FIREFOX MOON

Magic is erupting in Cedar Park, but Juniper is sure she can handle the dangers. She’s mistaken.

Following the events of Juniper’s Christmas (2023), Santa Claus has returned to his hidden workshop. But the London park where he hid out for years is still so loaded with magical Spangles (“units of polar magic”) that the foxlike Durkas of legend may have appeared. Beneath a rare Blood Moon, Durkas will grant a wish, if seldom in a way the wisher might expect. Little suspecting that some of Durkas' powerful past victims are gathering for a second try, Juniper sails recklessly into pickles ranging from magical compulsions to pursuit by Poppet, a giant sloth that she initially takes to be a five-ton “battle hamster.” Colfer is a gifted storyteller, but 13-year-old Juniper (who’s biracial, with a white English mother and a deceased Black Ghanaian father) not only seems from the start to be thoroughly outclassed by her adversaries, but also spends much of the tale bespelled into helplessness. With timely aid from Santa, she does at last regain enough initiative to help save the world from a dire future. Readers may find the resolution to be on the anticlimactic side and may view most of the rest of the cast, including the scene-stealing Poppet, to be more active, nuanced characters than the protagonist.

Terrifying and tongue-in-cheek in turn, if missing its predecessor’s sparkle.