The Fetch Book

Calder is a Fetch. Upon his own death in the 18th century at nineteen, he joined the ranks of Fetches who take souls through the Door, down the Aisle to the Captain and his boat, who will ferry them to Heaven.

When Calder's Key opens a Door to the deathbed of a small boy, a woman there catches his eye and holds him in thrall. He calls her Glory and wants to make her his Fetch apprentice by passing his Key to her. He thinks she's the governess of the children around the bed, and to make her happy he refuses to take the boy's soul and forces him to live.

He never knows where his Key will take him, and is surprised but happy to see her again. It's a girl who sees him, though, but he refuses to acknowledge the meaning of this. When he arrives through a Door to take the soul of Rasputin - Father Grigory - he takes the offered opportunity to possess Rasputin's body while Rasputin's soul drifts with the Lost Souls. He animates the body but doesn't need food or water and can't be killed - fortunate for him, because Rasputin has enemies.

Pretending to be Rasputin, he goes to the palace of the Russian Tsar and discovers that the lovely woman, older now, is actually the Tsarina and mother of the children he had seen at the deathbed, including Alexis, the sickly boy, and Ana, youngest girl and the one who saw him at the deathbed. She doesn't see Rasputin, but Calder's real form as solid.

Crossing to the land of the living has done more than shake Calder's dreams of Glory - he's unwittingly stirred up the Lost Souls. He's also landed in the turbulent years of the Russian Revolution of 1918, when the entire family of the Tsar is executed. By giving the Key to Alexis at his mother's request, Alexis survives - and Alexis pass the Key to Ana. Now Calder must protect Alexis and Ana and try to get back his Key, which has gone missing, while Lost Souls form demons to take out their anger on him.


It's a fairly interesting premise but not well executed. For one thing, Calder is a complete non-entity. He's the most dull, lifeless, slow-witted idiot I've ever come across as a protagonist - in spite of his actions. It's the way Whitcomb writes, a formal, slow prose that stifles action and emotion when it means to uplift it.

The only time when her prose worked perfectly was a lovely little scene in the background, when they're on the train in England sitting opposite a mother with a baby, and across the aisle is a depressed soldier. It's a poignant moment unhampered by excessive description, and speaks volumes of the emotional turmoil this couple is experiencing in the war. That's one little scene out of the entire book that succeeded like that.

Combining history with fantasy is quite common, but it can be tricky. Here we have the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the early days of the Movies, and three important characters - Ana, Alexis and Rasputin - who are incorporated into a story about angels and Heaven. It didn't work for me. I don't know much about Rasputin but he seemed an odd choice. It's easier working with Ana and Alexis because they're not larger-than-life historical figures, but they weren't fleshed out and I didn't care about them. There was very little in the way of romance except that now and then Whitcomb would remember that side of things and throw in a line about Calder feeling jealous about Ana's boyfriend Ilya and tucking a curl of her hair in his pocket: just sort of plopped in awkwardly. She didn't seem comfortable writing romance at all.

It took me a long time to read this because I had to force myself to pick it up and continue, and there was a loooooong break in the middle. It's a plodding story that travels the globe but doesn't really go anywhere. The Aisle was an interesting creation - if it borrows from anything I'm unaware of it - and I liked the idea of demons forming of Lost Souls that cooperate enough to make one. The biggest problems the book has are Calder and the prose style. The latter might click with others but for me it was stiff, stilted, lumbering and trying too hard, and a YA book has never gone so slowly.