Jamie O'Neill had bone cancer a year ago, which resulted in the amputation of his left forearm. Since then, he has not said a single word. He communicates by gestures and writing things in a notebook, and he lives with his mother in a ramshackle New York City apartment. Though Anna O'Neill has a good, well-paying job, all of the cancer treatments for her son took loads of money, and her debts are too great to live somewhere nicer. It doesn't help that her husband left her for a woman in Seattle when Jamie had just had his surgery, leaving his wife in the economic lurch and causing his son to feel betrayed, alone, and unloved by all except Anna and an old librarian named Thaddeus Harper who is fond of talking to him. Jamie has no other friends, and his Harlem School for Children with Special Needs is not at all the right place for him, since all the other kids there who can't speak are actually mute. Jamie chooses not to speak, and he connects with no one at school. But then Anna receives a letter with a lot of confusing legal terms in it one day, but she understands what it means: a distant relation of hers has died and she has inherited Muck Island off of Islandmagee off the coast of Ireland (at one point Jamie thinks of it as an island off the coast of a bigger island called Islandmagee off the coast of an even bigger island called Ireland which is off the coast of an island larger still called Great Britain--I liked that take on it). On Muck Island there is a little Victorian cottage--and an old lighthouse that is no longer used as such. Anna and Jamie, having nothing really to stay in New York for, decide that yes, they will move to the Lighthouse House on Muck Island, Northern Ireland. When they arrive, they make an interesting discovery--when he turns eighteen, Jamie will be the Laird of Muck, or Lord Ui Neill/O'Neill, a designation similar to a lord.
On Jamie's first day of school, he makes a friend--a guy named Ramsay McDonald who shares his rather rare views on the world. Ramsay respects that Jamie doesn't want to talk, and he's very smart, spending lots of the words he says to Jamie on bits of information. Ramsay and Jamie finally convince Anna to let them use the lighthouse as a place to hang out and do homework, as long as they were careful on the decrepit stairs. But one day, Ramsay looks at the lighthouse and realizes that it's too tall--there's an upper chamber that they haven't discovered yet. Jamie and Ramsay break through the ceiling and discover that there is, indeed, another room at the top. In that room, they find a strange gold device shaped like a fish and decorated with jeweled buttons. It doesn't take long for them to figure out that the Salmon, as it is called, takes them to the alien planet of Altair, where the equatorial country of Aldan is desperate for help in fending off the northern invaders from Alkhava, a country running out of resources and space as the permanent ice creeps over their land in the process of global freezing (the opposite of Earth's global warming). There, Jamie and Ramsay meet an Aldanese girl named Wishaway who claims that her people have been waiting for the Lords Ui Neill; in past times of trouble, they have come just in time to save them.
And now for what I really did not like. The main thing is how the writing went NEEERRRRRRRRRRRR once Altair was introduced into the story. Oh, I thought the author was brilliant and wrote beautifully up until that point, and it was such a disappointment to find that not true. A lot of the chapters in the beginning of The Lighthouse Land start with a vivid description of the setting, which is something I've never come across before, and I really liked it. I also thought it was interesting how the very start of the book was in second person, with the author talking to you as Jamie. The writing gave a positive first impression, and pulled me in. But then Altair barged in and screwed everything up. I felt like McKinty had handed over the reigns to the plot, which then did its best to get to the end as quickly as possible, meaning that the writing collapsed and the story barely made any sense. Maybe a more accurate way of putting it would be to say that McKinty handed over the reigns to the end, which then proceeded to get to itself the shortest way possible. Okay, I will admit that the writing actually wasn't all that terrible. Really only one little thing bothered me. Now you might read these reviews and notice that I say "was" and "were" a lot. That's true; I don't deny it. It's kind of hard to get around in a book review, though, so I try not to let it bother me too much. But when you're writing a novel, you want to stay away from "was," "were," "is," and "are" as much as possible. McKinty went to town on that verb! I stared at the pages with a dangerous look, hating it so, so, so much. And to make matters worse, sometimes it wasn't even something like "they were standing there" where one could write "they stood there" and it would sound so much better. All too often I saw things like "Jamie was frightened." "Ramsay was excited." I had to groan. Say "The idea of what they were about to do filled Jamie with fear." Try "Ramsay swayed from foot to foot in anticipation, watching his friend eagerly as Jamie picked his way towards the others." Another one that I hated was something along the lines of (I couldn't find the spot again) "Things weren't looking too good for the Aldanese." "Things?!?!?" "Good?!?!?" Are you kidding me?! You're a novelist, and you write "Things weren't looking too good" in your book?!?!?!?!? I write, too, but I never in a million years would even dream of publishing something with a sentence like that in it. I might've written that when I was ten years old, perhaps, but never now.
Anyway, enough about the writing, and onto the other issues.
This story was rather heavy on male characters, and normally I don't mind that sort of thing, as long as the girls are well-done. But the two main female characters in this story (the others being an Aldanese ruler who appears once, and Ramsay's mother who is only ever mentioned--there aren't even any girls at school, or so it seems) are absolutely dreadful. Anna, Jamie's mom, is actually pretty good for a while--she supports her disabled son and loves him, and manages to keep their life together with virtually no money, and she stays just as wonderful when they move to Northern Ireland. But at the end (not to give away much) she has her little damsel-in-distress moment and is saved by dudes--since there aren't any other ladies around in the first place. But the really main girl in The Lighthouse Land is the alien teenager, Wishaway. She had the potential to be brilliant; she really did. She was a ruler's daughter, she was interested in Jamie and Ramsay. But then this author who clearly has no idea what a girl is for went and ruined Wishaway. She was so one-dimensional! I couldn't stand her at all; if I had been a character in The Lighthouse Land, I would've hated her so much. She had, as Hermione says of Ron, the emotional range of a teaspoon. Occasionally she'd be feeling romantic towards Jamie (and it's no spoiler; believe me--sometimes I felt like the only reason a girl was included in this story was so that McKinty's straight male main charrie could have someone to "fall in love" with, and on that note, good God, they're thirteen!), but more often, she was sad. Yup, sad, Wishaway was always sad. Oh, you don't believe me? You think that Wishaway wasn't sad all that much? Have a look at the dialogue tags on the words that Wishaway says. About a million and three of them are "Wishaway said sadly." Honestly, McKinty could've at least pulled out his thesaurus and looked up sad. Miserable, depressed, unhappy, etc. You could pull out so many more adverbs to put there! And besides, you aren't even supposed to use adverbs as much as McKinty does. They are very dangerous if you have trouble showing what's going on instead of telling, which our author clearly does. But this is a writing problem again; I digress. Back to annoying girls. So essentially, Wishaway was boring and pointless, and the story would've been better without her.
Speaking of characters, there was also a serious problem with the antagonists of The Lighthouse Land, the Alkhavans. If there's a war in a novel, to make it believable, you must make the opposite side at least slightly good. Only once does Jamie feel regret for fighting these "evil" people, and it's not quite as deeply explored as it could be. The Alkhavans are basically portrayed as purely terrible people who are only going to war because they like to fight (which is stupid, because no one loves to go do something they'll probably get killed doing). Once their motives are mentioned, but then it's totally dropped. Well, I could go on describing how dreadfully done the Alkhavans are, but I just realized how absurdly long this thing is getting, so I'll cut it short here.
The final major problem with The Lighthouse Land was the world-building. McKinty thought up this brilliant world, this alien planet of Altair, and then he wasted it. It's way, way, way too similar to Earth, in a way that's just stupid and lazy. It's so incredibly underdeveloped, I several times almost gave up in disgust when parts of Altair culture were described.
In short, I would not recommend this book to anyone who isn't one hundred percent desperate for something to read. How on earth did this book get enough positive reviews as are posted on the cover and front pages of the book? The writing is inexperienced (and this isn't McKinty's first book, either!), the characters are boring, the world is flimsy, and the plot is ordinary at best. I won't be reading The Lighthouse War; the idea of making this wasted story any more than one book long is too sad to contemplate.