Skulk is an imaginative new take on the shifter mythos. I haven’t seen it done in this way before. Skulk features a handful of different shifters, foxes, rats, ravens, butterflies, and spiders.

We are reading things from Meg’s perspective. She’s a rich kid but that spoiled persona that pops to your mind when I say “rich kid” can’t be further from the truth. Her mother is a tyrant who physically and mentally abuses her all because she doesn’t live up to her standard of beauty. Though Meg is a size 16 I don’t think of her as overweight, even if her mother does. You would think she might have low self esteem but she seems to be a well rounded individual and a good person to boot.

When she ends up with the ability to transform into a fox she is so excited until all manner of things start to go crazy for her. She starts being stalked by spiders…and well who wants to see a bunch of spiders?

Another bloody spider. I don’t like spiders. Nobody likes spiders. It’s the legs, they’re just wrong. – pg 73

Meg eventually meets all the other shifters as well and is on a mission to stop a killer fog and a very evil woman from stealing from each shifter group a precious stone that they are set to protect.

There are a few topics that I think Rosie Best was trying to speak to in Skulk that she handled rather nicely. Individual identity, parental abuse, and discrimination of the LGBT community.

Supporting characters worthy of note are Addie and Mo. They stand out more so than the other characters. Addie was the only one that I felt I could really see and feel as being a real person. The others I thought could have been strengthened more.

Overall, I think Skulk was a great story and I really liked Meg. I do think there were some areas that could have been improved upon in the character behavior and reactions areas where Meg is concerned. Namely, her reaction to the violence and death that she sees. I don’t know of anyone that would have witnessed someone die and not told someone about it. I also felt the villain was not as well written as she could have been and we got the info dump, villain monologue at the end of the book that I am not a fan of. Still it was an engaging read that I finished in two sittings and I would recommend it to those that like paranormal/shifter fiction. ( )

Skulk by Rosie Best is the author's first novel, and what a début it was! It's a YA urban fantasy set in London I enjoyed it immensely from the very start. The main character is engaging and realistic and the fantasy worldbuilding is somewhat original. It even has a blurb which isn't entirely made of spoilers! (Well done, Strange Chemistry.)

When Meg witnesses the dying moments of a shapeshifting fox and is given a beautiful and powerful stone, her life changes forever. She is plunged into the dark world of the Skulk, a group of shapeshifting foxes.

As she learns about the other groups of shapeshifters that lurk around London – the Rabble, the Horde, the Cluster and the Conspiracy – she becomes aware of a deadly threat against all the shapeshifters. They must put aside all their enmity and hostility and fight together to defeat it.

The first aspect that had me enjoying Skulk was Meg herself. She comes from a privileged background with a (Tory) politician mother and a CEO father and goes to a good private school. Her mother is fairytale-level abusive, driven on in particular by Meg being a little overweight and her father is emotionally absent almost to the point of catatonia. She has friends at school (who come from similarly privileged backgrounds) but doesn't enjoy going out clubbing with them, preferring instead to stay home and later sneak out to draw scathing political graffiti around London. I first grew particularly attached to Meg when reading about her forays into socialising in situations she didn't want to be in, like at a club or her parents' political dinner party. It reminded me exactly of how I would've felt and acted as a teenager. (I have since learnt how to have a polite conversation with boring people, but I still have zero interest in clubbing.) It was nice to read about a socially awkward character without them being ridiculously awkward nor portrayed as the butt of a joke.

What really pushed this book into five star territory for me, though, was Meg's reactions to the horrible things happening around her. When someone dies explosively in front of her, she throws up (runs away) and spends the rest of the night trembling in the foetal position. Like a normal person. And during the climax when she's pretty much running on adrenaline trying to save the world without having time to stop and reflect on the horrible things that have been happening, she has a panic attack and collapses (luckily at a non-crucial moment), again, like a normal person. It was refreshing to read about a character who had realistic responses to the horrible things going on around her, especially since the body-count in this one was fairly high. Not enough YA books do this. Which, as I was discussing earlier on Twitter (with DarkMatterzine, Speculatef and StuffedO), does not say anything good about our culture.

Most of the book was about Meg dealing with her problems. Some of those problems were her mother's ridiculous expectations of perfection, and some were more along the lines of gaining the ability to turn into a fox. They weren't boring problems, but there wasn't an awful lot of room for secondary characters, except directly in relation to Meg's problems. That said, Best does an excellent job of introducing a broad range of secondary characters. One of the more prominent ones was Meg's love interest, Mohammed, who was introduced late but was brilliantly — albeit very coincidentally — set up. I don't like YA plots that revolve around love interests and this was not one of those. Meg is not looking for a boyfriend and when she does meet a boy she has a lot in common with, she recognises that she really doesn't have time for warm fuzzy feelings when there are lives at stake.

Among the others, including bit players, Best includes several minority characters (gay, trans, homeless, disabled) some of whom only get a few lines of dialogue, but I'm hoping they'll play more pivotal roles in the sequel, after the cast has had time to regroup. I was particularly pleased with the existence of the spider-shifter who had cerebral palsy and had to be carried around by her friend. It came up just after I had been wondering whether human disabilities and illnesses carried over to the shifters' animal forms the way cuts and bruises clearly did.

With all the positive points mentioned above, what more is there to say about Skulk? Well I quite liked the choice of possible animal shifters. Best chose urban animals which fit into her London setting. Not wolves, but foxes, spiders, ravens, rats and butterflies. Looking inconspicuous in animal form out on the street is not a problem for them. Not to mention that spider and butterfly shapeshifters are not something I've come across before. And the antagonist has an army of evil pigeon minions, which also seemed quite apt in an urban environment.



Also, Meg's graffiti hobby takes her and the reader into London nooks that are off the tourist track and possibly not obvious to the casually passer-by. I felt I learnt more about present-day London (a city I've visited a couple of times as a tourist) than from any other book I remember reading recently.

Suffice to say Skulk was an excellent read. I would highly recommend it to all fans of urban fantasy (YA or otherwise), particularly those after a different sort of magical premise. (Although I will say the saving the world aspect of the worldbuilding was a bit stock-standard — MacGuffins and all — but Best definitely made up for it with all the other elements.) I have very high hopes for the sequel, which I'm hoping will come out some time next year. Even if it doesn't exceed my expectations, I'm still looking forward to seeing what happens next to Meg, including some of the consequences of events in Skulk that didn't get revisited before the ending. This book made me happy. I hope other readers also enjoy it.

5 / 5 stars

You can read more of my reviews on my blog. ( )

Skulk is a début YA novel about shapeshifters, but there are no werewolves here :D In this urban London there are foxes, ravens, rats, spiders and butterflies. Yup, butterflies. I think Skulk is a daring novel, pushing the boundaries of what is usually offered to YA readers, but I wonder if it's a little too different.

For example, our protagonist is Meg Banks - the daughter of a senator and a CEO who goes to a private school for the wealthy and is surrounded by the future leaders of Britain. Her mother is shockingly abusive towards her, while her father remains indifferent to the injustices occurring under his nose. Meg's friends are extroverted where she is introverted, and I can't see why Meg became friends with them in the first place. So, for a long time into the book, it seems that Meg is surrounded by people she could care less about. Meg's night-life as a graffiti artist also bothered me because to my mind it's very wrong, and I still don't really understand why she does it (aside from the usual, oppressed artist excuse). It's clear it's not a cry for attention from her family, so ... what is it? Meg isn't every-girl, in fact, she's about as far from every-girl as you can get; I thought that I would never understand her, but I ended up liking her well enough. I think that the author has approached the character well, giving her some background and gravitas, but I feel it may alienate potential readers because it took me a long time to feel an affinity with Meg.

One of the reasons behind this feeling of disconnection is the plot. Everything is too convenient, too contrived, for there to be any feeling of reality to this book. There are a host of characters who come into the story to impart some critical knowledge and then are killed - there's a lot of collateral damage in this book. It is also disconcerting to note that the deaths do not seem to affect Meg: she seems to go on fine after the deaths of people close to her, and many times simply forgot that she was grieving. It may tie in to the fact that Meg isn't sure she really cares about anyone in her life, even her parents and friends, but it's frightening to read a character who's so cold.

Where the plot let me down, I enjoyed the world building a lot. The underground urban London landscape is vivid, and richly described. I like the five clans, the interplay between them and their histories. I love the way they named: a Skulk of foxes, a Horde of rates, a Rabble of butterflies and so forth. It's clever :-) I like that the animals aren't the traditional shifter affairs but for the life of me I can't figure out why being a butterfly could be useful in any way. And spiders? ICK. The world of the shifters is interesting, although major elements take an unnecessarily long time to develop. The importance of the stones is clear from the way that Meg feels irrationally protective of it, but it's a long, long time before the situation is made any clearer. And this is actually the whole trend of the book: the world building elements are there, but are introduced so late into the novel that they will only prove useful to the most dedicated of readers.
I admired the well-drawn secondary characters in the novel; too often the secondary cast are stereotypical and flat, but Rosie Best handles a cast of diverse characters well. Characters of different ethnicity, socio-economic backgrounds and personalities come together in the cultural melting pot that is the underground scene in London. While James presents a hundred different mysteries, and Don, the alpha-leader of Skulk, annoyed me to no end, I liked the Rabble (the butterfly-shifters) a lot. As Meg points out, they are more organised and have more cohesion than the group she's become a part of, and I liked that about them even if they are butterflies :p
Another thing I liked about Skulk is the romance - it's very much in the background of the story and quite sweet. Actually, since the love interest was introduced quite late into the book, I started thinking that there wasn't going to be any romance. Which meant that I was pleasantly surprised when there was a development. I like that this romance isn't centered on a creepy stalker guy but on someone who has a lot in common with Meg, and has proven that he respects and cares about her a lot.

I liked Skulk and will be looking forward to its sequel (there had better be one!) with eagerness. I think it's a daring novel about shapeshifters and a girl who doesn't really fit in anywhere, but it could have been a little more sophisticated. However, Rosie Best's début YA has a lot going for it, and I think she's going to be an author to watch!

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher for review.
You can read more of my reviews at Speculating on SpecFic. ( )

This review is based on an ARC print copy received with thanks from the publisher. More at http://thebookshelfgargoyle.wordpress.com/2013/08/29/skulk-arc-review-read-it-if...

The story: Meg, under-appreciated daughter and unrecognised graffiti artist, gains the power to shape-shift into fox form after witnessing the death of another shifter. She is then drawn into a hidden world of shifters and finds herself the focus of attention of a highly sadistic (yet utterly modern) sorceress. Suddenly, an ordinary life doesn't look quite so bad after all.

I've found that I'm becoming a bit of an urban fantasy buff, and I have to say that Skulk is a welcome addition to that genre and ticks a lot of my "good-read-o-meter" boxes..

Ordinary, believable main character? Tick.
Great cover art sans broody-faced, long-haired girl? Tick
Romance that isn't shoved awkwardly into the plot? Tick
An easy-to-follow fantasy set-up that remains engaging throughout the book? Tick

As a young adult novel with paranormal/fantasy elements, Skulk stands out on the strength of Best's characterisation and plot-pacing. Meg and her supporting cast are not overblown, nor reduced to stereotypes, as happens in a lot of YA stuff going around. Similarly, the plot unfolds at a decent pace, allowing for some breathing space between the action, but not so much that you're required to flip ahead to get the story moving again.

The only real trouble I had with this one was trying to keep the names of the different shape-shifting groups in my head as I was reading (and there are only five, so it shouldn't be too hard!) - might I suggest a small pictogram with labels at the start of the book for the visual learners among us?

The element that put me most off balance while reading was the references to parental abuse that crop up now and again - Meg lives with a particularly cruel and abusive mother,an indifferent and distant father and some hired help who, oddly, seem to side with the parents against Meg. I'm not sure what it was about these scenes that threw me, but it was these, rather than the drug references or graphic descriptions of blood and gore that would have me placing this one squarely in the realm of older teen readers and above.

If you're new to urban fantasy, Skulk would be a great place to start, and if you're looking for a refreshing twist on YA paranormal/fantasy/romance, you could certainly do a lot worse than this title.

Recommended.



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When I saw the concept for Skulk by Rosie Best, I thought it looked like a very interesting one. I like novels about shape shifters but most seem to center around wolves or coyotes. If one entertains the idea of shape shifters as a possibility, surely there have to be other animals into which humans shift; however, those animals don’t seem to have captured writers’ imaginations to the extent wolves have.

Rosie Best is making up for that lack in her new novel. If it looks a bit familiar, Skulk’s opening portion first appeared in the 2012 Undiscovered Voices anthology. Skulk is a YA novel but, like a lot of YA novels, it’s going to appeal to a much wider age group. If you like paranormal mysteries and conspiracies then read on at http://popcornreads.com/?p=6644. ( )