Stalking Jack the Ripper

Well, this book was a solid disappointment. I had begun to read this with some trepidation because it was published under the James Patterson for children imprint, Jimmy Patterson. I had read only one other by this publishing company, Gunslinger Girl. Sadly, that novel was filled with a nonsensical world, a cliched main character, and a predictable plot. Is Stalking Jack The Ripper any better? Yes, but this book is still filled with an overbearing feminist message, cliched side characters, and a terrible romance.


The positives with this book have to do with the elements that brought me to it in the first place. The premise is interesting, with Victorian London being the setting, and this revolving around the Jack the Ripper murders. This is something that we just do not see very much in YA, both in terms of the setting and the mystery. It is also a suitably scary novel, which is perfect for reading in October. The author, Maniscalo, is better at writing settings, details and dialogue than Lindsay Ely, the author who wrote Gunslinger Girl.

However, this is where the positives seem to end for me. The rest of the book is just filled with problem after problem that seem to dominate the text and dwarf any positives it has. One of the largest is the overly feminist tone that this novel has adopted. Throughout the book, the main character, Audrey Rose Wadsworth is a girl whom we are constantly told is out of the ordinary. She likes putting her hands in cadavers chest cavities, and seeing what is inside. She also doesn't like her station in life, being a woman who is not expected to be training to become a medical examiner. She is instead expected to become a woman who has children and raises them to become productive members of society. The reader is constantly told that she is so unlike other woman, and that she hates her lot in life, and wishes it would change. She doesn't mind digging around in dead bodies, and kissing boys without a chaperone, and we the reader are always told that this is improper. Normally, I wouldn't mind this being an angle on gender norms of Victorian London, yet, this idea of 18th century gender norms is written with a kind of feminist slant that I found degrading to women of today. Most readers will know that, compared to today, women did not have the same right, and career opportunities as back in this time period, so to have it mentioned every single page, at least, seems insulting to our intelligence. It also hurts that, for all the complaining that Audrey does about not being able to do things herself, she cannot find a single clue without a man being right beside her. Whether it is a police detective or a handsome friend turned bodyguard, she cannot go on to do anything alone, as she and her various male side characters hunt for clues. What if she could go somewhere that the men could not go? Audrey could use her femininity as an asset, by say, talking to all the prostitutes who knew the victims? That would have been cool, but, no. Instead she has to be lead around like a dog on a leash, told to use her nose, I mean forensic skills, when the plot calls for it.

It is not enough to be told she Audrey is ahead of her time, but it must also be shown, and this novel does a lot of the former, and little of the latter. For a good example of a girl taken out of a Victorian Era London and into what we would call a woman's 21st century gender role, look than no further than The Infernal Devices Series by Cassandra Claire. In that book, we have a girl named Tessa Gray who is rescued from a terrible fate by a group of demon hunters called Shadowhunters. She then joins with them as she tries to figure out why she was captured in the first place. In that book, we have the shadowhunter group that works much like those in a 21st century society would, and here, Claire uses Tessa's notions of proper behavior as a way to comment on not only how out of place she feels, but what life was like for women during the 18th century. The best part of this is that it is done subtly, with it coming up very few times, instead allowing us to focus on the characters and our thoughts on them. In Stalking Jack the Ripper, the author does not have that talent, and so has to resort to the whining of Audrey Rose to let us know that gender norms sucked in the 18th century. How delightful.

There there are the other side characters in this novel like Thomas Creswell. Thomas is the boy who Audrey cannot help but be attracted to, and, of course, they begin to form a romance together, but we will get to that later. For now, we will just focus on Thomas. The thing is, there isn't really a lot to the man. Once you get past the fact that he is a handsome boy who the main character is supposed to fall in love with, it turns out that he is just an almost carbon copy of a teenage Sherlock Holmes. The author isn't even subtle about it because she gives Thomas the “You see but you do not observe” speech that Sherlock Holmes gives Watson in A Scandal in Bohemia. I cannot decide if this is an homague I should like, or something that makes it look like the author couldn't make up a character of her own, so she borrowed from someone else.

Sadly, the interactions between Audrey Rose and Thomas Creswell are disappointing because it comes in the form of a terrible romance. Now, a good romance can work when I see that both of these characters have some kind of dynamic to work off of, and that they are both great characters in and of themselves. Here, however, I do not have those elements. Audrey just keeps repeating how much of an independent woman she is, while Thomas is a narcissistic Sherlock Holmes knock off. To make matters worse, the romance is filled with will-they-won't-they moments. The characters will get close together, and ALMOST kiss, but then something happens and they will break apart at the last second. This kind of scene happens so often, it feels like the author didn't know where she wanted the romance to go, and so decided that she had to write it like this, which just seems tedious and boring after awhile, because I knew they were not going to get together in this book. (That could be considered a spoiler, but, as you can guess, I don't really care.)

As for the accuracy of the story, it is not very good, with regard to history. Whenever I begin a historical novel, I always ask myself just how accurate to history this is going to be. It could be like To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, where it is set during a specific time period, but it lacks the telling of any specific historical event. Or it could be like Wolf by Wolf by Ryan Graudin, where it is so far from history, it can be considered an alternative timeline. Stalking Jack the Ripper can be considered something in between. It does feature the kills of the iconic madman who stalked Victorian London, but, of course the killer was never caught, so there are some liberties taken with the reveal, which I will get into in a moment. The author admits that she did mess around with the dates, and names of those people killed, which I find to be par for the course for historical novels. She also has a lot of different elements related to anatomy, and even the beginnings of the study of criminal behavior. This seems accurate enough, although I could not find any sources on when this began to become an accepted practice, verses when it was first thought of and considered a theory. Regardless, your feels toward it's accuracy, or inaccuracy depend on how you feel about the names and dates of the women killed being changed, as that seems to be the most accurate facts being changed, other than the exposition on gender roles that I mentioned above.

The mystery element is something that I did not enjoy by the end. For a non-spoiler, let me say that the reveal was one that surprised me, not because I couldn't believe who had done it, but because it seemed to come out of nowhere, and raised more questions than answers. Spoiler section here: How Audrey's brother managed to steal their mother's body and get it down into the secret passage without anyone noticing is beyond me. Also, why was he so obvious in committing these murders, if he is supposed to be such a smart man? And what caused him to believe that electricity would help to bring their mother back to life in the first place? These are just the questions that I can remember. This raises so many questions that it does not make sense, and feels like the ending was rushed, given what we know about the characters. .

Overall, this is a book that I enjoyed, but did not think was the best, given all the elements above. In fact, I'd say that this book has KILLED any interest I have in this series (only pun, I swear). I give this book a two out of five. There were just too many things here that annoyed me to continue with this series.

3.5 Enjoyable semi-compelling mystery with some true goriness in the mix. Not a lot of character development or motive outside of pretty and Victorian (for both Audrey Rose and Thomas, they were equally written in broad strokes) and some parts dragged a bit but overall pretty fun to listen to. Not the fault of this book, but very similar to Madman's Daughter, which is also on BOB list - I guess making for really hard-to-distinguish questions!