OAKENMEER

In O’Shea’sfantasy novel, a young girl must find an important mystical item after a corrupt prince uses trickery to seize the throne.

Everything and everyone in Oakenmeer is connected to the forest; they even share certain physical qualities with the trees, such as sap running through their veins, barklike skin, and leafy hair. Although every living being is sustained by the forest, conflict still arises in the five Surviving Kingdoms of Oakenmeer—Macadamia, Pignoli, Colocynth, Cashew, and Pecan. Fortia, a young girl from the Kingdom of Macadamia, is about to come face-to-face with a massive power struggle. After a normal day of gathering nuts with her father, Constans, a farmer and producer of nut oil, she and her family learn that the king of Macadamia, King Serenus, has just died. In Oakenmeer, when a monarch dies, their heir must prove that they’re worthy of the throne by crushing a mystical nut called a Golden Nugget in their mouth. Fortia sneaks out that night to watch Prince Tonitro complete the ritual, and then she takes home a shard of the crushed Nugget. When Constans sees the shard on her nightstand, he’s instantly alarmed—but not because his daughter sneaked out. Constans and his wife, Fortia’s mother Sedo, are part of an order called the Ordo Nux Aurea, which maintains justice in monarchical succession. It’s revealed that the “Golden Nugget” that Prince Tonitro crushed was a counterfeit, confirming the Order’s suspicion that he had murdered his father for the crown. The Order resolves to find the real Golden Nugget to challenge Tonitro’s ascension, but before their plan can be carried out, Tonitro sends his henchman to arrest Constans and Sedo; Fortia escapes and, under Sedo’s instruction, manages to bring a box of important relics—a map, a dagger, a glove, and a compass—with her before the henchmen set their house on fire.

Over the course of the novel, O’Shea presents an intriguing and whimsical story, filled with detailed descriptions of the landscapes (“A dense canopy of multi-colored leaves stretches upward for hundreds of feet. The variety of this scheme gives the sunlight a kaleidoscope effect, which cascades down the rugged bark of these monoliths”) and of the inhabitants of Oakenmeer, supported by Riong’s and McKinley’s beautiful, painterly illustrations of characters and maps, respectively. However, as the brave, determined Fortia makes her way through the story—eventually teaming up with the Order on a mission to find the Golden Nugget, save her parents, and bring Tonitro to justice—the verbose, repetitive prose drags things down. Vagueness and inconsistencies disrupt the pacing, as well. For example, Fortia’s exact age is never made clear, although she is described as “young” frequently; she also distractingly oscillates between calling her parents “Mom” and “Dad” and “Mama” and “Papa.” Awkward phrasing also has the effect of taking readers out of the action: “Coughing, she descends into the obscurity of the smoke”; “Before this, she thought of Salamena as a lavish and skilled caretaker.”

An intriguing fantasy story featuring unique biology that’s hampered by unfocused execution.