J. M. Miro

A STUNNING NEW WORK OF HISTORICAL FANTASY, J. M. MIRO'S ORDINARY MONSTERS INTRODUCES READERS TO THE DARK, LABYRINTHINE WORLD OF THE TALENTS England, 1882. In Victorian London, two children with mysterious powers are hunted by a figure of darkness—a man made of smoke. Sixteen-year-old Charlie Ovid, despite a brutal childhood in Mississippi, doesn't have a scar on him. His body heals itself, whether he wants it to or not. Marlowe, a foundling from a railway freight car, shines with a strange bluish light. He can melt or mend flesh. When a jaded female detective is recruited to escort them to safety, all three begin a journey into the nature of difference, and belonging, and the shadowy edges of the monstrous. What follows is a story of wonder and betrayal, from the gaslit streets of London, and the wooden theatres of Meiji-era Tokyo, to an eerie estate outside Edinburgh where other children with gifts - the Talents - have been gathered. There, the world of the dead and the world of the living threaten to collide. And as secrets within the Institute unfurl, Marlowe, Charlie and the rest of the Talents will discover the truth about their abilities, and the nature of what is stalking them: that the worst monsters sometimes come bearing the sweetest gifts. Riveting in its scope, exquisitely written, Ordinary Monsters presents a catastrophic vision of the Victorian world—and of the gifted, broken children who must save it.

A Novel

Ordinary Monsters

Sophia 

But when Pinkertons sons rose to power she was let go, all because she was a woman, and therefore delicate, and therefore not right for detective work. She put her fist through the wall of William Pinkertons office when he fired her.

"Your fucking wall is delicate," she said to him.

I think all of chapter 11 has me on the brink of puking from anxiety. Mistakes were made by these adults. 

Apiecalypse Jen

Remmi Ahmed

All around her lay the shabby riverside stillness of a city still pretty in all its architecture, all of it built on the backs of slaves, pretty like a poisonous flower. 

That was the summer the cholera burned through the old quarter. Ir came in a fury, and faded with the autumn rains, but came again the next summer, so that the dead were stacked like cut wood in the muggy streets and the shops stood empty and the hollow-eyed survivors burned incense to appease whatever angry spirit was killing their loved ones.

Ordinary Monsters quotes

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