BOOK REVIEW: Son Of Death by Andrew McDonald

Shane | 12 March 2015 | Reply

BOOK REVIEW: Son Of Death by Andrew McDonald
Random House
February 2015
Reviewed by Shane Pinnegar
8 ½ /10

How’d you like to wake up one day and find that your Dad isn’t just a mild mannered employee at the tax office, but is also a Grim Reaper? That’s what happens to Sod, a fourteen-year old who struggles to come to grips with finding out the hard way that Dad isn’t a murderer, but is actually helping souls onto the next plane after they pass.

There’s trouble in the family business, though, with Reaping CEO Uncle Rodge up to something, and the super-rich Williamsburg family setting about turning themselves into zombividuals – embalmed corpses whose souls refused to go to the afterlife, and can continue eternally on earth.

More importantly, Sod finds himself falling for the school goth, Graveyard Girl, and evicted from his beloved band, The BaDonka-Donks.

Son Of Death is a wildly inventive Young Adult title written by Melbourne-born Andrew McDonald. A full-steam-ahead story, it combines rock n’ roll with ghoulish shenanigans, a hefty dose of gross-out gore (sure to be loved by the mid-teens in its targets) and some real tragedy with an ending you simply will not have seen coming.

Easy to read, but never talking down to its youthful audience, Son Of Death is a winner.