I’m going to talk a little bit about two children’s series I read over the last few weeks, the (ongoing) Tapestry series by Henry H. Neff and the Fablehaven series by Brandon Mull. These are fantasy books, which aren’t usually my jam, but hey, isn’t that where all the good writing for kids is going these days? I had some fairly heavy hitters on my currently reading list, including Ulysses, the autobiographies of Mark Twain and Benjamin Franklin, a couple of nonfiction books about imperial Chinese warfare, and the latest Banana Yoshimoto, and my fiancée had been on a fantasy kick post Harry Potter 7.2, so I picked up her kindle and started reading.
The Tapestry
The Hound of Rowan is a story about a troubled orphan boy who discovers that he is a wizard when he is invited to join a secret wizarding school out in the countryside. Along the way he makes friends with a talented know-it-all and a mischevious underachiever, explores a world of magical creatures in which all myths are true, and sneaks out under the nose of his teachers to have wild adventures. Unfortunately Max McDaniels’s education will not be a normal and happy one, as he lives in dark times: a long vanquished enemy of incredible power is returning.
So… Harry Potter?
Yes. Yes it is. The first book is almost point for point Harry Potter. This is maybe smart. Harry Potter was big. Bigger than Big. Huge. But it is not inspiring. Luckily it’s not the last book in the series.
The Second Siege, book 2 of the series, diverges from the Harry Potter mold significantly. The school of witchcraft and wizardry paradigm falls away, as danger comes to the world much faster than in the Potter books. The stakes are raised, the writing is stronger, and this is where the first really new ground is laid. But then…
In The Fiend and the Forge, the Harry Potter themes creep back in. The hero abandons the relative safety of his magical environment and goes out into a hostile world on his own. He gathers magical items and allies and has a direct confrontation with the big bad. The difference from the Harry Potter books here is that this is the middle book in a planned series, not the end, so the story isn’t over.
And hey, these were pretty solid. If you read these as an adult, you don’t have to kill yourself afterwards. I’d give these things a solid B-.
But…
Fablehaven
Fablehaven is the story of a young boy and girl discovering that they are heirs to a secret magical world in which all myths are true, and of course they cannot simply explore and enjoy their new discovery, because the world is in immediate peril from long-vanquished enemies. I get that it sort of has to be this way. You can’t have a series where the protagonists have always known about the magical world, because you get left with enormous exposition problems (if everyone knows what’s happening, why would they ever explain it?). And you can’t have three extremely boring books about a magical world running efficiently with no threats, because no one would care, even if you somehow dropped hints that shit was about to get unreal in book 4. So… eh.
Where Tapesty gets off to a rocky, derivative start, Fablehaven is strong from the get go. The writing is better, the characters are better, the plot is better, the universe is more interesting, &c.
Rise of the Evening Star does most of the work of establishing the various players, factions, and ideologies in the universe, at the expense of a slightly less interesting plot than the other books in the series. It’s good, but it’s a bridge to the main arc of the story, which begins in…
Grip of the Shadow Plague — by this point the protagonists are discovering their abilities, the factions are established, and the danger to the world is looming larger. The first two books were interesting, this one is actually good, sturdy solid.
Secrets of the Dragon Sanctuary is the fourth book, which has a great climax. It’s questy, with desperate moments and solid characters. It’s probably the best book in the series, though I’m sure there are readers who prefer book 5…
Keys to the Demon Prison — Now this is still a solid book, a good read, &c., but I can’t understand why this wasn’t split into two books. So much of what goes on in the middle two thirds is hurried, skipping from day to day, leaving out details and character moments to race from set-piece to set-piece, that it’s easy to come up with some divisions that would have made sense and allowed a more measured pace and some better character work. There’s an afterword in which the author explains that he always envisioned a 5 book series, but if he crammed this all together in blind adherence to a 5 year-old outline, that seems like doing the series a disservice.
Taken all together, this series is the stronger of the two, although the Tapestry books aren’t all in yet. It’s B+/A- territory. I read most of it in big chunks, hours at a time.
So What Can We Do Better?
If you’re sitting down to write a children’s fantasy series, let me ask you a few questions:
1.) Does all the exposition have to be done in dialogue?
If you didn’t write the world as it was being discovered by the protagonist (if your protagonist had grown up in the magical world), what would be different? Are we worried that children won’t read passages without dialogue to learn the backstory? Is this fish-out-of-water trope really necessary to keep people engaged, or can we assume that an interesting magical world will be worth ferreting out? Is this half monkey-see and half “if the protagonist doesn’t kn ow anything about magic I don’t have to know anything about magic until it comes time to write the relevant sections”?
2.) Does there have to be a crisis that threatens the entire magical world?
If the enemies are small-time and their goals are small, does that mean the story will be boring? Would you expect every Poirot mystery to be a Regicide? Aren’t Hardy Boys mysteries interesting even though no one ever dies? Does magic automatically raise the stakes?
3.) Do ALL myths have to be true?
Do you have to have wizards and werewolves and vampires and satyrs and phoenixes and nagas? Do the norse myths and the indian myths and african myths all have to be concurrently true? Isn’t it conceivable that the magical world could be made up of only a few mythical creatures, or creatures outside of myth altogether? Is this a nod to multiculturalism (as in: if we put in greek monsters we’d better throw in some african ones, too, we can’t judge one culture’s myth as more valid than anothers)? Is it lazyness (as in: why should I think of magical entities when I can go to wikipedia and type in “zoroastrianism”)?
4.) Does the protagonist have to have special powers beyond those of the rest of the magicians around him?
Can’t we read about a team of competent magicians with normal magical powers? Does every hero have to be a genetically predisposed hero? Can’t these skills be learned? Isn’t there room for teamwork and strategy? Would you believe a story about a real world conflict that was only solved because one member of one faction was born with a special ability?
I don’t think the fact that these books are written for children means they have to follow any of the tropes I’m asking about. I don’t think the fact that they’re written about magical worlds means there’s no room for realism in plotting. I’m not even convinced that smaller stakes books wouldn’t be just as interesting.
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I’ve been reading some other things, too, and I owe some reviews for them, but maybe they’ll be quicky goodreads reviews and not whatever this garbage became. Stay tuned.