The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart

Critics

• Book Review: The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart by Mathias Malzieu Share

  What if falling in love cost you your life? Would you be able to resist? Malzieu seamlessly integrates the elements of steampunk with literary fiction, allowing this novella to transcend the usually cursed designation of “genre fiction”. It should, f ... (read full critics)

  blogcritics published on Sat, 21 Jan 2012

• The Boy With the Cuckoo-Clock Heart by Mathias Malzieu

  Brooding, cruel-faced, handsome, Mathias Malzieu glares out from the endpapers of his book, originally published in France as La mécanique du coeur. The biography claims he's a rock star, but my research with French teenagers, garagistes and a CD sho ... (read full critics)

  guardian.co.uk published on Fri, 24 Sep 2010

1 Review

• 

  A story for Tim Burton's fans

  "Don't touch the hand of your clock. Master your anger. Never ever fall in love." These are the three rules Jack, the boy who has a cuckoo-clock sewn to his heart, has to follow. Needless to say he breaks them all. Of course he falls in love. Of course he gets upset, angry, mad. He also gives the ke ... (continue)

  "Don't touch the hand of your clock. Master your anger. Never ever fall in love." These are the three rules Jack, the boy who has a cuckoo-clock sewn to his heart, has to follow. Needless to say he breaks them all. Of course he falls in love. Of course he gets upset, angry, mad. He also gives the key to his hear to the girl he's fallen in love with. The result? A mess.
  His adoptive mother told him so, "your heat will break once more".
  In a narrative that makes you see little Jack as a Tim Burton creation you enter the 19th century world of a boy, then teenager, then man in search for love. The language is not always 19th century: in a few places the narrator, Jack, comments on events that took place a hundred years later. But hey, we're not going to be too critical about such things. I'm sure the author had his reasons.
  The one thing I did not understand, something that's got nothing to do with the story itself, is the fact that at the end of the novel there are a few pages with notes: an author's note, a note about the author, an acknowledgements page and a note on the type (?!)
  Loads of notes, if you ask me, and since there are so many why not add one on the translator?
  I'd have found it more useful to know that she's a well-known translator of children's books, winner of a translator's award than let's say, to know who the type was designed by.

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  Wild Raccoon said on Oct 6, 2010 about the Hardcover edition | Add your feedback

Book Details

• Rating:
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• English Books
• Others 176 Pages
• ISBN-10: 0701183691
• ISBN-13: 9780701183691
• Publisher: Chatto and Windus
• Pub date: Sep 22, 2009
• Also available as: Hardcover and eBook
• In other languages: other languages 繁體書, Livres Français, Libros en Español, Livros em Português, llibres en català

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