Harrison Squared

By: Daryl Gregory

Narrated by: Luke Daniels

Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins

Publisher's summary

Harrison Harrison - H2 to his mom - is a lonely teenager who's been terrified of the water ever since he was a toddler in California, when a huge sea creature capsized their boat, and his father vanished. One of the "sensitives" who are attuned to the supernatural world, Harrison, along with his mother , has just moved to the worst possible place for a boy like him: Dunnsmouth, a Lovecraftian town perched on rocks above the Atlantic, where strange things go on by night, monsters lurk under the waves, and creepy teachers run the local high school.

On Harrison's first day at school, his mother, a marine biologist, disappears at sea. Harrison must attempt to solve the mystery of her accident, which puts him in conflict with a strange church, a knife-wielding killer, and the Deep Ones--fish-human hybrids that live in the bay. It will take all his resources and an unusual host of allies to defeat the danger and find his mother.

©2015 Daryl Gregory (P)2015 Audible Inc.

Pleasant Surprise

It started out a bit slow, but after a while it got so engrossing that I couldn't stop listening. I just had to know what happened next. And the ending was not at all what I expected. Definitely worth reading/listening to!

very entertaining

loved this story. imaginative, fun to listen to, and the reader was great. hoping there is a second book

how do i lub thee?!

excellent story and absolutely amazing performance by luke daniels!!! i’m excited to move on to the next part of the saga.

pretty good story!

it was a little hard to get into at first. Once Lub showed up it got a lot more fun. I actually laughed out loud a few times.

What I remember are tentacles. Tentacles and teeth

When Harrison Harrison (H2 for short) was three, his father was lost at sea while saving the boy from a giant tentacled arm from the deep. Harrison’s leg had to be amputated and he nearly lost his life anyway, and ever since he’s had a phantom leg on steroids and a violent temper to match. Now he’s sixteen and his “rather Ahabish” Brazilian marine biologist mother Rosa has brought him with her to Dunnsmouth, Massachusetts, ostensibly to investigate whether the colossal squid makes it that far north.

After their sunny San Diego home, Dunnsmouth is a Lovecraftian “heart of bleakness,” hermetic, inbred, and occult. Everyone looks related (black-haired, pale, fish-eyed, and creepy). People go missing all the time, perhaps victims of the legendary boogeyman called the Scrimshander. The bay resembles an alligator’s mouth. There is no cell-phone or Internet access (Harrison fears being “involuntarily Amished”). And his new school, Dunnsmouth Secondary (“Home of the Threshers”) consists of creepy teachers (who teach the making of fish net knots in Practical Skills, the galvanizing of dead frogs in Cryptobiology, the solving of nonsensical problems in Non-Euclidean Geometry, the reading of Catastrophes of New England 1650-1875 in English, and The Subjugation and Domination of Various People and Lands in World History), zombie-like students (who are as “quiet as pallbearers” and communicate to each other in “fingercant” invisible piano key tapping gestures), daily rituals called Voluntary in the assembly hall where everyone chants in an unknown language, and a permanently closed library where the librarian says things like, "The lure of the stacks can't be resisted."

As if all that weren’t enough, after his first day at school, Harrison’s favorite book, his father’s 20th Anniversary Treasury Edition of the newspaper comic strip Newton and Leeb (about the adventures of a five-year-old boy genius and his robot dog) is stolen from the Harrisons’ rental house by a “Fish Boy,” a humanoid with webbed appendages, sharp teeth, and gills. And after Harrison’s second day at school, his mother goes missing while she’s out on a chartered lobster boat placing her radio buoys on the sea. The police say the boat, its pilot, and Rosa all disappeared without a trace, and that the Coast Guard has been called in to search for them.

In addition to the compelling first-person narrator Harrison (with his expensive prosthetic leg and his sensitive phantom leg, his rational intelligence and his volcanic rage, his wit and his stubbornness), there are plenty of neat characters: Harrison’s aunt Selena (like a 2D model from a fashion magazine but clever, ironic, and caring), Lydia from school (as grim and difficult to cozy up to as Batman), Lubb (a male Little Mermaid type into comics and other landlubber popular culture), Salim (an ABD astrophysicist taxi driver), Professor Freytag (an eccentric ectoplasmic researcher), and Ruth and Isabelle (a mild girl and her bloodthirsty and apparently independently talking china doll).

The reader Luke Daniels does a fine job reading the audiobook, crowding the camp line mostly without transgressing it (though his Lubb sounds a wee too much like Gollum).

There’s lots of humor here, with the quirky characters and witty lines like “Cults. They always thought the glass was half-doomed.” There are some scares. Toad Mother is a 10’ tall and 10’ wide woman wearing a muumuu and smelling like an abattoir. The Scrimshander is a scary monster artist. Despite them and his mother’s awful plight, you’re never TOO worried about Harrison or his friends, perhaps because of the consistently funny tone. The concept of clever and rebellious youths opposed to wicked and none-too-bright adults must be appealing to the YA audience. Indeed, Harrison Squared (2015) reads like a cross between H. P. Lovecraft and Percy Jackson: The Lightening Thief, but it’s funnier and less disturbing than the former, and better written and less obnoxious than the latter. Although I found it less impressive than Daryl Gregory’s earlier novels Raising Stony Mayhall (excellent) and Afterparty (fun), I will probably read the next two entries in the trilogy when they are published.

Surprisingly good!

Interesting plot, full of mystery and intrigue. I got this book on a daily deal sale and wasn’t expecting much. I had some free time and saw this in my library, so I decided to try it. It greatly exceeded my expectations. If there is a second book I am totally getting it!

For those concerned with language or adult themes, it was fairly tame, though there were a couple strong words and one or two scenes alluding to adult content, though nothing was explicitly said.

I prefer books with an ending.

Predictable pretty early on and what the heck was with the ending. That was it?

Excellent YA novel - even if I AM 46 years old!

Sometimes I like to read something very light compared to the stuff I normally read, so I head to YA. This was was great! And the narrator was AMAZING! I would not have enjoyed this nearly as much if I had been reading it in text form. The author gets in some hilarious lines, which the narrator pulls off so well, and I was literally laughing out loud at points. At the same time, lots of action and adventure. I'm definitely NOT the intended audience for this book, but I had a great time with it.

Watch Out in the Water!

I purchased this book mostly because Luke Daniels was the narrator, and I wasn't really expecting to like it as much as I did. I loved the reviewer who said it was like Scooby Doo. I totally agree. It was fun to watch the development of the kids in the story from zombie like to secret agent.

I just have to say Lub was my favorite voice. He should have had a ring.

I really enjoyed this "YA" story.

I would definately buy or root for a sequel. It had a great story and well defined characters. And Luke Daniels never dissapoints with his narration.