Wildspark: A Ghost Machine Adventure

By Author / Illustrator

Vashti Hardy

Genre

Adventure

Age range(s)

Publisher

Scholastic

ISBN

9781407191553

Format

Paperback / softback

Published

02-05-2019

Synopsis

Winner of the Blue Peter Award 2020. A mind-bending adventure from the author of Brightstorm! A year after the death of her older brother, Prue Haywood's family is still shattered by grief. But everything changes when a stranger arrives at the farm. A new, incredible technology has been discovered in the city of Medlock, where a secretive guild of inventors have developed a way to capture spirits of the dead in animal-like machines, bringing them back to life. Prue knows that the \"Ghost Guild\" might hold the key to bringing her brother back, so she seizes the stranger's offer to join as an apprentice. But to find her brother, she needs to find a way to get the ghost machines to remember the people they used to be. Yet if Prue succeeds, all of society could come apart...

Reviews

Prue and her brother Francis live on a farm with their parents. They both have a gift for engineering and producing mechanical marvels that help out with the work around the farm. Cruelly early, Francis dies and the family are bereft. When a strange visitor to the farm asks for Francis (not knowing of his death) to join the Ghost Guild in the city of Medlock and put his skills towards building animal like machines that are powered by the spirits of the recently deceased, Prue deceives her parents and pretends to be Frances, explaining away the error in the name as a spelling mistake. Her hope is to learn enough as an apprentice to be able to bring Francis's spirit back to life within an artificial body and take him home to her grieving parents.

Whilst in Medlock, learning the craft from the Masters, things get very complicated indeed and Prue is called upon to make the most heart-breaking of decisions to save the Guild.

Wildspark is Vashti Hardy's second book, and is sure to be as popular as her first. The fantasy world is brilliantly constructed with its blend of animals that are really animals and lifelike mechanical animals that are inhabited by reawakened human spirits. The technological marvels that surround the Ghost Guild Factorium and the processes involved in harnessing a recently deceased spirit and installing it in a 'personificate' are described in great and imaginative detail.

Readers will be enthralled by the new world that the author has created and there is so much else here to exercise young (and not so young!) minds. The top engineers, for example, are all called 'Masters', irrespective of gender. Protest groups campaign for the rights of 'personificates'. The hateful Cora may not be as hateful as she seems and Prue may not be the only one hiding the truth.

Serious questions of love, loyalty, grief and the desperate yearning to bring back someone who has died are all raised here. Edwin's comment, 'the thing that makes us who we are is not the outer body, but something deep inside, and our bodies, whether flesh or ghost machine, are just a shell', opens up a whole conversation about what it means to be human. All in all, a fantastic book for a confident young reader and a marvellous class novel.

448 pages / Reviewed by June Hughes, school librarian