Riding Tycho

Demetria #1

by Jan Mark

Demetria has never questioned her harsh life on High Island. The endless rules, merciless bullying and the scream of the Banshee announcing another doomed escape across the sea, are all she has ever known. But then she meets political prisoner Ianto Morgan, who tells her about a strange and distant world full of stories and freedom. Demetria is captivated by the possibility of a life without limits, but is Ianto telling the truth or is it all dangerous lies? Whatever the cost, Demetria knows she must find out...

Genres: Science Fiction, Young Adult, Dystopia

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 7, 2005

About the author

Janet Marjorie Mark (1943-2006) was a British children's author and two time winner of the Carnegie Medal. She also taught art and English in Gravesend, Kent, was part of the faculty of Education at Oxford Polytechnic in the early 1980s and was a tutor and mentor to other writers before her death from meningitis-related septicaemia.

Meet the author:

What is your favourite animal?
The noble rat

What is your favourite boy’s name?
George

What is your favourite girl’s name?
Marjorie

What is your favourite food?
Pickled herring

What is your favourite music?
Klezmer

What is your favourite hobby?
Listening to music

Reviews

[Patricia Anderson]

Gripping & thrilling. An inmissable novel.

[Punit Sahani · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite well written. Makes you ask what' next? Can't wait to get my hands on the sequel to unwind the suspense...was Ianto honest to Demetria?

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Apparently the two things that haunt teenage girls' psyches are being excluded from the group, and the dystopian aspects of continual knitting.

[Gill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Found by accident in a second-hand bookshop, this is the first book of a pair, possibly a projected trilogy, written not long before the author's untimely death.

Demetria is a young girl living in a brutal and joyless community on an island across the strait from a prison island. Her family hosts a "political" prisoner in the shed at the end of the yard, and she comes to know him. He gradually makes her aware of the bullying and sexism she has accepted as her lot and gives her glimpses of a much larger world and, indeed, universe outside. She assumes much of what he tells her are lies, but slowly understands that the lies are what she has been taught all her life.

A touching portrait of the slow growth of trust and the awakening of a young girl to the possibilities of life, in a horribly plausible picture of a vicious, backward dystopian community.