Darkmouth by Shane Hegarty

Darkmouth is the start of a really fantastic new series. It has cool tech, portals to another world, a house with secret passageways and hidden doorways, monsters with a serious plan (not to mention the humans), and secrets upon secrets. Oh, and a hero who’s, well, a bit accident prone…

Finn is the last in a long line of Legend Hunters. Before him came Sean the Brave, Aisling the Powerful, Conor Red Skull, to name but a few. His father Hugo was battling Legends when he was twelve years old, and now it’s Finn’s turn. This is Darkmouth, a tucked away little Irish town, the last of the Blighted Villages. The last place where the divide between our world and the world of the Legends – myths, fables – is breached.

Encountering a Minotaur on your way to the corner shop is a fairly normal sort of day in Darkmouth, though that doesn’t mean anyone likes it and the locals are getting edgy – why, after all, have all the gateways to the Infected side closed except in Darkmouth? Hugo isn’t revered so much anymore as blamed for the Legends and the trouble they cause. And soon it’s going to be up to Finn to keep these creatures – and villagers – at bay. There are lots of problems with this, as far as he’s concerned, one of which is probably the part where he’s really not very good at it.

Trying to balance his training with his schoolwork isn’t an easy task for Finn, especially when his dad can’t seem to understand that Finn really is trying to master the skills, but it’s not as easy as it sounds. And then the Hogboon arrives. He has a message for Finn, but what does it mean? Perhaps there is trouble brewing and perhaps, no matter how much he might wish, there is no escaping destiny for Finn.

Plus Emmie, the new girl at school, seems to have a particularly keen interest in the Legends and Finn’s family. Is she as innocent as she seems? What are the Legends on the Infected side planning? What is the purpose of the diamonds the Legends are sending through the gateways? Is there a traitor in their midst? Does Finn have it in him to be a Legend Hunter and can he get his dad to listen to him?

Shane Hegarty has created a fun and witty adventure with plenty to get your teeth into – or will it be getting its teeth into you? Tightly plotted, there’s lots of action, amusing repartee, and great characterization – of both the Legends and the humans! The Legend Hunter’s Council of Twelve reminded me of The Watcher’s Council from Buffy the Vampire Slayer – in other words, utterly useless, and with a pointless political agenda – while the characters twist and turn almost as much as the page-turning story does. Oh, and there are some really great illustrations too, with loads of detail and that bring the story even more fully to life. Ideal for readers of Skulduggery Pleasant or Percy Jackson, and I’m definitely looking forward to book two.

The Glory by Lauren St John

I may be well past the age for which horse stories are aimed, but that hasn’t stopped me from them loving them, and when it comes to contemporary horse stories, Lauren St John is the best. This was demonstrated in her wonderful One Dollar Horse trilogy and now cemented with her new book, The Glory.

‘The Glory’ is an invented race (unlike the Event trials our One Dollar Horse hero Casey Blue competes in) - a mammoth, long distance race across America, the like of which no longer exists today. The Glory is endurance riding taken to the edge, a ‘do or die’ experience not to be undertaken lightly, whatever temptation the $250,000 prize might ignite.

Will has to win – his father needs life-saving surgery and without the money there’s no way they’ll be able to pay for it. He’s spent the last of his savings to get here and told his father he’s gotten a job on a ranch. Alex has been sent to the states by her mother and step-father to a boarding school/prison camp for troubled teens, 'Camp Renew', following a series of mistakes and her parents' blinkered inability to try and understand their daughter properly. The school is just a few miles from the The Glory's start point, and after running away at the earliest possible chance, stealing/rescuing a horse in the process, Alex, moneyless and otherwise directionless, talks the organizers into giving her a wild card entrance.

Can these two teenagers beat the odds, survive everything the wilderness has to throw at them, and achieve their dreams? Several dastardly villains are on their tail – cheating competitors, horse thieves, and Camp Renew’s warden/headmaster Strike Cartwright among them. I hope it’s not giving too much away to tell you that they each get their comeuppance in the end – some in quite the comedy of errors – but the real worry is, how much damage will they cause along the way?

Alternating between the two protagonists, The Glory comes together with Lauren St John’s usual wit, panache and clever storytelling. The quiet relationship that gradually develops between the two characters has just a touch of engineering – as does the fairytale ending of the story – yet also feels entirely right and true and exactly the way the world should be. There is danger a-plenty, but a good number of laughs too, and St John deftly interweaves little snippets of American history into the narrative that give the story a lovely extra little touch.

The Glory is pure escapism, but its escapism at it's absolute best. I loved it.

Mouse Bird Snake Wolf, by David Almond and Dave McKean

In Mouse Bird Snake Wolf David Almond and Dave McKean bring us a new creation fable told in a graphic novel form. It’s a story about the wonder of imagination, of innocence lost and human nature that is at once wonderful and ominous.

Once, in a world pretty similar to our own, there lived three children: Harry Sue and Ben. It was a pretty good place to live, except for one little problem: the spaces. Because the Gods, after they started making this world, got kind of lazy and tired, and stopped creating things before all the spaces were filled in. They’ve been napping ever since.

But one day, Ben, out walking with Harry and Sue, looks into one of these spaces and pictures within it a creature that could fill the gap. A mouse.

“A mouse?” said Harry. “What on earth is a mouse?”

“I don’t quite know,” said Ben. He wrinkled his nose and scratched his. “It’s kind of a mousy thing, I suppose.”

Thinking hard about what a mouse might be, Ben gathers together some of the natural things around him – wool and petals and nuts – and makes them into a mousy shape, then wills it into being. It’s sweet and mousy, and runs off to do mousy things.

Seeing Ben’s success, Sue and Harry each look into a space and see what they could fill it with, while the Gods stir restlessly above them. And then they imagine a wolf. Ben really isn’t too sure about the wolf, but the older children are wrapped up in their newfound power over the world and determine to continue with their creation… What will happen when the wolf is willed into being? How will it change the world? And how will it change Harry and Sue?

Each time I read Mouse Bird Snake Wolf, I seem to get a little extra something from it. It’s beautifully produced, colorful and edgy; it’s something more than a picture book, something more than a story book. The layout of each page is different, using panels or full colour images, or a mix of the two. ‘Stylised’ is the word that comes to mind to describe Dave McKean’s drawings, many of the images being quite angular and sharp. I like how the Gods are all in black and white, making them somehow ‘other’, and I like how we are shown the imagined images of the world and the new creatures running through the children’s minds, developing from a blur into something with form that they then express in the physical world with leaves and twigs, sticks and stones.

What starts off as a shining and innocent world – I think the image on the first double page is my favourite, showing Harry, Sue and Ben balancing on the world, the plants growing around them, their roots extending down beneath their feet – becomes a little darker, page by page, as the children tamper with it. This is shown not only in the types of creature they create – from the essentially harmless mouse, to a bird, to the cunning snake and then the wolf – but also in the tools they use to bring these creatures to life. To make his mouse, Ben gathers together wool, petals and nuts, and then whispers it to life. The bird involves sticks, leaves, grass and a little more coaxing; the snake needs clay and stones, and actions to bring it into being.

The wolf takes all of these things, and two people howling and drumming their feet. The very act of bringing the wolf into life requires Harry and Sue to change their behavior and once it is done, once the wolf has been imagined once, it will be there forever within them:

“Now their wolf was inside them, like a dream. They felt it, running through them. They heard it, howling and snarling deep inside them.” 

This is not a light and fluffy fairytale. In fact, the night after I read Mouse Bird Snake Wolf for the first time, I dreamt about being chased by wolves; I had to barricade myself indoors to try and escape them. The drawings of the wolf once he comes to life are really quite scary – and this is a thirty-plus-year-old talking. What starts off as a seemingly innocent creation tale soon becomes something darker: the wolf is waiting in the wings.

Masterful, thought provoking, a book that is a little bit special.