Review of Lucretia and the Kroons by Victor LaValle

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Format Read: eGalley
Source: from the publisher in exchange for an honest review
Release Date: July 23, 2012
Buying Links: Amazon* | OmniLit* | Barnes & Noble
* affiliate links; the blog receives a small commission for purchases made through these links.

Blurb from goodreads:

Lucretia’s best friend and upstairs neighbor Sunny—a sweet pitbull of a kid, even as she struggles with a mysterious illness—has gone missing. The only way to get her back is for Lucretia to climb the rickety fire escape of their Queens tenement and crawl through the window of apartment 6D, portal to a vast shadowland of missing kids ruled by a nightmarish family of mutants whose designs on the children are unknown. Her search for Sunny takes Lucretia through a dark fantasyland where she finds lush forests growing from concrete, pigeon-winged rodents, and haunted playgrounds. Her quest ultimately forces her to confront the most frightening specter of all: losing, forever, the thing you love the most.

Lucretia and the Kroons is a dazzlingly imaginative adventure story and a moving exploration of the power of friendship and the terror of loss. This all-new novella serves as the perfect companion piece to The Devil in Silver, a thrillingly suspenseful work of literary horror that continues the story of Lucretia.

Bea's Thoughts:

The story starts off slowly, laying the foundation. We meet Lucretia, Loochie, her family, and her ailing friend Sunny. Loochie is twelve and anxious to be older; she worries that she's not developing as quickly as other girls in her class and she's worried about Sunny's health while at the same time in denial about it. I was expecting a dark fantasy/horror story but what I got was a contemporary dark fantasy with hints of "Alice in Wonderland" set in an inner-city. It's both gritty and horrific. The Kroons sound like an urban myth but they are all too real.

"Lucretia and the Kroons" is a horror story, a love story, a story of friendship, loyalty, hope, and death. A mix of the expected and the unexpected, it's a dark story; some children might find the material difficult to deal with but many young teens and tweens will be able to relate to Loochie and her life. A plus for me was that both Loochie and Sunny are people of color, not white, and yet that wasn't the point of the story, it was just part of who they were. I appreciate stories where there's diversity but it's just part of the story and isn't the point.

Trigger warnings- children dying and cancer.