Here’s hoping the next book offers more nuanced characters and a less calculable plot.
Caw and his friends return in this sequel to Ferals (2015).
Exploring his parents’ old house, Caw, a white boy and crow feral (a person who can communicate with and control a certain kind of animal), finds a pale-skinned squatter named Selina. Though he wants to welcome her, Caw hesitates, a decision that turns out to be fortuitous. Outside the house, Caw’s accosted by an old man who gives him a mysterious stone that belonged to Caw’s mother. Caw eventually notices that touching the stone makes him feel bad, but it isn’t until near the end of the book that he fully comprehends its abilities. Third-person narration unveils a plot similar in its predictability to the first book, within which good characters are good and evil characters are evil. The book’s villain, the Mother of Flies, is forever ranting about the other ferals not respecting fly ferals, which does give her a glimmer of dimensionality, but it’s not enough to paint her as anything more than heartless. And though characters vacillate about whether Selina—who turns out to be connected to the Mother of Flies—is evil, she’s always merely a pawn with a good heart. The end finds Caw triumphant, at least temporarily—a tidy setup for a third installment.
Here’s hoping the next book offers more nuanced characters and a less calculable plot. (Urban fantasy. 10-14)Pub Date: April 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-232106-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
A droll and clever opener likely to leave readers breathless both with laughter and anticipation.
The fourth wall suffers major breaches as young characters from a popular fantasy series and the "real real world" join forces to battle threats in both.
Born of a real mother and a fictional dad, Bethany has been searching for her father ever since he disappeared into a book on her fourth birthday. When classmate Owen sees her materializing out of a copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, she unwillingly acquires a gobsmacked ally who persuades her to pick up a finding spell from the cliffhanger scene at the end of Volume 6 in his adored Kiel Gnomenfoot series. Owen tags along to do the unthinkable: change the plot by saving the Dumbledore-ish Magister from death at the hands of mad scientist and archvillain Dr. Verity. Crises snowball as Owen finds himself caught in a climactic battle between Magic and Science in the yet-to-be-published seventh volume. Meanwhile, Bethany is left on this side of the printed page to somehow prevent the Magister, enraged by the revelation that he's fictional, from freeing all made-up people and creatures and exiling their creators into a storybook to see how they like having no free will. Riley concocts a tasty mix of familiar tropes and truly inventive twists for his Gnomenfoot scenario plus a set of broadly rendered scene stealers for a supporting cast. For a plot, he dishes up a nonstop barrage of situational pickles for his increasingly desperate protagonists.
A droll and clever opener likely to leave readers breathless both with laughter and anticipation. (Fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4814-0919-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
A muddled middle, with little sign of movement toward a final conflict or resolution.
Nightmarish visions prompt desperate gambles for young magic-wielder Fort as he continues his efforts to rescue his father from the mysterious Old Ones.
Showing no inclination to pick up the opener’s plodding pace, Riley marches his preteen spellcaster through wordy reveries and exposition, conveniently overheard conversations, and recurrent dream encounters with a foe given to ALL-CAPS bombast as one ill-starred rescue scheme gives way on the fly to others. Doing his best to shuck annoyed friends and allies who insist on saving his bacon anyway, Fort eventually finds himself in a subterranean realm facing dwarves, elves (one elf, anyway), huge monsters—and an Old One who turns out to be a dragon willing to help subdue his three repressive kindred elementals before laboriously “fathering” an egg. (Just to muddy the waters a bit more, the titular dragon turns out to be another one altogether, hiding back on Earth and remaining offstage throughout this episode.) Magic, mostly teleportation and telepathy with admixtures of mind control and the occasional exploding fireball, gets brisk workouts, but in the end, the dark is still rising. Fort seems too colorless to inspire the sort of loyalty he gets from his supporting cast, which is well stocked with firecrackers and wild cards. Again, Fort’s circle isn’t entirely white, but the default is in operation.
A muddled middle, with little sign of movement toward a final conflict or resolution. (Fantasy. 10-13)Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5344-2572-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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