SPARKS

A boy in an abusive orphanage and his “Rags-to-Riches Princess” flee from her controlling father.

Felix, like the rest of the Freaks, doesn’t get Bagged (zipped up in a sack) or Dragged (to the brig) for his regular punishments. He doesn’t get tased with the Wolf’s Hotshot when he breaks a rule. He’s too fragile, with brittle bone disease. But in Wolfgang Law’s Great Home for Good Girls and Boys, the four Freaks—as they refer to the disabled residents—are punished in their own special ways. It’s the only world Felix has ever known, until mere days before his scheduled Discharge on his 18th birthday. That’s when the beautiful Jewish girl from the fairy-tale castle across the street sneaks into the home and demands Felix help her. Annika and Felix are soon off on an exuberantly punctuated, sky-high-body-count journey around Nevada. The family secrets Annika hopes to unearth turn out to be uncomfortably Nazi in nature and more than a tad mad scientist. Meanwhile Felix is learning some unexpected truths about the Freaks’ disabilities, while the villains who hunt them become increasingly more physically grotesque or mentally unbalanced. The primary characters are White.

Exploitative treatment of disability does grave disservice to the compelling, carnival atmosphere of brutality.