T.K. Welsh

THE UNRESOLVED

Church and Synagogue Library Association (CSLA), August 2007
"In 1904, a fifteen-year-old German-American girl named Mallory Meer finds herself in love with Dustin, a boy who has finally noticed her. Unfortunately, their romance comes to a fatal end when a fire breaks out on the General Slocum steamship and she dies, along with thousands of other passengers. Now her ghost seems trapped, unable to move on. How can she let go of her family or Dustin? How can she help bring those responsible for the horrific fire to justice? Is Dustin wrongfully accused of the crime because he is a Jew? Filled with intrigue, corruption, and revenge motifs, Welsh weaves a fast-paced romance with time shifts clearly delineated.

"This is Welsh’s first young adult novel, although (the author) has written seven books in the adult fiction category. Let’s hope this is just the beginning of more young adult books from this author."

Review by: Mary Lou Henneman

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RESURRECTION MEN

The YA YA YAs, "Under the Radar", August 2007
"When the Marquess of Stanton’s coach runs over a boy, his coachman and mistress insist on taking the boy to a doctor. In his determination to save the boy, Dr. Lambro minces no words and throws the marquess out of his house. Dr. Lambro’s neighbor, Colonel Maxwell, warns Lambro that he may have made an enemy out of the marquess, but the good doctor is not afraid. As he begins to operate on the boy, he tells the colonel a story about a young boy just like the one lying on his table.

"Twenty-two years earlier, in 1830, a boy named Victor watched soldiers kill his parents in Modena. Though some of the soldiers wanted to kill Victor, too, their senior officer had a better idea. Selling him would be much more profitable, and so Victor ends up a cabin boy on a ship sailing west. But when his leg is shattered, Victor is of no use on the ship and is thrown overboard. He manages to survive, washing up on the shores of England, where an elderly man rescues him, taking Victor in and saving his leg. Although Victor is forced to use a crutch to get around, it’s a pleasant life, until the old man can no longer afford to keep Victor around and sells him to a Mr. Tipple and Mr. Biggs.

"Mr. Tipple and Mr. Biggs take Victor to London. His journey is an unpleasant one, as he has been thrown into a coffin and must share the space with a corpse. Once in London, Mr. Tipple and Mr. Biggs leave Victor at the home of Master Hartley, who forces children to beg for money in exchange for living in his attic. Master Hartley also has a menagerie of animals he rents out to these children. With so many beggars in London, an animal can make the difference between earning enough money to live in Master Hartley’s attic and living in the streets. Gradually, Victor learns which animals will earn him the most money, and he also begins to earn his keep by doing errands for Hartley, including driving Mr. Tipple and Mr. Biggs around London as they steal corpses and dig up graves, for they are Resurrection Men, selling bodies to doctors eager to learn more about human anatomy.

"T.K. Welsh brings Victor’s surroundings, which range from his idyllic days on the English coast to a dirty, squalid, awe-inspiring London, to life in vivid detail. He doesn’t flinch from messy, gory descriptions, but neither does he dwell in them. Likewise, Victor is a worthy and sympathetic hero, making the most of his circumstances and determined to save his friends when it becomes apparent that someone is kidnapping and killing London’s poor children to supply doctors with corpses.

"Resurrection Men was inspired by a real 1831 trial.  A note about this in the book, along with a bibliography or short reading list, would have been nice. But this is a minor quibble. A bigger problem, in my opinion, is the flap copy, which does the book a disservice by immediately telling us that the protagonist is twelve years old. Yes, Victor is twelve, but to first describe him with his age will no doubt dissuade some older teens from giving Resurrection Men a try, which is a pity. It is more appropriate for them than it is for twelve-year-olds, and it is a book adults will appreciate, as well. As our narrator says, 'And while the average life expectancy in London was around thirty-five, when you factored in infantile deaths, twenty-seven was the average age people died, twenty-two among those in the working class. Twenty-two! By that measure, Victor was already middle-aged.'"

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RESURRECTION MEN

Necropsy -- The Review of Horror Fiction, Summer 2007
"A Corpse Is a Corpse, Of Course" -- June Pulliam

"Although T. K. Welsh’s Resurrection Men is published by an imprint that markets books to children and young adults, I am reviewing it here in Necropsy nevertheless. It is something that can be enjoyed by a much wider audience, which is the case with a good deal of young adult fiction of the past twenty years.

"Welsh’s novel is a complex frame tale very loosely based upon the infamous exploits of those most infamous of resurrection men, Burke and Hare...Welsh creates a similar situation in 1831 London. His protagonist, Victor, an Italian lad orphaned at twelve, finds his way to the British Isles by way of being sold to a ship’s captain to be his cabin boy. When Victor breaks his leg at sea while climbing the rigging, the captain declares the child is no longer of any use to anyone and has him thrown overboard. Miraculously Victor survives, and is rescued by a beach comber with enough raw medical skills to set his badly broken limb. But because the man is barely able to feed himself, let alone support Victor, he eventually sells the youth as an apprentice to a man similar to Charles Dickens’ Artful Dodger. This new master trains Victor to be a professional cadger who gives a percentage of the daily alms he begs in the streets to his master in return for his lodging. In this position, Victor has the opportunity to see how the poor of the city are treated and expand his already bountiful store of sympathy for his fellow humans. Victor also learns quickly that begging is not an unskilled job, but a high art, where the most successful of his lot either have an attraction such as a rented taxidermied animal to pose with or are particularly adept at evoking pathos in their marks so that they part with their coins. Some among his fellow cadgers are also able to augment their meager incomes through prostitution.

"Since Victor’s leg healed crookedly, he is still crippled, and is sometimes able to use this disability to his advantage when he begs. It is in this capacity that he comes to the attention of Dr. Quigley, a well-to-do London physician who takes an interest in Victor and re-breaks and re-sets his leg for him free of charge so that he will be able to walk once again without impediment. During Victor’s convalescence, Quigley soon discovers that the lad has a quick mind and instinct for healing in his own right, and puts the idea in Victor’s head that he could become his apprentice and eventually be a physician himself.

"But then Victor discovers how people like Quigley get the bodies they use in their work. As with most tales of resurrection men, there is some tension between the sometimes unsavory deeds that must be performed in the name of the advancement of knowledge vs. the dignity due the dead. But since this tale is being told in the 21st century rather than the 19th, readers have long since given up being disgusted by the idea that human bodies are dissected in the name of medical science, and so the writer must use a new technique to awaken our revulsion at the practice. Robert Wise’s 1945 film The Body Snatcher, as well as Sheri Holman’s 2000 novel The Dress Lodger, use the device of the anatomy student (or teacher) being forced through convoluted circumstances to dissect the body of someone they knew well, thus rejuvenating our primordial sense of outrage about the fate of the dead. And both The Body Snatcher (Wise’s film and the 1884 Robert Louis Stevenson short story of the same name on which it is based) and Resurrection Men venture into Burke and Hare territory to enflame our sense of moral outrage.

"When Victor confronts the man ultimately responsible for creating a market for the immorally procured cadavers, he responds that his actions are justified in order to further medical science, and that the unfortunate “Burked” individuals were nothing more than cadgers. Without giving away too much, as this is fiction, the good end happily while the bad end badly...Resurrection Men is a well-written story, and Welsh (and perhaps the author’s publisher too) demonstrates faith in the target audience’s intelligence, as there is no deus ex machina to explain the term “resurrection man,” and words like “cadger,” that are generally not used in the United States, are not Americanized the way some words were changed in earlier editions of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter’s novels. The writer instead has enough faith that the reader will understand these things or even take the radical step of consulting a dictionary when in doubt."

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AUGUST 2007

NEW AND NOTEWORTHY

RESURRECTION MEN
RESURRECTION MEN has been named a Junior Library Guild selection.

Publishers Weekly called RESURRECTION MEN, "A haunting tour of London's underclass during the 1830s...Welsh's visceral descriptions of industrial London are unflinching...Teens will likely be both captivated by Victor's harrowing story as well as his ability to prevail in the face of harsh injustices."  VOYA said, "(Welsh's) plot and writing style are reminiscent of Oliver Twist by Dickens but far more graphic. Teen readers will thoroughly enjoy the hair-raising suspense in this historical thriller."  And KLIATT said, "Like M.T. Anderson's The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, this look at sinister events in history makes the era come alive and lingers in the memory."

Inspired by the 1831 “Italian Boy” trial of body snatchers in London, England, RESURRECTION MEN is a spine-tingling murder mystery that pits a beggar boy named Victor against a nefarious group of Resurrection Men. In this tumultuous dark underworld, where a “fresh subject” can fetch as much as nine guineas -- the yearly salary of a working man -- Victor must risk his life to uncover the identity of the murderer who is at the heart of London’s furtive trade in human corpses.

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IN OTHER NEWS

THE UNRESOLVED
Ranked one of the Top Ten Children's Books of 2006 by the Washington Post, THE UNRESOLVED has been named a 2007 Association of Jewish Libraries Notable Book for Teens by the Sydney Taylor Book Award Committee, which recognized only six works in Jewish teen literature this year.  The novel was also nominated for the 2006 Cybils literary awards, and for the 2007 Best Books for Young Adults (BBYA) by the American Library Association.  It's currently featured as one of the Best Teen Books of the year 2006 at BarnesAndNoble.com.

The Washington Post said, "Welsh writes with a precision and delicacy unusual for YA fiction."  School Library Journal said, "THE UNRESOLVED tells a remarkable story in a remarkable way."  Horn Book Magazine called THE UNRESOLVED, "A decidedly unconventional ghost story ... (and) a tightly wound novel."  Kirkus Reviews termed it, "A remarkable account."  Romantic Times said, "THE UNRESOLVED is a book you shouldn't pass up."  The Edge of the Forest said, "It may be the most beautifully written novel I've read this year."  All About the Book said, "The Unresolved is a great one. Mallory is the most well-developed ghostly character I've seen in a long, long time..."  And Midwest Book Review called THE UNRESOLVED, "a wonderfully different kind of ghost story."

Inspired by the tragic events of 9/11, THE UNRESOLVED reaches back into history to explore what was, until recently, the greatest disaster in New York City history.  Based on the sinking of the General Slocum steamship -- which caught fire in the East River, New York, in 1904, resulting in the death of over 1,000 mostly German immigrants on a church outing -- THE UNRESOLVED is at once a ghost story, a courtroom drama, an examination of immigrant life, and a tale of love, redemption and revenge.  The novel dramatizes how a single life –- and death –- can have a powerful influence on history.

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READERS' POLL
The results are in for the July, 2007, Readers' Poll.  The question was, "After Victor's mother was killed in front of him by Austrian Jaegers, what happened to Roberto, Victor's father?"  Eighty-six percent of you got this right.  He was cut down by a sword.

For the results of previous polls, click here.

REVIEWS (Excerpted in July)

RESURRECTION MEN -- Editorial Reviews

It's All About the Book, July 2007
"T.K. Welsh’s last book, The Unresolved, was one of my favorites of 2006, and Resurrection Men doesn’t disappoint...Of course, the inevitable comparison to Dickens’ Oliver Twist comes to mind, but Resurrection Men is far more than that. Welsh makes the horrific living conditions, especially those for children, come alive here...Most history books recount the glorious reign of the Queen and ignore the harsh reality lived by her poorest subjects. Welsh succeeds in bringing that reality to vivid life."

RESURRECTION MEN -- Reader Reviews

Kurt Johnson (Top 50 Reviewer) @ Amazon, July 2007
"...This book is written for young adult readers, and is intended to teach them the depths of the horrors that some people experienced in Victorian England...If you are willing to take this book for what it is, you will find it to be an interesting look into the dark, dark side of The Good Old Days. Personally, I found it to be a very interesting read, and a very educational one. I highly recommend this book."

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THE UNRESOLVED -- Reader Reviews

Sylvana @ the Christian Science Monitor, Book Bits, Readers' Picks
"The Unresolved by T.K. Welsh is historical fiction for young adults based on the real General Slocum steamship disaster. It was one of the best books I've read all year."

Annie/Winks at www.goodreads.com
"You start this book thinking that you know the end before you get there because it's clear the narrator is dead. But then she dies right in the beginning of the book and you spend the rest of your time following her and the other still live characters around as she tries to get justice meted out for the burning of the boat she was on with over a thousand others, many of whom also perished. It is an excellent thing to be able to write a compelling book that holds you until the climax, guides you through every turn and provides you with an excellent explanation of historical zenophobia and sexism in turn of the century New York City."

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JULY, 2007, Readers' Poll

The results are in for the July, 2007, Readers' Poll.  The correct answer was "He was cut down by a sword."

Eighty-six percent of those who responded got this right.  Great work!

After Victor's mother was killed in front of him by Austrian Jaegers, what happened to Roberto, Victor's father?

0% He killed his attackers 0% He ran away to Genoa 0% He was hanged 14.3% He was shot with a pistol 85.7% He was cut down by a sword