this story... I completely understand their significance, and they've made me very excited at the prospect of more to come.

Age recommendation and challenging content: Some violence – e.g. there is a reference to the death of a child and a stabbing near the beginning. Recommended for Year 9 or above. It takes quite a while for anything interesting to happen but it does get going with a burglary. There is the continual mystery of his mother, the role of the 'witches' in his upbringing and of course, this magical gift which isn't really clarified. I guess that Akala was trying to suggest something about the magic of writing... but I'm only guessing. Personally I would have loved to see more of the dramatic magic of the witches. But maybe that would have changed the genre. Lol Ali, Syed Hamad (19 September 2013). "English rapper Akala unplugged". gulfnews.com . Retrieved 17 April 2020. Henry is an orphan, an outsider, a thief. He is also a fifteen-year-old invested with magical powers ... Akala". Brighton.ac.uk . Retrieved 21 May 2020. He told graduates: "I can't lie, I often envy those of you who do get to go, people like you … who are about to remake the world, or at least this country. That's how serious these four years are. What will you do with the time you spent here and the education you have been privileged to be loaned by the rest of society?

The set-up for the novel is not so bad. Tudor England is a particular interest of mine, so the historical setting immediately had me intrigued. The focus on reading and literature also sounded awesome. Additionally, like our protagonist, I'm a huge fan of Shakespeare, so I had high hopes that pulling the Bard into the story might make for some fascinating, nerdy reading. The duke realised that Henry has a gift. So now Henry is a prisoner with extraordinary gifts. He’s been tested on how his gift works, then he is brought to a room with men and they get him to show everyone his gift, Henry’s gift is that he can write out any book that is handed to him.

I think this book isn’t a young YA book but more of an adult kinda books. I seriously will buy ice-cream to the younger generation that read this book. He has chosen to use slang from Tudor times, but as the rest of his prose bears little or no resemblance to how people spoke at that time, the inserted slang just feels jarring and confusing. Seeing as the prose is also interspersed with obviously modern phrases and idioms, the result is a linguistic mess that puts you in doubt whether English is in fact Akala's native language. In fact, the prose bears a similarity to that frequently written by confused Americans attempting to sound English. Given that Akala actually is British, I find this rather impressive.

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It's not because the story itself took a different turn that I wasn't expecting - though that's definitely one of the reasons why. It's because even though I was very excited to dive into this book, I was only three chapters in when I was already considering DNFing it. It was slow-moving almost instantly, and I just found that I was not connecting with this story whatsoever, and I could just feel it putting me into a reading slump already; I just knew that this book was not for me. There are a wealth of resources online already from Akala to support teaching Shakespeare to students which would accompany this text well. Henry and his cousins Mary and Matthew pass the time and earn some precious money by robbing more well to do houses in London. One night Matthew tells of a commission he's had for them to steal a particular item of jewellery from a Duke's house. They get disturbed, Matthew gets away but Mary and Henry get caught and their lives change forever. Henry has a 'gift' that the Duke exploits, but will he conform to the high life at the expense of his heritage and true family? Akala weaves in historical figures including William Shakespeare himself, who is Henry’s idol. Henry writes poetry, even scrawling verse on the walls during his stint as a prisoner in a dungeon. All Henry’s sonnets are inscribed within the novel, often in the standard font and inset in italics as well.

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