A Better Nightmare

Emily Emerson has got the Grimm. In a repressive society that feels rather too close to our own, children discovered to have the condition Grimm-Cross Syndrome are dragged from or sent away by their parents to live in Borstal-type establishments until they reach the age of 18, at which point they are deemed cured or incarcerated in a different way. The ‘Grimm’ takes many forms; some young people can call up wind or cause electric storms, others can shapeshift or switch into the body of a wild animal. Emily has the power to make her dreams – and nightmares – come to life. The symptoms are what in other stories are known as magic, though you could also say the state is responding badly to an excess of imagination in its young people. Alerted to the fact that she’s not ill, just different, fifteen-year-old Emily stops taking the drugs that have keep her subdued for so many years and, with a gang of fellow detainees, starts to get organised and to resist. Megan Freeman portrays her young protagonists as pleasingly normal, despite their strange abilities, in that they are impulsive, determined, disorganised, collaborative and brave. The brutality of the people they are up against is depressingly believable too, cruelty, cowardice, a lack of imagination their defining features.  Emily is an appealing and open narrator, romance offered in the form of Emir and Gabriel, if she can work out which one to trust. This is a tense and even exhilarating piece of writing, driven it seems by anger at the injustices we accept too readily in our everyday lives. It reaches a satisfying conclusion, but the door is left open for more adventures, and it will be interesting to see what Megan Freeman writes next.

Read our Q&A interview with Megan Freeman.