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Emlyn had a bad streak.
She was well aware of it and kept it contained. Others might yearn to be the hero and save the world or save the baby. Emlyn yearned to be a brilliant thief.
Another excellent example of Cooney's trademark "take a cliche or uninspired or easy-to-do-badly premise and make it much better than it needs to be." In this case, the actual premise is "high school students steal a mummy from a museum as a prank," but I strongly suspect that her publisher just asked for a thriller called Mummy and a cover with a mummy.
I will note up-front, since I forlornly held out hope for quite some time that the mummy would rise at some point, that the mummy does not rise. There are some very borderline maybe-fantasy elements in which Emlyn may get some glimpses of life in ancient Egypt, but she might just have a vivid imagination.
Mummy is a heist novel with a noir sensibility. About one-third of it is the theft of the mummy, a beautifully worked out sequence of nailbiting suspense, and there's several other, shorter, heist-style action sequences that are also very well-done. But Cooney doesn't settle for just writing a heist novel where the characters are modern teenagers who don't do anything real teenagers couldn't do - which is an unusual and impressive feat by itself.
There's also Emlyn, the protagonist. She's a fascinating, unusual protagonist, very competent and smart in some ways but with some very big blind spots. She loves the idea of stealing and lying and elaborate plots, but for all her criminal ambitions, she's one of the few characters in the book with an actual moral compass. Because she wants to have illegal adventures, she's thought a lot about morality and takes the idea of good and bad seriously; she thinks she's the clever villain, but she has a tragically naive idea of what badness is. She's been so focused on her own potential for wrongdoing that she's completely forgotten that other people might want to do bad things too, and, unlike her, might not care at all that they're wrong...
The book melds a heist novel with the sort of coming of age story that's largely about disillusionment with a character study. It also takes the idea of mummies and goes in possibly the most unexpected direction with it, focusing largely on issues of respect and disrespect for the dead. When it turns out that society really hasn't moved on from tomb-robbing and destroying priceless artifacts for money and cheap thrills, the focus is less on the value of history than on respect for the actual person that artifact once was.
She was well aware of it and kept it contained. Others might yearn to be the hero and save the world or save the baby. Emlyn yearned to be a brilliant thief.
Another excellent example of Cooney's trademark "take a cliche or uninspired or easy-to-do-badly premise and make it much better than it needs to be." In this case, the actual premise is "high school students steal a mummy from a museum as a prank," but I strongly suspect that her publisher just asked for a thriller called Mummy and a cover with a mummy.
I will note up-front, since I forlornly held out hope for quite some time that the mummy would rise at some point, that the mummy does not rise. There are some very borderline maybe-fantasy elements in which Emlyn may get some glimpses of life in ancient Egypt, but she might just have a vivid imagination.
Mummy is a heist novel with a noir sensibility. About one-third of it is the theft of the mummy, a beautifully worked out sequence of nailbiting suspense, and there's several other, shorter, heist-style action sequences that are also very well-done. But Cooney doesn't settle for just writing a heist novel where the characters are modern teenagers who don't do anything real teenagers couldn't do - which is an unusual and impressive feat by itself.
There's also Emlyn, the protagonist. She's a fascinating, unusual protagonist, very competent and smart in some ways but with some very big blind spots. She loves the idea of stealing and lying and elaborate plots, but for all her criminal ambitions, she's one of the few characters in the book with an actual moral compass. Because she wants to have illegal adventures, she's thought a lot about morality and takes the idea of good and bad seriously; she thinks she's the clever villain, but she has a tragically naive idea of what badness is. She's been so focused on her own potential for wrongdoing that she's completely forgotten that other people might want to do bad things too, and, unlike her, might not care at all that they're wrong...
The book melds a heist novel with the sort of coming of age story that's largely about disillusionment with a character study. It also takes the idea of mummies and goes in possibly the most unexpected direction with it, focusing largely on issues of respect and disrespect for the dead. When it turns out that society really hasn't moved on from tomb-robbing and destroying priceless artifacts for money and cheap thrills, the focus is less on the value of history than on respect for the actual person that artifact once was.
