Skullduggery Pleasant

Skullduggery Pleasant

Written by Derek Landy

 

What is Skullduggery Pleasant you may ask, well Skullduggery Pleasant is a wise, joke cracking and tough kinda guy, he goes on journeys to defeat gods and save the planet, and the most amazing thing about him he's dead.

 

When he was fighting in the war a long time ago his family was killed in front of his eyes and then he was then killed himself. He was brought back from the grave to take vengeance on the man that killed his family. He successfully killed him and was then expecting to go back to the grave but he stayed alive in the same form, a skeleton. This part in the story is a cool addition to the book because it is almost like an extra story to the main plot. I enjoyed knowing this extra bit because even though I knew it was a fictional book skulduggery had some very normal traits, for example in this bit the loss of his family obviously traumatised him completely and I know coming back from the grave was a little iffy but he did it for the love of his family and what kind of guy wouldn’t want that.

 

So that was the background of the story and we find our other main character Stephanie Edgeley at her Uncle Gordon’s graveside. Stephanie is a teenage girl in the middle of high school. She is a bit of a loner and seems a bit of a dreamer. Her Uncle is a famous writer and writes fantasy horrors which everyone believes that is make believe but turns out to just be a real account of the magical affairs.  I couldn’t help thinking when I got told this bit in the book what magical books out there could really be real but done behind us humans backs. Even this very book could be the same. This start to the book almost made it a conspiracy theory because no one knew, everyone had a right to know and everyone had probably seen evidence of it happening but either took no notice or was brain washed of some sort.

 

Stephanie finds out about Skulduggery’s magic and he takes her under his wing and teaches her the basics of crime fighting. But Stephanie wants to start learning magic and it doesn't work unless you are a descendant of a magic user. Stephanie starts to unravel her family tree and finds that she is a direct descendant of the most powerful gods in history.  Finally Stephanie had her chance to prove that she was ready to get into the big-time of the crime fighting regime. This made me happy because know Stephanie was able to help out and I had a feeling she certainly would.

 

While Skullduggery and Stephanie are touring the country, fighting the bad guys, they came across rumours saying that the Sceptre of Ancients is going to be stolen. It is a powerful weapon with capability to bring back the evil gods and destroy the world. So Skullduggery and Stephanie set out on a quest to find the bad guys and destroy the Sceptre to stop it from being used in the future.  Finally the plot had started to thicken. After all the training here was the twist that the book had been leading into, finally Stephanie’s chance to prove herself.

I found the entire book really interesting and thought provoking because the whole book is set out in the present and completely behind the entire country's back. Normal humans don't even know it is happening. The writer also captures the full emotions of people and puts in great detail and puts in heaps of great action. This is what all good books need, to capture peoples emotion and actually make it part of the book and I believe Derek Landy did it perfect in this one.