Forgotten Book: PIXIE DUST by Henry Melton
By Scott A. Cupp, on November 4th, 2010
Pixie Dust by Henry Melton, © 2010 trade paperback, Wire Rim Books
This is the 22nd in my series of Forgotten Books
"Pixie Dust" by Henry Melton
PIXIE DUST is the latest YA book from Henry Melton. It is the story of Jenny Quinn, a graduate student in physics at the University of Texas who is working on a project with her professor when things go badly. There is an explosion and things are muddled. Professor Williams, her advisor, is killed in a freak accident the next day. Then strange things start to happen. Jenny is petite, 4’10’ less than 100 pounds. As a result of the explosion she finds herself infused with dark matter which begins to eat away at her, causing her to lose weight but giving her the ability to fly.
There’s a fair bit of physics here as Jenny learns to control her abilities and experiments to see the limits of what she can do. As a fan of comics as a child, she is intrigued by her own origin story and the various failures of her testing, like nearly freezing when she goes more than 10,000 feet up.
She is keeping her abilities a secret until things are well documented and she can present the findings of the research she and Williams have done. When her apartment is ransacked and her notes destroyed, she suspects that life may not be as easy as she thinks. Then her apartment is blown up when she should have been inside. She decides to escape. She winds up in a carnival, selling cotton candy, under the name of Tinkerbell.
From the carnival she finds herself unable to stay hidden and must eventually learn to trust some people who help her resolve the mysteries.
This is a very fun young adult novel. It is highly readable and laid out as if it were a continuing comic book series. Instead of chapters, he calls the sections Issues. Issue one is “Origin Story”, Chapter Two is “I Can Fly!”
I have a few small quibbles with book, I thought the first paragraph was a tiny bit jarring and could have been easily fixed with the deletion of one word or the addition of a couple of commas and another word. I also had a little trouble with the early carnival section as I sold cotton candy myself. That sugar pervades everything and gets everywhere. It dominates your life. I literally had to hose off after a shift before I could get in my car. There was red sugar everywhere, up your nose, in your ears, everywhere. But these are minor quibbles on my part.
There are things that need to be told here. Henry Melton is one of my oldest friends. Aside from occasional commenter Guy Plunkett, I have known and kept in touch with Henry longer than anyone else. We met in the fall of 1970 when we were both first attending the University of Texas. I was a freshman; Henry was a junior college transfer. We discovered we liked many of the same things and spent much time that first year doing things. We went to bookstores, listened to Henry’s reel-to-reel tapes (everything from Broadway shows to the Moody Blues), and we wrote short stories. We both wanted to be writers. Our early works were not that great (though I still have a fond spot for “The Great Wolfbane Fogging Device”, an unpublishable story of mine).
All that said, I cannot be totally unbiased about his work. Keep that in mind.
Henry’s novels that I have read (EMPEROR DAD, ROSWELL OR BUST, and GOLDEN GIRL) are easily at home on my shelf with the likes of the YA novels of Heinlein, Norton, and Clarke. You should check them out. The books are readily available from the normal sources online and in various eBook formats too.
Series organizer Patti Abbott hosts more Friday Forgotten Book reviews at her own blog, and posts a complete list of participating blogs.
Review: Pixie Dust by Henry Melton
retweet
Posted by Teen Guru at 11:35 AM
Reactions:
funny (0)
interesting (0)
cool (0)
Pixie Dust by Henry Melton
Publisher: Wire Rim Books
April 1, 2010
ISBN-10: 0980225388
ISBN-13: 978-0980225389
Available Formats: Ebook, Paperback
Purchase Links: Goodreads, Amazon, Author website
For Readers 14+
Book provided by author for this review.
Book Description:
Jenny Quinn’s life was on course for her advanced physics degree until a lab experiment in vacuum decay turned her life upside down. With career hopes destroyed and her professor dead in an unexplained fall, she is forced to cope with a strange change in her own body. With nothing but her own resources, a childhood infatuation with old comic books may be her only guide to help solve the twin mysteries of cutting edge physics and the murder of her professor, before one or the other puzzle gets her killed.
My thoughts...
After a strange yet slow building beginning… Pixie Dust picks up quickly with the non-stop action. Jenny's life changes and not for the good when her professor inexplicably dies after a mysterious fall. She finds herself in a world of trouble. Jenny learns how hard it is to find someone she can trust. Jenny turns to her an old obsession... Comic book and clues to help her solve the mystery of her professor’s death.
Henry Melton is one creative and wildly entertaining author. Never knew how and why authors can drag out the storyline in the beginning… now I do… That is how they get readers sucked in, forcing them to keep on reading the very end.
I admit ... I was wondering why Henry was giving us such a slow start. Then it literally hit me… That was Henry's plan all along to tease me with this and keep me from letting this book go. Boy, am I ever glad I did not give up reading Pixie Dust.
The action, the suspense, and the romance between Shawn and Jenny are just what every reader can wish for in a book.
Thanks to Henry for sending me another of his awesome novels and once again giving me another chance to review them.
I hope this will be a good enough review for my blog readers to check out Pixie Dust and many of Henry Melton’s wonderful selection of books.
I give Pixie Dust a rating 4 out 5 Pink Kittens!
Book reviewed by:
Veronica
4 Pink Kittens, Henry Melton, REVIEW
Monday, May 31, 2010
Henry Melton's been reviewed here on the blog before, and I've enjoyed all his books. This one's a bit different from the others. It's a big longer, I think, and the protagonist is a bit older, but it should still fit into the YA market and be attractive to older folks like me, too.
Jenny Quinn's working on an advanced degree in physics. During an experiment, things go wrong, and odd stuff begins to happen. Jenny's major professor dies in an accident. We mystery fans know about that kind of accident, and sure enough, this book is an SF mystery, one of those hybrids that's not easy to bring off, but Melton does it. It's also an "origin story." When Jenny starts to experience certain, um, powers, she has no real idea of what to do. But she thinks of a good source of guidance: comic books.
And when Jenny has to go on the run, she winds up living with carnies. So we have a mystery, some SF puzzlers, and carnies, all in the same book. There's more, but that should be a surprise. And there's even a good final twist. You can't go wrong. Check it out.
0 Reader(s) Responded Posted by Benjie at 8:30 AM
©2010 Wire Rim Books, Hutto, Texas
I first encountered Henry Melton’s Young Adult Science Fiction a couple of years ago with his sophomore outing for the “Small Towns, Big Ideas” series, Roswell or Bust, and I was hooked. Having not been a fan of SciFi, but a big fan of YA fiction, I approached the read with trepidation. After that book, I find myself waiting (sometimes impatiently) for his next book.
This latest offering is a slight departure from the “STBI” series in that it’s set—not in a small town—in the city of Austin, Texas, and the featured character is slightly older than his typically high school-aged hero. He addresses this discrepancy by creating a new series—“Home Planet Adventures.”
Now to the reading, Jenny Quinn is a budding physicist working on her graduate project dealing with a new substance identified simply as dark matter. An accident in transporting the dark matter results in her personal contamination with the stuff, and the death of her professor.
Losing her professor, her research, and her desire to continue her education in one fell swoop, Jenny finds herself on the run, trying to hide the fact that she now can fly. She finds unlikely friendship in a lone trucker and refuge among the Carnies of a traveling show. By the end of the story, she’ll have opportunity to bring to life her brother’s comic book heroes and discover the truth about her professor’s death.
Melton jumps directly into the action with the catastrophe involving a dark matter explosion, and keeps everything moving as Jenny finds a way to keep herself alive and moving while hiding her new ability from the public view. The author also gets a chance to give tribute to his own childhood infatuation with the comic book industry not only with the story line, but also by dividing the story into numbered “issues” representing each segment of the tale. If you like SciFi you’ll want to read this book; if you like comic books, it will be fun as well; if you’re a Henry Melton reader, you won’t want to miss this outing.
Four out of five reading glasses.
—Benjamin Potter, May 26, 2010
Labels: Henry Melton, Science Fiction, Young Adult
MONDAY, APRIL 12, 2010
Pixie Dust is award-winning author Henry Melton’s newest YA sci-fi novel.
In it, Jenny Quinn, a physicist getting her advanced degree, is involved in an experiment involving vacuum decay (um, what, right?) that goes awry. A huge discovery is made, but then her professor dies in an accident – an accident she finds suspicious. But just as soon as she finishes grieving and begins detecting a bit, she realizes that the incident with the lab experiment left some big changes in her own body. It’s infected her somehow. Now, Jenny has to figure out what is going on and doesn’t know if she’ll even survive long enough to find out the truth about what happened to her professor.
Okay, physics ain’t my thing. I never was very into math – probably my weakest subject. Science was interesting – but physics??? Talk about gibberish! So, I was taken a bit aback at the detail and intelligence that Henry Melton seemed to portray in Jenny Quinn’s character. I have no way of verifying that all of the basic theories brought up in Pixie Dust are correct, but I found myself convinced rather quickly that our main character is a very, very smart gal. It was easy to go with the flow and not stress out too much that I had no idea what they were talking about when it came to physics. It didn’t distract from the story at all.
It wasn’t long before I found myself really connecting with Jenny. She’s a bit of a loner, still grieving past losses, and trying her best to be independent. She’s likable and quite unique as a main character, especially in a sci-fi novel.
The plot is expertly laid out, slowly revealed piece by piece. For the first 50 to 60 pages or so, I was very intrigued and never bored, but not very invested. But quickly thereafter, things really started to pick up speed and the suspense began intensifying. I was turning pages quite eagerly, needing to know what would happen next. There was a slow build almost throughout the entire novel, and the climax did not disappoint.
There’s a cool, updated, understated version of superhero genesis going on in Pixie Dust – though I don’t want to give away too much. Henry Melton keeps it from going too cliché, yet still manages to embrace the inspiration from comic books that Jenny herself has a passion for. The character development is great! By the end you feel like you really know Jenny, as well as various background characters.
Pixie Dust is entertaining and gripping, sometimes dark and disquieting, subtly romantic, delves into family issues and managed to surprise me with the final twist. I enjoyed the way the novel was split up into sections, and took you to places you wouldn’t expect. It wasn’t one of those books that was easy to predict where it was going, or what would happen next.
I really, really enjoyed Pixie Dust and I think it has a lot of crossover appeal from sci-fi fans, YA fans in general, and adults who would just like a good read. There’s a little of everything in Pixie Dust – highly recommended!!!
Henry Melton Science Fiction Writer
Published March 26, 2010 by:
View Profile | Follow | Add to Favorites
Pixie Dust
Henry Melton, Young Adult Science Fiction Writer, has a new book out.
Pixie Dust is a departure from his younger YA work in that Jenny Quinn is an older protagonist working towards her advanced physics degree. When a lab experiment goes wrong resulting in the death of her professor Jenny is suddenly without a chance to get her degree in her chosen profession. Besides this disaster the lab accident left her with strange changes in her body.
With no other guidance Jenny resorts to her old comic books for instruction on how to deal with this new phenomenon.
The combination of murder mystery, science fiction and comic book collector makes for a compelling and enjoyable read.
Be sure and check out Henry Melton's website http://www.henrymelton.com/0/Home.html
where you can read some of his short stories for fee.
Henry Melton also offers the opportunity to read the first fifty pages of his currently published books as well as some valuable links for writers.