J.M. Miro's Ordinary Monsters is the wholly original, haunting first installment in a historical fantasy series filled with monsters and magic. It takes the Victorian gothic aesthetic of its 1880s London setting and re-invents its lore on a global scale.
Marlowe, found as a baby in a freight car, remained safe traveling from London to San Francisco, thanks to a series of caring adoptive mothers. But no one can explain how Marlowe is able to emit a blue light and alter people's flesh. Meanwhile, teenaged Charlie Ovid, a mixed-race orphan in the postbellum American South, is imprisoned after killing a man in self-defense, with a mob of white men eager to kill him. Yet everyone is wary of Charlie's ability to heal any wounds he incurs. Alice Quicke and Coulton, representatives of the mysterious Cairndale Institute in Edinburgh, are determined to retrieve both boys. These children--called Talents--act as bridges between the living and the dead. As Alice and Coulton rush to save Marlowe and Charlie from a fast-encroaching evil, a larger battle begins at Cairndale that will determine the future of the entire world.
Miro's perfect blending of period detail and unique fantasy lore give this spectacle an engrossing, hypnotic quality. While the novel's visually and intellectually stunning world and its fast pace will keep readers turning pages, it is the chemistry and tenderness between its characters that gives Ordinary Monsters its lasting appeal. The central tension--between what is beloved and feared, valued and rejected, idealized and vilified--gives the world of the Talents its complexity, its heart and its fundamental truths. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor