Looking For a Good Book

Fourteen year old Nick, his younger brother, and their father move into an old, run-down Victorian house that they’ve inherited. It’s a little bit eerie, but for a pair of curious boys, exploring an old house can be a lot of fun. And dangerous.  When Nick opens the door to his room in the attic, he is hit in the head by a flying toaster. Things only get stranger from there.

The old house contains a great deal of … junk. Nothing looks useful, in any case, so they organize a garage sale to get rid of all the old items in the attic. During the course of the sale, Nick meets and befriends some local kids his age – Mitch, Vincent, and Caitlin. Exploring first the unusual items from the attic, and then the attic itself, the group of teens learn that the items from the attic had been placed there by engineer/inventor Nikola Tesla. These were his last inventions and contained special, very unique properties. But more than that, the attic itself was a special vortex and it needs the items that Tesla had placed in the attic.

Nick and friends  begin a quest to retrieve all the items from the attic that were sold in the garage sale. But along the way they encounter the Accelerati – a secret society of physicists, who want to prevent Nick and friends from returning items to the attic. Messing with Tesla’s work might enhance their own devious schemes.

While I recognize Neal Shusterman’s name from my bookstore browsing through the years, I don’t believe I’ve ever read anything by him before. This book comes from my very early days of reading and reviewing ‘new releases.’  In attempt to establish myself with publishers, I was requesting a lot of books, not expecting to get as many as I did.  This is one of those books that had been sitting at the back page of my Kindle.

I’ve long been a fan of adventurous books for YA readers, and books that also manage to be a little didactic is a good thing. A book like this might well have been a young reader’s introduction to Nikola Tesla and his work (would any young reader who didn’t know about Nikola Tesla ever think to look up why the electric car was called a Tesla?). I enjoyed the Tesla connection and all the secret society hoopla that kept the story moving. This all fits a YA adventure very nicely. And of course we get a little background on Nikola Tesla without feeling like we’re being taught a lesson.  Very nice.

But for me the book didn’t work. There was too much emphasis on identifying items and discussing Tesla, and not nearly enough on why we should care.

The pacing of the book actually seems to slow down just when it should be picking up and propelling us forward, and our group of characters are almost too real – they don’t stand out or give us a reason to rally behind them.  There was nothing about them that caught my attention –  it was the attic and the items in the attic and then the Accelerati that were the much more interesting characters.

Looking for a good book? Tesla’s Attic, by Neal Shusterman and Eric Elfman, is a YA adventure that is generally a fine but ultimately forgettable read.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

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Tesla’s Attic

author(s): Neal Shusterman and Eric Elfman

series: The Accelerati Trilogy #1

publisher: Disney-Hyperion

ISBN: 9781423148036

hardcover, 256 pages