Prometheus High: How to make a monster (Stuart Wilson, Puffin)
Stuart Wilson’s debut middle-grade novel, the first in a series, will appeal to 8–12-year-olds looking for an adventure tale with a macabre edge. Athena Strange, an intelligent yet unruly young teen, has just come back from a school suspension when she almost blows up her house resurrecting her neighbour’s dead cat. Thankfully, before she gets into even more trouble, Athena is scouted and whisked off to Prometheus High, a mysterious school for gifted science students to ‘conduct experiments’ without endangering themselves. Of course, Prometheus High, located aboard an old ocean liner, is rife with danger. The school’s purpose? Reanimating the dead. In studying subjects like Galvanism and Replantation, students learn to make their own ‘creations’. Yet as Frankenstein taught us, messing with the dead can have disastrous consequences. There is a murder at the school that Athena is determined to solve, as well as a werewolf zombie, untrustworthy teachers, missing corpses, an ominous ‘watcher’ and midnight misadventures. This quirky novel is a lot of fun and Wilson creates a vivid world. Yet with its genre-blending, action-packed plot and a few too many caricatures, there perhaps isn’t enough room left for a satisfying emotional payoff. Nonetheless, with a lone wolf protagonist who must learn to embrace friendship and the help of her peers, Prometheus High is, at its heart, a story about struggling to fit in, having patience and the importance of teamwork.
Charlotte Callander is a bookseller at Antipodes Bookshop and Gallery and an educator at Melbourne Museum.
