Archer's Goon: Chapters 8 & 9
A LEGO tribute to a fun and original YA novel
Welcome to our LEGO re-enactment of Diana Wynne Jones’s awesome and highly original novel Archer’s Goon. My eight-year-old son and I did this a couple of years ago, and luckily, we took some photos! I’ve included some excerpts from the text, so you can see what our LEGO scenes are meant to be portraying.
If you haven’t read the story, none of this will make much sense. But, if you haven’t read the story, you shouldn’t be here anyway - you should be heading to your local bookstore/library to get a copy of Archer’s Goon!
If you want to start at the beginning, here’s where you can find all the chapters.
Or, read on!
Chapter 8
We didn’t build much for Chapter 8, because the action took place in the Sykes family home. Here they are sitting around the kitchen table.
The LEGO scene above doesn’t really capture the degree of desperation and chaos that were consuming the Sykes family by this time! In the book, it says around now:
They had to borrow food. They borrowed up and down Upper Park Street and from everyone else they knew. Quentin borrowed from the Poly buffet, and Fifi borrowed from the students.
By Thursday Hathaway’s men had reduced Upper Park Street to a patchwork of holes and new surface. Then they marked it out into new squares and commenced drilling all over again.
Chapter 9
Running feet padded softly and swiftly on both sides of the lane. Before Howard could drag Awful more than a yard or so, they were surrounded by Hind’s gang and backed up against a shopfront. “Bit of luck at last!” said the boy with the ginger hair. “Lost your nursemaid, have you?”
Howard and Awful encounter Shine in her underground headquarters, which was fun to build:
Almost the only light in there came from rows of black and white television screens over in the left-hand wall. At first it was hard to see anything else in their bluish glimmer.
The low blue light glinted off things on the walls, hung there by orderly hundreds: guns of all kinds, drills and different lengths of crowbar, racks of blackjacks and knives, lines of explosives, gas cylinders and heavy cutting equipment.
…
Shine was on the edge of the platform cleaning a gun…
Her hair was dark, and she was vastly fat. She was dressed entirely in black leather, which made her look fatter still since the leather stretched and strained in all directions in order to get round her.
To be continued…