Putting the “urban” in urban fantasy
Kiki Strike: Into the Shadow City
by Kirsten Miller
The mere sight of an official-looking person seals men’s lips. These youngsters however, go everywhere and hear everything. They are as sharp as needles too; all they want is organization.
— Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet
Imagine Sherlock Holmes—detachment, intellect, and interpersonal foibles intact—as a twelve-year-old albino girl. Give her five improbably and delightfully skilled girl-scout-reject companions called, collectively, the Irregulars. Set them on a mission that sends them scurrying through a forgotten city beneath Manhattan, a restored castle on Roosevelt Island, and the halls of an elite private school on the Upper East Side. Throw in a series of narrative narrative asides explaining things like:
- How to Follow Someone Without Getting Caught
- How to Take Advantage of Being a Girl
- How to Plan an Escape Route
- How to Tell a Lie
...and you have Kiki Strike: Inside the Shadow City.
It’s cute. If I’d had it around when I was twelve, I’d have read it till the covers fell off and copied the helpful asides into a notebook to keep by my bed. I’d probably also have a criminal record, but it might have been worth it. The book’s quick pace glosses over events that strain the reader’s credulity, and the combination of espionage and urban archeology is clever and engaging.
But does it work for older readers? I blew through it in a few hours and enjoyed myself immensely while reading, but the very slickness that makes Kiki Strike go down like a fresh, sweet oyster left me a little unnerved after I’d finished it. As a grownup, I can see the work that went into making this book so marketable, and I’m not naive enough to think that sort of thing happens by accident—particularly not after spending a few evenings poring over the whole 17th Street Productions book-packaging debacle.
The six girls who make up the Irregulars are a suspiciously multicultural crew, each with her own specialized skill; they feel more than a little like literary Bratz dolls. Miller emphasizes the book’s girl-power message enough to be perfectly clear without bludgeoning her young readers, and her narrator, Ananka, is a carefully drawn everygirl—not too good or too bad at anything. The Irregulars even have their own marketing-friendly icon, which is reproduced all over the book’s website. All told, the book feels as though it’s been edited just a hair too heavily.
But what am I complaining about? The book is a piece of openly commercial fiction, and if it’s a smarter, more engaging work than most of the terrible girly YA franchises around, then great—right? Thing is, there are glimmers of something even more interesting throughout the book. The spooky early scenes in which Ananka follows Kiki through a silent, snow-covered Central Park (where Kiki serves up Buffy-style vigilante justice in a plot thread that’s never really resolved) promise something luminous and strange that never entirely materializes. In some of the moments in which Ananka’s fragile trust is shaken, you can feel her growing older and more careful in the space of a few sentences. But the pace at which the book careens toward its rather guessable ending prevents any of these moments from blooming into something deeper.
Kiki Strike performs beautifully as a high-speed, stylish adventure that doubles as a girl’s guide to adventure and self-defense. (It even avoids the obligatory adolescent romance subplot I expected to see shoehorned in near the end.) I suspect that the author will be able to offer even more by stepping back from her publisher’s marketing plan and crystalizing the emotional moments that could make her next book a classic.
Research on Amazon, buy from Powell’s.
