Invocation

Three months before her eighteenth birthday, Myfanwy Morris is sucked into the affairs of a mystical secret agency, Chancelhouse, as it tries to reinvent itself for the 21st century. All is not what it seems, and danger lies all around - and within ... "If JG Ballard had written an Enid Blyton girl's own adventure on Facebook under the influence of mind-altering drugs, he might have ended up with something like Invocation. Or maybe not. Jo L Walton's hallucinatory anti-fantasy fantasy is a kind of Harry Potter for the Contemporary Poet, a neurological black comedy, a Clockwork Orange for the 21st century, a satire in which contemporary Britain dissolves in the acids of the hyperreal, a paranoid critique, a nonsense that constantly threatens an ambush by alarming lucidity. Being like everything, it's not like anything else. 'Anything that is unlike anything else is sad,' says one of Walton's uncharacters. Maybe. But in this case, it's also perilously funny. Did I say it was gloriously written? Perhaps that's how Walton gets away with it. I'm awaiting the final instalment with pleasurable trepidation." - Alison Croggon ". . . a hyperreal comic thriller and, I'm pretty sure, one of the most urgent, smart and exciting fictional projects of the moment . . ." - Colin Herd, 3am Magazine