Five Kingdoms: Sky Raiders by Brandon Mull

The main character is likable, interesting and loyal. He's a great friend. He's both clever and yet still a kid, so prone to doing dumb things. 

This book is a delight. And it feels like it's written for kids, starring kids who act and think and speak like kids or young adults. It's refreshing after reading some clever books in which the kids are ideologically pure adults in kid form. Here the kids do dumb things that adults simply wouldn't do, like going into a stranger's house, into the basement without any adults knowing where they were. Or being told not to speak in the Quiet Wood (in case they are attacked) and two of the characters having a sparring match to see who can have the last word. Adults would tend not to do those things; but they are fairly natural to kids.


The world is reasonably easy to come to grips with. There are certain elements that are difficult to comprehend (like the castles made from clouds containing treasure), but the whole is reasonably cohesive. It's an unpredictable, difficult, different world compared with earth, but it's not so incongruous as to be unbelievable. The other characters are well realised and interact differently, so aren't copies of the main character, nor copies of each other.

One of the issues of the book that would be worth discussing is how trust is earned. The main character is entrusted with an important secret because he demonstrates trustworthiness to the character carrying the secret. This is partly because of his loyalty and also because he shows himself to be the kind of person who will jump into a situation and help. In all the situations he does this, it turns out well. But it might not. What would happen if it didn't? How far should we go?

Cole, the main character, solves his fights by thinking. This would be a great conversation. How do his ideas help? How are they better than the other strategies by some of the other characters (like straight out fighting)? Where would his thinking need to start as he's trying to figure out what to do?

A wise parent would also have a conversation about entering strange people's houses. Ever. And not going into a stranger's basement. Ever.

There's fighting, real sword play. There's betrayal by grown ups. There is slavery. There is corrupt government and a king who has his daughters apparently killed in order to imprison them and steal their powers. So, lots of grown up stuff to deal with and discuss, but not too brutal with the details.

I like this book. I want to read the other four. 4 out of 5 stars.

Jinx by Sage Blackwood

 

Jinx is a great, easy read. The main character, Jinx is likable and interesting. He has one of the coolest abilities I've ever come across. His friends (whom he meets about 2/3rds of the way into the book), are also interesting, likable and a bit unknowable.

Jinx is 'rescued' by a wizard and becomes his apprentice, leaving his master to solves some problems and defeat the bad guy with his friends. It's part orphan story, part quest and it leaves room for the next book to be all about a follow-up quest. Jinx lives in an interesting, believable world which is fairly easy to access and imagine. It has various 'parts' to it that are interconnected and well realised.

Jinx lives in a dangerous world, full of evil people and rampaging monsters. Sometimes the evil is half-hearted, sometimes well intentioned, sometimes purposeful and frightening. But there are no easy, gentle good characters in the book. No-one is doing something for someone else because they love them. The only exception to this is the one major action that may be good but may not. We are never completely sure. The upshot of this is that it's hard to know who to trust and this waxes and wanes throughout the book. Indeed, from time to time the reader even doubts whether she can trust Jinx's point of view, which is something of an accomplishment in a young adult's novel: most main characters are infallible! The twist in this is that one of the character has a curse on her where she can only speak the truth in response to a direct question. This has caused substantial problems for her and means that she is an orphan of sorts also.

The book captures the issues of needing to understand the other people in our world, in order to respond properly and trust appropriately. Jinx needs to have this information to survive. When he loses the ability to 'read' people and needs to rely on what they show on their faces and in their voices the degree of duplicity (accidental or otherwise) creates difficult and frightening situations. When he regains the ability he is far more in control of how he responds to relationships and able to make better decisions. This would be a useful discussion to have: how our words reveal us and enable us to cloak ourselves, how our voices and faces show what we're thinking; what honesty looks like in a world where it is hard to trust each other and we face consequences for trusting one another.

One of the difficult things about this book is that it has a very black worldview: there are no altruistic people with genuine goodness who are inherently trustworthy. Grownups are as much victims as young people; grownups are an incompetent, foolish and caught in their own heads and worlds as everyone else. They aren't looking out for the kids; they warn them, but they don't care enough to intervene. They let them have the consequences of their choices, even where the consequences are dire. They'll only intervene if they are called on to do so, or they think it might be interesting. It's easy to see why you wouldn't trust an adult. The unadulterated selfishness that spikes the book makes it hard to read in the sense that it hurts ones soul. This would be another great discussion to have: imagine there was no-one in your world that you could trust to think beyond themselves and care about you, sacrificially. What would that be like? How would that affect you? What would 'trust' look like in that world? And who are you grateful for that is not like that in your world, because anyone you can identify to be 'for you' even where it might cost them something is a gift for which to be grateful.

3 out of 5. Not too hard to read. Ages 9-11.