Michael Marshall Smith

It's not every day that the Devil knocks on your door From the critically-acclaimed author of Only Forward comes a delightful new tale about Hannah, a young girl living a mundane existence in California, who discovers that her grandfather has been friends with the Devil for the past 150 years . . . and now, they need her help.

Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

Moray Lyle McIntosh

*I received a free advance copy of this book in return for an honest review*

Hannah's parents have split up and they are all having trouble coping with the new situation. In an attempt to get some space to adjust her father sends her to stay with her grandfather, an eccentric wanderer who just happens to work for the Devil. The Devil. The problem is that the Devil has just emerged from several years of "sleep" and things have gone wrong in his absence, the essential balance of evil in the world is shifting and he needs his old employee's help. Oh, and there's a demon cheeky, simple-minded demon called Vaneclaw that happens to resemble a large mushroom.

There's a slightly rocky start and Marshal Smith takes a little while to find his feet in the narrative and to establish the tone. For a while I wondered how the strands were going to come together when the tone was sometimes wildly different. Hannah is an enjoyable protagonist sitting on just the right side of precocious, she entertainingly cynical and world-weary without losing her childish qualities. The Devil is the Devil and he does Bad Things, but this is the devil in his most relatable form, a part of the necessary balance between good and evil . He's bad, but he's not all bad. My unease was with the trio of criminals that form the antagonist group, some of their segments were really rather dark, in a way that I found difficult to reconcile with the more typical YA fare of the rest of the narrative. It's a problem that was never fully resolved with moments of unexpected violence that were just a shade too much.

Aside from this I found myself enjoying the story more and more. The interactions between the Devil and his dry deadpan delivery and Vaneclaw's silly puns and asinine comments are amusing and the relationship between the Devil and Hannah's grandfather in an inventive take on the age-old trope of making deals with the Devil, though a little more development would have been very welcome. Hannah is funny, brave hero out to save her parents and the world while grappling with the changes wrought by their split. She wants them to reunite but a conflict of potentially biblical proportions puts everything into perspective, even for an eleven-year-old! Once the tone (mostly) settled it was a fun, pacy ride with enough originality and style to make it truly enjoyable. The balance between the morals of the story, the sly humour and the acknowledgement of the darkness out there in the world definitely placed it in the better class of YA, with just enough depth to keep young readers and adults (children at heart) happy.

Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

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