Amberville

January 12, 2009
Those with an appetite for the bizarre will best appreciate the pseudonymous Davys's offbeat debut, set entirely in a town inhabited by living, breathing stuffed animals. Everyone in Mollisan Town fears the Death List, the legendary roster of residents designated for pickup by the Chauffeurs, from whose red pickup truck no one returns. When word that mob boss Nicholas Dove (yes, a stuffed bird) has been placed on the list, he coerces Eric Bear into helping him escape his fate. Bear, who's put his shady past behind him and turned to a career in advertising, goes in search of answers. The backbiting and betrayal would certainly be at home in a conventional hard-boiled crime novel, but some readers may feel the premise's novelty wears thin after a while. Passages of clunky translation don't help (“From being a suspect rat who through her mere presence transformed the individuals around the conference table to normalcy, here she was in her right element”).

January 1, 2009
This debut novel from pseudonymous Swedish author Davys, foreign rights to which have sold in more than 20 countries, is a noirish allegory starring a pair of twin teddy bears. It was originally published in Sweden in 2007.

The story is set in Mollisan Town, a metropolis that's ordinary in every respect except for the fact that it's populated entirely by stuffed animals. That makes for an odd social order. Couples wishing for a child submit a request to the Cub List, and their little bundle of fabric and stuffing arrives via a green pickup, while some adults tend to strangely disappear via red pickups. The novel turns on the latter detail. Eric Bear, a former gangster settled down with his wife, Emma Rabbit, is visited by his old boss, Nicholas Dove, who believes he's on the Death List, meaning a red pickup is due to arrive soon. Eric is asked to discover the keeper of the list and expunge Dove's name from it, lest his wife, Emma Rabbit, be destroyed. That setup suggests a spoof of hard-boiled crime fiction, but while Bear's associates seem drawn straight from the heist-film playbook (an immoral gazelle, a devious snake, etc.), Davys is working more existential turf. Eric's twin, Teddy, is the polar opposite of his brother, deeply obsessed with the nature of good and evil, and the novel is interspersed with his musings on the nature of relationships, particularly when it comes to family and religion. Davys ensures that Teddy's ruminations are well integrated to the plot, and as Eric gets ever closer to discovering the true nature of the Death List, the author ponders the big questions of who created us and who keeps order in a complex society. Why a stuffed animal is a useful metaphor for getting at philosophical concerns is never entirely clear —Davys doesn't make much of the inherent stuffed-animal-ness of his characters, which drink, eat, drive and generally live much as humans do. Still, the romantic triangle among Eric, Teddy and Emma is engagingly drawn, and never for a moment does the story feel like kids stuff.

An appealingly unique world, cut from some interesting cloth.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

February 15, 2009
Davys's first novel is set in a town made up entirely of stuffed animals that walk and talk like humans. This clever idea soon loses its luster, as Davys does little with the potential except in a few instances to play it entirely for laughs, as when a teddy bear is beaten until he coughs up cotton. The plot revolves around Eric Bear's quest to save his wife's life by removing the gangster boss from the infamous "death list." Thus begins Eric's descent into the underworlds of Mollisan Town, a shadowy neighborhood on a trash dump where the deformed animals live, and finally to the puppet master himself, in the least likely place of all. The prose and dialog lack the style and wit of true hard-boiled writers, and at times the narrative falls into long, flat exposition. The second half of the novel is more engaging as the characters' duplicity increases. But the ending is implausible, tacked on in an epilog to make sense of the earlier gaps in logic. Not recommended.Stephen Morrow, Athens, OH

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2009
Davys's first novel is set in a town made up entirely of stuffed animals that walk and talk like humans. This clever idea soon loses its luster, as Davys does little with the potential except in a few instances played entirely for laughs, as when a teddy bear is beaten until he coughs up cotton. The plot revolves around Eric Bear's quest to save his wife's life by removing the gangster boss from the infamous "death list." Thus Eric descends into the underworlds of Mollisan Town, a shadowy neighborhood on a trash dump where the deformed animals live, and finally encounters the puppet master himself, found in the least likely place of all. The prose and dialog lack the style and wit of true hard-boiled fiction, and at times the narrative falls into long, flat exposition. The book's second half is more engaging as the characters' duplicity grows, but the ending is implausible, tacked on in an epilog to make sense of the earlier gaps in logic. Not recommended.Stephen Morrow, Athens, OH

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 15, 2009
The detective novel contains multitudesfrom Murakamis Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1991) to Chabons The Yiddish Policemens Union (2007)but its still surprising when a writer finds a new twist. In Mollisan Town, Eric Bear is an advertising executive with a shady past. When crime boss Nicholas Dove learns hes on the Death List, he tells Eric to erase his name, or Erics beloved Emma Rabbit will be torn to stuffing. To do the job, Eric reassembles his old gang: Sam Gazelle, Tom-Tom Crow, and Snake Marek. Yes, theyre all stuffed animals, but theres more to this than the fun of toys behaving badly. While Amberville employs the twisty tropes of classic crime fiction, from doppelgngers to fake identities, its real ambition is metaphysical: Is there really a Death List? Who chooses the names? And why would factories make stuffed animals when theyre destined to be destroyed? The search for answers leads Eric Bear to the highest halls in Mollisan Towns secular and religious institutions. Ironically, these questions would seem less weighty if not posed by stuffed animals, but we couldnt help loving this book anyway. The publisher describes it as The Big Sleep meets Animal Farm, and, frankly, we cant do better than that.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)