Kit Grindstaff

I have no idea what reader this is meant for. It has strange goth themes of death and decay that I would not peg as for younger middle-grade readers and is fairly long and complex, but the writing is very simplistic and of the tell-not-show style that usually appeals to those younger kids.

I also couldn't figure out the main character - she's kind of dumb and very much "not like the other girls" (or, well, somehow despite growing up for 12 years with a gruesome take on the Addams Family and knowing nothing else, she is the bright ray of sunshine that doesn't fit in), but doesn't seem to be someone that younger kids could look up to either.

The plot doesn't make any sense in the first few chapters and so I gave up at the end of Part 1. I couldn't suspend my disbelief enough to go further, so I took the big blank "Part 2 Agromond Forest" on page 89 as my cue to leave. The book is about 450 pages long, and it seems to me the only way to fill that out is for more plot obstacles and lack of thinking from the main character.

Honestly, I only picked up the book in the first place because it has a similar title to another book I was searching for in the library database, and i decided that was as good a reason as any to borrow them both. Unfortunately, both books are terrible.… (mehr)

I love rats. I'll never forgive J.K. for what she did to Scabbers. My favorite character in Angie Sage's Septimus Heap series is Stanley the Message Rat. So The Flame in the Mist should have been a natural for me, with its two golden rats, Noodle and Pie. But it just didn't work. There was absolutely nothing distinctive about Noodle or Pie, nothing that gave them any personality.

(And why two rats anyway? Why not just one? Why not three? There was just no difference between Noodle's and Pie's personalities that would individuate them in any way. So why precisely two of them? – aside perhaps from the significance of twins and triplets in the plot, but this doesn't seem relevant to the rats.)

Overall, this isn't a bad book, but it's obviously a first novel for this author. Much of it is trite – for example, that the best defense against Mordsprites is "positive thoughts and feelings" – and Grindstaff has a tendency to use lengthy conversation by a character rather amateurishly as a means of setting forth narrative facts. Show, don't tell!

Overall, I'm going to give this a 3***, which isn't bad but isn't all that great either. Fortunately, the author wraps everything up in one volume because I wouldn't be all that anxious to go on to a sequel or a trilogy.… (mehr)