Into Goblyn Wood by Anna Kemp and David Wyatt

Into Goblyn Wood by Anna Kemp and David Wyatt
Buy Into Goblyn Wood by Anna Kemp and David Wyatt at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Confident Readers
Reviewer: John Lloyd
Summary: Clearly a lot of work has gone into making this junior fantasy a rich, developed and lively one. If the same could be said for pulling us back for parts two and three we'd be on to a clear winner.
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 320	Date: September 2022
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Children's UK
External links: Author's website
ISBN: 978-1398503830
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Meet Hazel. For the last nine of her eleven years she has been stuck as a foundling in a horrid, Victorian institution, generally peeling vegetables or acting as a servant. She'd arrived at the place at the same time as Pete, and they're inseparably good friends now, until a chance for them both to escape, and enter the outside world, does not go to plan. There had always been the idea of a life idyllic in the nearby forests, Goblyn Wood, and a tribe of Wild Children, but none of that comes to pass, as Hazel finds herself in the care of a professor at the Natural History Museum. But life with him is not anything like what she might have expected it to be – and Hazel is determined to return to the Woods, restore her friendship with Pete – and to work out just what is going on in the forest, both the light and the shade, and the deathly dark...

This at its best was a joy. From the off, the first very brief chapter hints at the mythology of the piece, and therefore the background of Hazel, but none of this is forced upon us. Yes, she has a magical pendant that is impossible to remove, and that grows as she does, and yes she sees mysterious things, but she is the most suitable and suitably humanised character to let us see unusual fairy lore here. And it certainly struck me as unusual – I'd never read that derivation for them at all.

What's more, as with all the best writing, the character is brought to us through action. Dialogue is kept to a sprightly level, but the setting for the story switches copious times, forever keeping the characters and us on our toes, and forever letting us learn more about this world.

And I think that might point to an issue with this, as opposed to a flaw. (The biggest flaw is how it has to gloss over characters being naive, such as with the return of the cat we saw coming a mile off.) No, to me the issue was that I could see too much world-building going on, to the extent that about the halfway mark, if that, I knew this would be entirely unresolved, and would leave us hanging for the follow-on book (it was ever going to be a trilogy, in fact). The end as we have it has some surprises, for sure, but is almost too subdued in the way it just fades to grey.

And I'm always a touch anxious about rating books that completely remove any pretence of being a stand-alone. I have to throw in the caveat that this has all the pointers towards the three volumes being four stars, each and in total, if not more, but there's no guarantee. That said, I have knowledge of some of the author's previous picture books, and nobody throws one of the greatest straight fantasy illustrators for the young at a trilogy like this if there were signs of it turning pants. But as with stocks and shares, past performance does not mean a hill of beans is worth anything in the morning, and it's with a slight bit of caution that I say this journey is worth jumping on board for, at this early, optimistic stage. It certainly is a journey.

I must thank the publishers for our review copy.

For more straight junior fantasy, try Dragon Storm: Tomas and Ironskin by Alastair Chisholm and Eric Deschamps – it packs a lot of world-building in to make the six-tome series another potential delight.

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