Skulduggery Pleasant

Landy, D. (2007). Skulduggery Pleasant. New York: HarperCollins.

When Gordon Edgley, the writer for horror novels dies, he leaves everything to his twelve year old niece, Stephanie.  With this, came a whole new world, one with magic, adventure and lots of danger.  She meets Skulduggery Pleasant, a skeleton wizard detective.  Together they try to find out the reasons for her uncle's death, and she starts to believe that her uncle's horror novels were not completely fiction.  

Evaluative Criteria:

Theme: The main conflict described in Skulduggery Pleasant is good versus evil. When Stephanie’s(Valkerie Cain) uncle, Gordon Edgley, dies everyone thinks he dies of natural causes. But his good friend (skeleton detective) Skulduggery Pleasant thinks he has been murdered. Together with Stephanie, they go on the hunt to destroy the evil Nefarian Serpine who is their primary suspect in the murder. They must stop him before he gains too much power and brings back the Faceless Ones.

Style: Derek Landy the author of Skuldruggery Pleasant introduces the reader to a dark, sarcastic, and yet at times pleasant much like his name-Skuldruggery Pleasant. Throughout the book Landy uses conversations with Stephanie to characterize Skuldruggery. His sarcastic tone is consistent throughout the story. Even when the story reaches a tense moment, Skuldruggery comes up with his one liners to break the tense ice adding a hint of comic relief to the story. His sarcastic tone is very of today’s times which makes the reader want more of Skuldruggery Pleasant.

Book Trailer:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XE87tuzw0kM