Rebel Genius

Michael Dante DiMartino's Rebel Genius is a Renaissance-flavoured fantasy for 9 year olds about a boy who lives in the sewers and cannot stop drawing.

What happens

Giacomo is an orphan in the city of Virenzia. He sleeps in an alcove off the old aqueducts, lights a lantern with olive oil borrowed from a bakery, and eats the stale bread the baker throws out for the ducks. He promises himself he will pay the man back one day.

What he actually owns is a sketchbook and a lump of charcoal. He draws his own face over and over and never likes the result.

Here is the trouble. In this empire, every artist is supposed to have a Genius, a small winged creature that arrives when you are a child and becomes your muse for life. Nerezza, who has renamed herself the Supreme Creator, has made them illegal. She has burned the old stories. She has soldiers on the streets after curfew. If a Genius flies into a child's life now, it is a death sentence for both of them.

So Giacomo has grown up watching a cracked fresco in an abandoned art school, looking at painted families welcoming their children's Geniuses, knowing he will never have one.

Then one does turn up, on the worst possible night, with a red gem glowing in its little crown.

The world-building is lovely and unfussy. The magic is drawing, geometry and paying attention. The politics sit right on the surface, a ruler who puts her own name on every street and destroys any story about a hero who came before her.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

This one gets dangerous, and not in a cartoon way. Giacomo is stabbed and spends a chapter dragging himself along walls, bleeding, wondering whether he is about to die in a sewer. It is not dwelt on lovingly, but it is not brushed off either.

His parents are gone as well, and gone in a particular way. Nerezza took their Geniuses, which left them as Lost Souls. That hangs over everything he does.

For a child who is fine with peril, this reads as a proper adventure with real stakes. For a more tender reader at the younger end, it may be one to keep for a year or two.

What to read next

Should a drawing that gets up and walks about sound like their sort of thing, Kenneth Oppel's Inkling begins with an ink blot lifting itself off a comic artist's sketchbook in the middle of the night, watched only by the cat.