Tuesday is the release of the Mockingjay, the incredibly super highly anticipated conclusion of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy. (But I don’t have to tell you that: let’s face it, if you like YA enough to read this blog, you already know that.) So here, have an open thread for discussing whatever you care to about the series. Who will live and who will die? Will Katniss have to go through a third round of games? Does Katniss end up with Gale or Peeta (and do you care who she ends up with)?

The only thing we ask is that, while spoilers for The Hunger Games and Catching Fire are fair game, no one spoils Mockingjay for 48 hours after its release (so all day Tuesday and Wednesday) so people will have a chance to read it for themselves. (I know I’m taking Tuesday off work to do so…)

Okay? Have at it!

Nimira left her home of Tiansher hoping to find fame and fortune in Lorinar, only end up a singing “trouser girl” in a low-class show. Then Hollin Parry, a well-to-do gentleman sorcerer, invites her to create a show with him, singing to accompany his fairy-made automaton piano player. Nim jumps at the chance — but when she arrives at his estate, she learns that it’s haunted by the ghost of his wife, and that there’s something strange about the automaton… In fact, it might just be alive.

I enjoyed this book, but there wasn’t much to it. It only took me a few hours to read, and after I finished, I was left without any serious impressions about it, positive or negative. Which makes it kind of hard to review.

Here’s the best I can offer: the world building was really interesting. It was clearly a fantasy take on Victorian England — I wasn’t positive where Nim’s homeland was, certainly somewhere in Fantasy Asia — with plenty of magic mixed in. Parry’s house featured tigers turned to gold by alchemy, and garden fairies turned into decorative paperweights. There was war brewing with the fairies (a second war, actually), and interesting references to the mermaids Nim’s ship had to pay off to journey to Lorinar, and some other magic creatures. The world building was definitely my favorite part. I wish there had been more to the book so we could get further into it.

Nim herself didn’t leave me with much to say about her as a character, though I thought her situation was handled interestingly. She had been a child of privilege in her home country, who came to Lorinar after she lost that; she was self-aware enough to realize she craved having the trappings of wealth back, and that was part of her motivation throughout. The fact that she was also clearly an Exotic Other to the people of Lorinar, but that we saw it from her POV and how uncomfortable and upset it made her, was an interesting touch. (And makes the fact that the book was rejacketed to show Nim as a character of color all the more important.)

The plot itself didn’t wow me. The idea of the fairy automaton was very cool — the secret of who and what it turned out to be even more so — but that largely became a romance that I was never sold on. It happened too quickly, it seemed to be largely based on pity and intrigue and not actual connection. I was somewhat disappointed. Alternately, you have the subplot about Parry and his wife’s ghost, which borrowed quite heavily from Jane Eyre. To the point where I recognized that without actually having read Jane Eyre. I wasn’t terribly impressed by either plot or the book’s resolution.

Overall, the book was… fine, if somewhat forgettable. I feel like there was no there there; I wish it had been meatier, something I could sink my teeth into. More depth (of character in particular, and plot in general) would probably have improved it a lot. It earns an entirely middle-of-the-road two and a half cupcakes.

Even though Hiccup is the son of the Viking chief, he’s scrawny and not much good at Viking-type things. All the youths in the village have to catch dragons to train, but Hiccup only manages to get a tiny one, which he accurately names Toothless. Though Hiccup has taught himself to speak Dragonese, Toothless refuses to obey him, and eventually gets Hiccup and all the other boys banished from the village. That’s when they realize a monstrous Sea Dragon has washed up on their shore. It’s up to Hiccup and Toothless to defeat the Sea Dragon, save the village, and get themselves reinstated in the village, if they can only get along long enough to do it.

Despite my love of dragons, the Cowell books didn’t look terribly interesting to me in the store. But the How to Train Your Dragon movie blew me away. I loved everything about it – the story, the animation, the characters, the complete awesomeness of having a fantastic female lead and another girl who was treated as just another kid instead of the “bad” girl to Astrid’s “good”…fabulous. Utterly fabulous. I adored it.

So I picked up the book. Unfortunately, it’s pretty much the only time that I’ve liked the movie version better than the book.

To a certain extent, this isn’t the book’s fault at all, because it’s a very different beast. And certain decisions that were made were the correct ones for the format the story was in. For example, in the book, Toothless and Hiccup talk in Dragonese, which wouldn’t work in a kids’ movie – you’re not going to have long conversations between the two main characters in subtitles when half the audience can’t read well enough to follow them. Conversely, in the movie Toothless is basically a big kitten, and his body language is utterly lovable to anyone who’s ever had a cat – but that’s not something that translates to prose.

Then, too, in the book Hiccup has a friend who’s even more pathetic than he is: Fishlegs. In the movie, Hiccup’s isolation works well. In a book series with an indefinite amount of books, it would be way too depressing. He needs at least one friend. Again, it makes total sense that the book was written that way, and the changes that were made for the movie were made to tell a different kind of story – but it was a story that I preferred.

The one thing that the movie changed that I do in fact fault the book for is the amount of (human) female characters. There’s one in the book – Hiccup’s mom – and I’m not sure she even has a line. Meanwhile, the movie has the fantastic Astrid and Ruffnut, and women seem to be just as capable warriors as men in general. Advantage: movie version, by far.

Also, a small quibble: emphasis in the book is done with all caps instead of italics. This makes it read like everyone’s screaming at you all the time, including the narration. It’s kind of stressful.

The book was decent, with cute illustrations, and I’m glad it’s a successful series. But I have no interest in picking up any more of them – just in getting the movie when it comes out on DVD. Three cupcakes. (But the movie would’ve gotten five.)

Underlying the world we know is a world of magic users – a handful of lesser guilds, ruled over by the powerful and ruthless wizards. For centuries, the wizards have been forcing magical warriors into deadly tournaments to avoid confronting each other directly and starting an all-out wizard war. That all changes in The Warrior Heir, when Jack Swift, an ordinary high school student, discovers that he may be the last warrior alive – and every wizard in the world wants to use him or kill him. Jack is thrust into the wizard tournament, and wizard society is subsequently turned in its head. In The Wizard Heir, the immensely powerful young wizard Seph McCauley finds himself a pawn in the growing wizard war, thanks to a magical lineage he doesn’t even know about. And in The Dragon Heir, the fate of everything may just rest in the hands of the seemingly-unmagical Madison Moss, who is trying to fight both her growing attraction to Seph and the destructive power she holds over him. If the magical world is to be saved, Madison must figure out her place in the ancient legends before the other side gets their hands on her.

There’s something odd about these books. All three are very, very long, and very, very dense. Whenever I was actively reading them, I was totally engrossed and completely enjoying the story. I didn’t want to put them down. However, when I did put them down, I always had to force myself to pick them back up again. They were so long and so dense (and contained a far higher ratio of soul searching and angst to action than I prefer) that it was a struggle to get through them, even though I enjoyed the experience of actually reading them. It was sort of like exercising is for me: I like it when I’m doing it, and I’m always glad afterwards, but it’s like pulling teeth to get me there.

On top of that, these books completely slipped my mind when considering my backlog of Books to Be Reviewed. Seriously, I read them months ago and completely forgot about them immediately afterwards, even though I have another book of Chima’s sitting in my TBR pile. So I clearly have some sort of inexplicable mental block about these books, but I’ll try to do my best to review them anyway.

First off, the worldbuilding is great. I love the guild system, with its different types of “Weir,” or magic-users: emotion-manipulating enchanters, amulet-crafting sorcerers, precognitive seers, magically strong and durable warriors, and spell-speaking wizards. I love the allegorical legend explaining the origin of the guilds, and the way it turns out to be not so allegorical after all. I love the complicated history of the wizards, interwoven with real history. Good times, all of it.

Now for the characters. Jack is a perfectly decent if somewhat boring Everyboy of a protagonist. I was a little annoyed when he was thrust out of the spotlight in favor of a completely different protagonist for the second book, but Seph is also a perfectly decent protagonist, angstier and more arrogant, which makes him both more interesting and less likeable than Jack. The third book is divided between several protagonists, but mostly Madison and clever but low-power wizard Jason Haley. I found them to be my favorite protagonists – more interesting than Jack, more likeable than Seph – but hoo boy, they both spend a lot of time angsting and completely failing to communicate with the other characters in order to forward the plot. This is wildly frustrating, since it means they do a lot of idiotic things they would have avoided if they’d just talked to other people. I hate that. In general, the angsting is my biggest problem with the book, because all the characters spend a lot of time worrying the same issues like a dog with a bone. I feel like a hundred pages of very repetitive “who can I trust” or “oh no I am a monster” agony could have been easily cut from each book. Maybe it would have made them easier for me to get through.

There’s also a somewhat weird pattern of women being used or traded or otherwise treated as valuable possessions and/or weapons, at least as far as important, magical women go. Jack’s Aunt Linda is an enchanter and as such, though she is one of the major movers and shakers of the series and in fact can be credited with setting the whole thing into motion, is also very much something the wizards want to possess as a fun sex toy, since that’s how they view enchanters. Madison is sought by both sides in the final war because they know how powerful she is, although not why. Alicia Middleton, a teenage wizard, is introduced as a spy who dates Jack in order to keep an eye on him for the powerful wizards who want to use him in the tournament; she is redeemed in the third book, but the redemption involves her being pulled back and forth between the interests of powerful male wizards, working both sides while wearing, essentially, a slave collar. And show

Anyway. Despite my difficulties getting through the books (and remembering that I had done so), I did, you know, actually really like them, and I’m glad I forced myself to finish. Four cupcakes.

High school student Ellie’s life is fairly normal, until she agrees to help out with a play at the local university, thanks to the urging of her best friend, Kevin. But someone else in the play has her sights set on Kevin – someone not quite human – and suddenly Ellie finds herself navigating the world of the New Zealand supernatural armed only with a magic mask and the help of the mysterious Mark (on whom Ellie just happens to have an enormous crush). As Ellie discovers that the mythology of her homeland is all too real, she finds that that selfsame mythology is threatening to destroy New Zealand – and that she may be the only person left who can stop it.

(Full disclosure: Karen is actually a friend of mine. I shall do my best to review without bias!)

There are two striking things about this book that set it apart from 99% of the YA fantasy lit out there. One is, of course, the setting. Guardian of the Dead isn’t just set in Karen’s native New Zealand; New Zealand informs everything about the book – the culture and geography, of course, but more importantly the magic. No tired dragons or vampires here – the fantasy element in Guardian takes the form of beautiful, terrifying, fairy-like patupaiarehe and powerful, sea-serpentine taniwha, and creation myths star Māui and Hine-nui-te-po instead of Zeus or Odin. Everything is carefully explained for the benefit of clueless readers like yours truly, but the explanations are smoothly integrated into the plot (and there’s a helpful note from the author at the end for further clarification). While this may feel info-dumpy to people familiar with Māori mythology, it was all fresh and fascinating to me.

The other aspect of the book that really struck me was its determined inclusiveness. The cast is remarkably diverse: Ellie, being white, is distinctly in the minority, though there are mixed-race characters who “pass.” Kevin is of Māori descent; Ellie’s sort-of friend Iris is of Chinese descent; Ellie’s favorite teacher is black; and the ranks of minor characters are filled with people of varying ethnicities. And it’s not glossed over; race is something Ellie thinks about and is careful to be politically correct about, and the different cultures she interacts with have a direct bearing on her life, in both mundane and extraordinary ways. Furthermore, Kevin is asexual, marking the first time I’ve seen an explicitly asexual character in a YA novel, and Ellie’s older sister (who doesn’t appear in the book) is gay. It shouldn’t be so remarkable that this book represents the diversity of real life in a way that most literature – hell, most media, full stop – doesn’t do, but it is, and Guardian should be commended for being inclusive without ever taking away from the narrative.

Aside from that, the book is just really good. Ellie is believably teenage, self-conscious and uncomfortable in her own skin, but simultaneously extremely self-reliant and unafraid to stand up for herself or speak her mind, a difficult balancing act for a protagonist. Her romance with Mark had me almost embarrassingly hooked, cooing over all their little moments together and hoping for a happy ending. Her developing friendship with Iris, and Iris in general, really pleased me, since I love to see narratives of female friendship handled well. And the fantasy adventure itself is exciting and very, very scary, scenes of sheer horror bursting through a general ominous storm cloud of something wicked this way coming.

My only quibble is with the somewhat odd pacing of the book. For the entire first half, the terrifying villain is Reka, a patupaiarehe woman. Then, abruptly, we discover that all of the patupaiarehe are trying to destroy New Zealand, but Reka’s okay. We’re suddenly left without a face to latch onto as regards the patupaiarehe threat, but at the same time introduced to Mr. Sand, a thoroughly creepy sort of vampire of magic who serves as an excellent villain for the rest of the book…except he has nothing to do with the patupaiarehe. If Mr. Sand had been introduced earlier, or the patupaiarehe given more specificity instead of being just a big scary something, it would have eased the transition from the first half to the second; as it is, they feel somewhat disjointed.

That said, Guardian of the Dead is still an exciting, scary, fun read, and I enjoyed it very much. It gets four and a half cupcakes, and I’m off to go bug Karen about letting me read her next book. Wish me luck!

Arthur has battled and defeated the first six trustees, but now he must face the most powerful of them all: Lord Sunday. To make matters worse, the House has almost completely collapsed into nothing, his best friends Suzy and Leaf have been pressed into dangerous military service against the Piper’s army, his mother is missing, and he is now completely, irrevocably a Denizen. As he struggles to overcome Lord Sunday and free the final part of the Architect’s Will, the Will’s true meaning is about to become clear, shaking the very foundations of the House and all of existence.

Since I can’t discuss my reaction to this book without talking about the end, major spoilers are unhidden behind the cut.

I’ve already spoken at length about this series in general, so I won’t rehash all that again. Suffice to say that I love the characters and the world-building, and have been waiting extremely impatiently for this, the last installment in the series.

And, well, I was disappointed.

It’s still very well-written. Arthur is still a fine protagonist, and his sidekicks Suzy and Leaf are still wonderful. There’s nothing really wrong with the book; I have no objective, critical comments to make.

(Well, no, I actually have one. Arthur’s mother – his smart, awesomely competent mother – is killed off off-page in order to give Arthur a momentary pang, then basically forgotten. The killing of female characters in order to bring pain to or forward the narrative of male protagonists (an infamous phenomenon in comic books) is one of my least favorite things to encounter in fiction and I was angry and disappointed that Nix used it.)

But the big twist is that the Will, when completed, is the Architect, and that Her reappearance triggers the complete dissolution of the House into Nothing, thus freeing the Architect from the self-imposed trap of her own existence. Rather than let her creation be completely destroyed, though, she offers Arthur the opportunity to become the new Architect. He accepts, with a caveat: he splits himself into two beings, the Architect, and a mortal Arthur who doesn’t remember any of his adventures.

And so the entire series is a pyrrhic victory. Arthur does not manage to save the House, but he is left with the painstaking work of rebuilding it from scratch. He does not manage to remain human, but he creates a human copy of himself, though neither New Mortal Arthur nor Architect Arthur come across as the Arthur we’ve come to know throughout the series. And hanging over all of these events is the depressing knowledge that everything Arthur did throughout the series was a roundabout way of accomplishing exactly what he was trying to prevent. In trying to save the House, he destroyed the house. It could be argued that the House needed to be started afresh and this is all a good thing, but it’s extremely frustrating to spend an entire series rooting for a character to succeed, only to have that success snatched away at the last second.

I do still think that The Keys to the Kingdom is an excellent series, and I do still love the characters and the world-building. But I really, really didn’t like the ending. Since I know my reaction is very subjective, and since I’m loath to give the book a really bad grade thanks to my former love of the series, I’m settling on a middle-of-the-road three cupcakes.

The ancient and evil woman called Beloved has finally broken through into Luster, the land of the Unicorns, and brought the Hunt with her. As the Hunters start their genocide, the unicorns gather together and find allies of their own — but if they can’t find a way to get back their fighting fire, it could be the end of the unicorns forever. But Beloved’s mad Hunt has an unintended consequence: the gate she opened is right in the heart of Luster, destroying the great tree that holds the world together, and now not just the unicorns, but all of Luster, may be doomed…

General spoilers are unhidden after the cut.

Not gonna lie: I devoured this book. I did a doubletake when I realized I’d missed its release, bought it the next day, and had it finished in under 24 hours. I had originally planned to reread the whole series first, but it was so new and tempting and right there in my bag, and look, I’m only human and I’ve been waiting for the series conclusion for, like, 16 years now.

It’s hard for me to figure out what to say here, so I’ll start with this: it feels like the legend and worldbuilding behind Luster ran away with the story at some point. I remember reading the second book, and I was utterly blown away by the twist at the end, when you find out the truth about the Wanderer. But I didn’t feel similarly about the reveal of the Whisperer in the third book, because the first two set it up clearly that Beloved is the series’ Big Bad. Adding in the Whisperer, while intriguing (and it says a lot of interesting things about the unicorns) meant that the story was no longer about Cara and the unicorns fighting with Beloved; it was about defeating a much more nebulous villain, and Cara was no longer at the heart of that conflict.

The fourth book takes it further. It turns out that the Whisperer isn’t something that can be defeated by Cara or the unicorns at all, which surprised me: with the repeated talk about the unicorns needing to find a way to “regain their fire” after having tried for so long to be pure, I genuinely thought that they would have to reclaim their darker impulses, and in so-doing, defeat the Whisperer that was created by those impulses. Instead, there was a whole additional layer of conflict added. To defeat the Whisperer, the book had to bring in Elihu, Fallon, and Allura, and even though we barely got to know Elihu as a character, the whole conflict hinged on him. There were pieces of it I loved — I think the Dimblethum’s backstory was awesome — but that meant that the series was really no longer about Cara and Lightfoot and their friends. Instead, it was about some godlike creatures and ultimately out of everyone else’s hands, and that frustrated me a little.

Actually, now that I think about it, very little of The Last Hunt was about Cara (and Lightfoot was barely in it at all). Between her parents, the dragons, the centaurs, the delvers, M’Gama, and other unicorns, her story was only one of many, many plot threads. They were all woven together very well. The book never sagged, I was never bored, and once I remembered what had happened in the previous book I was never lost or confused by having such an array of subplots. And the fact that they came together in the massive final climax was nothing short of amazing — just getting all of those characters together at one place and time couldn’t have been an easy narrative feat, and the dual-climax of the Hunt and Luster shaking apart worked really well. But, as I said in my mini-review of Dark Whispers, having so many POVs and so much going on means there isn’t time for a lot of development for any of the characters. I think the character who stuck out to me the most in this book was Rocky, because (between this and the previous book) he really did have the strongest character arch.

As a reader, I’m really into story structure. I love worldbuilding. On a technical level, I think those aspects of The Last Hunt are brilliant. But as good as they are, I don’t think those things are really Coville’s strength as a writer. I’ve always loved his characters most of all. He has a rare talent of making characters feel very, very real — especially tween and teen girl characters, which seems to be pretty rare from male writers (and oh man, I can’t tell you how strongly I identified with Wendy from the AI Gang as a kid, for example). So as much as I flew through this book, and really loved the glimpse into Luster’s history and aura of hope for its future, I also wish there had been more of that character in it. Still, I enjoyed it mightily — more than Dark Whispers, definitely — and give it a solid four cupcakes.

Because Theodosia’s parents work at the London Museum of Legends and Antiquities, Theodosia spends a lot of time around quite a lot of very cool ancient artifacts. The only problem is that most of these items come into the museum with curses on them, and Theodosia appears to be the only one who can see the curses. When one particularly curse-heavy artifact is stolen from the museum, Theodosia must recover it, along with her brother Henry and her new pickpocket friend Will, before the whole country is flung into war.

I picked this up in Target because it was cheap, and because spunky Victorian girls and Egyptology are things that intrigue me. I then proceeded to not review it for, like, eight million years at least. So that’ll give you an idea of how much of an impact it made on me. A lot of the details have been lost in the canyons of my mind since I read the book, but let’s see what I can remember:

Theodosia is a pretty decent heroine, and her two sidekicks perfectly respectable sidekicks. The villains were sort of random and disconnected, and the red herring villain’s red herring-ness was never adequately explained.

The prose was quite charming Victorian pastiche, but the chapter endings were dreadful. Almost all of them felt more like LaFever had paused for a bathroom break than because there was a real break in the narrative; the first sentence of the subsequent chapter almost always seemed like it could just have followed the last sentence of the previous chapter without interruption.

One of the motifs of the book is that adults, particularly Theodosia’s parents, don’t listen to her. I know that often adults don’t listen to children, and have certainly been there myself, back in my graham cracker days. And there are narrative where it works well (Count Olaf’s triumphant “Adults never listen to children!” in the Series of Unfortunate Events film is marvelously chilling). But here I just found it unbelievably frustrating and, quite frankly, it made me hate Theodosia’s parents, who never hear a word she says, whether it’s plot-related or not.

The end was a little bit of a letdown, because the war the heroes are trying so hard to prevent is…World War I. So, um, sorry, guys. Your triumph will be short-lived. It’s just hard to celebrate with them through the lens of history.

All in all, Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos was a perfectly serviceable but un-noteworthy book, and so gets the middle-of-the-road grade of three cupcakes.

Thomas wakes up in the maze, the newest kid there. Before he has a chance to figure out why he can’t remember anything, or acclimate to life in the Glade and the Maze and its horrible Grievers beyond, bad things start happening. First, another newbie shows up — the first and only girl. Then supplies stop coming. And then the Ending: if the Gladers don’t solve the Maze soon, they’re definitely going to die there.

There are spoilers uncovered under the cut.

My main thought after reading this book was that it called on a lot of the same tropes as the Maximum Ride series — but its strengths and weaknesses are exactly opposite. Consider: both books involve kids who are part of some enormous experiment (not one they entered by choice), who don’t really know what its endgame in. They both are told that everything happens for a reason, but never really get more than a hint of what that reason is, and yet have reason to suspect the evil scientists are perhaps not so evil after all. And both feature a lot of running and being chased by strange creatures.

But in terms of strengths and weaknesses, where the problem with Maximum Ride was the pacing and total lack of plot, but its strength was the characters, Maze Runner is in the extreme other corner. The book is face-paced and exciting; the plot is fine, though nothing extraordinary, and carries the book from setpiece to setpiece with no problem. But the characters had zero personality (and there was only one girl, who spent much of the book unconscious, which… yeah). We’re told that Thomas is very smart, and in great shape, super duper special and extraordinary… and being told that substitutes for development. Similarly, the ease with which Thomas defeats the Grievers and saves people makes it look like everyone else was just incredibly incompetent for two years,and makes it all feel a bit too easy for him.

Aside from that, the slang made me really irritated. I think adding in some slang can make for really great world building, when done well; it can make the strange setting feel real. It basically failed to do so in Maze Runner. It didn’t feel like there was a need for a lot of the words that were used, and whether there was a need or not, they were all vastly over used, to the point where it felt more like a nervous tick than an insult when a character was called a shuck-face or a pile of klonk or whatever.

Ultimately, because I’m such a nut for worldbuilding and structure, I liked the book fine. I might even pick up the second one, to see if there really is a plan behind everything, something I’m generally pretty skeptical of (especially after the Maximum Ride series…). But the book itself didn’t do much for me; the good parts were fine, but not outstanding, and the bad parts were pretty annoying. So it edges by with a respectable but not outstanding three cupcakes.

On his 11th birthday, Will Stanton learns that he not merely human; he is the last of the immortal Old Ones, destined to protect the world from those that would destroy it. Since time immemorial there has been a constant struggle between the forces of the Light and those of the Dark. Now the Dark is rising, gathering for a final push, and the chances of stopping it for once and for all rest with a small group of children: Will, youngest of the Old Ones; Simon, Jane, and Barney Drew, powerless but clever and resourceful; and Bran Davies the Raven Boy, with a secret magical heritage of his own.

I originally meant to read this entire series before the movie came out, then do a sort of comparative review of the two. In 2007. Oh well, the best laid plans, right?

I really liked Over Sea, Under Stone, the first book in the sequence, which was about the three Drew siblings searching a tiny island in Cornwall for the Holy Grail, with some guidance from their Great-Uncle Merriman. I love books about plucky British children on holiday, and books about working out magical puzzles by following clues, and books about Arthurian legend, and this had all of that in spades.

The problems arose in the second book, when Will, the protagonist for the rest of the series (well, he splits point-of-view chapters with the Drews in the third and fifth books, but he’s really the main character of the whole sequence), took over. Now, I like Will just fine, as an 11-year-old boy. Unfortunately, glimpses of Will-the-11-year-old-boy are few and far between in the series. We see far more of Will the Old One, who is just kind of boring and pompous and unrelatable. He views humankind with a sort of distant, patronizing fondness; there’s no immediacy between Will and the reader or Will and his friends and family. One book features a mortal whose life is put at stake by Merriman, another Old One, as a sort of failsafe magical device, and when the mortal realizes how willing Merriman was to sacrifice him, he is deeply hurt and winds up betraying Merriman. Will and Merriman show very little understanding or sympathy towards the mortal, or anger or hurt at his betrayal, just vague but tolerant annoyance at the inconvenience of the whole situation. It’s this sort of reaction that makes Will, except for those rare moments when his normal boyish self shines through, a cold and somewhat unlikable narrator.

This isn’t helped by the fact that the series suffers greatly from…it’s not even a case of telling, not showing. Things just are, with no proper transitions or growth on the part of any of the characters. Will is given a book to read early on; the reader doesn’t get to see any of the content, but it instantly teaches Will how to be an Old One and use his powers and basically helps him change instantly from a confused little boy to an untouchable god. It’s incredibly unsatisfying; we never get to see Will learn or grow. To a lesser extent this happens throughout the series: characters suddenly know things for no reason, or instinctively trust or distrust people because they just do. The whole thing reeks of deus ex machina.

In general, the more vague and mystical and grandiose the books got, the harder it was to follow them or relate to them. When Cooper kept the books on a more human level, they were far more compelling. This is why the Drews are more successful characters than Will; it also applies to Bran, the troubled Welsh boy of mysterious parentage who is introduced in the fourth book. The Drews and Bran can be confused, or scared, or petty, and it’s their moments of all-too-human peevishness that make them interesting and likable.

All that said, the books are enjoyable. The prose is absolutely lovely, some of the best I’ve read since we started this blog. The passages describing Cornwall and Wales in particular are like poetry. The mythology is really well-done, although only Arthurian in the broadest sense. And the climaxes are all exciting and high-stakes. So it wasn’t like I didn’t like the books. Just, you know. Will. (Sometimes.)

In light of that, and in light of the fact that these are classics, and a lot of the problems with the books have only become annoying tropes years after The Dark Is Rising helped blaze the trail for modern kids’ epic fantasy, the sequence gets four cupcakes. Not bad!