Anyone who lives in Oregon will tell you that ivy is
evil. It is impossible to get rid
of, it sticks to everything, and it pricks you when you try to pull at it. It is awful, and it is fucking
everywhere. So how great that someone
has written a story about the wilds of Oregon where ivy is the ultimate
evil. I loved that aspect of this
story and thought it worked very well, some others not as much.
The story is not a new formula and is clearly an homage to
The Chronicles of Narnia. A young
girl is told never to go near the Impenetrable Forest until her brother is
taken there and she must go in to try to bring him home. Within is a world of
animals and humans living in a time of turmoil while an evil queen plans to
destroy everything and everyone.
Prue, and her friend (?) Curtis, end up playing major roles in the
drama. I know that this is a
planned trilogy but am happy to report that there is a complete story here with
no cliff hanger ending. YEA!
Prue is rather too cool for school, which I guess is now the
norm for Portland. Her parents,
she always knitting and he always reading, are lax to an extreme and when
details are revealed about their past I had a hard time understanding how they
could possibly act the way that they did.
Curtis and Prue clearly know one another before the story starts but I
have no idea how. My main issue
with the book is that I needed to know more about Prue, Curtis, and their
families before the Wildwood part of the story began. I never got attached to them or understood their
attachment to one another, and I felt I needed a bit more background knowledge to
understand their actions.
The most successful part of the text were the amazing black
and white illustrations. I loved
them and thought that they really added to the story. However, the colored illustrations were a bit distracting. Because they were in color, they were
placed based on the printing instead of on the story, and so they came out of
sequence and that took me out of the reading. They were also well done but I didn’t think that they were
necessary.
0 comments:
Post a Comment