Abstract
Reviewed by: Beautiful City of the Dead Cindy Welch Watts, Leander Beautiful City of the Dead. Houghton, 2006254p ISBN 0-618-59443-4$16.00 R Gr. 6-12 On her first day at a new high school, Zee meets Relly, the boy with "deep red, almost purple" eyes, who loves the same metalhead music she does and seems to exude a shimmery heat. He is part of an as yet unknown four-piece band, Scorpio Bone, and she auditions as a bass player for him, a drummer named Butt, and a surpassingly beautiful lead singer called Jerod. From the first song, each senses they are creating something beyond regular music, something Relly calls "ghost music," when the sound is so loud and overwhelming that it creates a silence in which other sounds can be heard. The four are actually elementals, gods of fire (Relly), [End Page 41] water (Zee), air (Jerod), and earth (Butt) who have been drawn together to form a unit, "just four and no more." They aren't the only elementals in town, though, and a rival group that includes the assistant principal and a biology teacher from Zee and Relly's school wants Zee to replace their own mysteriously missing water element. She resists the lure of adult power and the subsequent mind games and physical threats, but when fragile Relly is kidnapped, Zee agrees to complete the rival quartet. Treachery is afoot: they mean to offer Relly as a sacrifice rather than free him, and Scorpio Bone confronts them in a final struggle for power. Watts' latest offering maintains the darkly atmospheric mood of his earlier works (Ten Thousand Charms, BCCB 5/05) while moving the setting to today's Goth culture, where song lyrics come from gravestone inscriptions and bands are named Brain Hammer and Little Black Pill. Though a few supernatural details remain puzzling, the potential love story between Relly and Zee, the supernatural rivalry between teens and adults, and the musical interludes will keep readers turning pages deep into the night. Copyright © 2006 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
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