Dungeon Runners: Hero Trial by Kieran Larwood and Joe Todd-Stanton
| Dungeon Runners: Hero Trial by Kieran Larwood and Joe Todd-Stanton | |
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| Category: Confident Readers | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: Freaks, Uki and the Outcasts – this author seems to provide us nicely with underdogs, and here is a further one, as a most unlikely fantasy combatant engages in the deadly sport of the series title. A warm-hearted, lively and enjoyable adventure for the under-tens. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 224 | Date: June 2024 |
| Publisher: Nosy Crow | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 9781839945182 | |
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Meet Kit. Like most of the people in his world, it seems, he is an avid fan of Dungeon Running – the sport where a team of warrior, mage and healer enter specially prepared, century-old, magical mazes, and race to the exit, perhaps bothering with the treasure or the big bad and the points they grant you along the way. Unfortunately for Kit, the only thing he's seen of the latest race on the inn TV equivalent is that one team has been retired, eaten, and a new trio of questors is needed. Possibly very unfortunately indeed for Kit, he has taken to the goading from the token bully of his world and stumbled into declaring he'll enter as a team. What chance does this friendless, muscle-free-zone have in actually managing that, and how could he possibly hope to succeed?
This fantasy story is a broad look at the underdog, and boy is it broad, and boy is he under. His species is not the largest, he has no lot in life (there is mention of family – a family not able to afford one of the TV-styled things – but no direct parental response to his wish to enter the contest) and everything smacks of him being a loser. Each ounce of our sympathy for him is wrung from us by this – although somehow the lack of subtlety here is not really a flaw.
This volume has to act as set-up for the series it starts, and as a full narrative itself. You'll know as much as I do how difficult some authors find it to marry both sides of such a book's needs. Yet given we spend a lot of time with the exposition so we as reader know what's what, and then a further chunk with the building of the team, I still didn't find the amount of dungeon running terribly low. I imagine the sequels will manage to be more full-on, but here the balance of set-up and set-to is quite fine.
Oh, and the book also provides some knowing comedy, from the commentators who crop up now and again (great scale joke from their first portrait in the art here) to the arch side it has when knowing the only response to it being so formulaic is to joke about that very fact. This doesn't take itself too seriously, however earnestly it wants us to gun for Kit. Overall, I'm not on the most solid ground when it comes to predicting the success or otherwise of future books here – will they have the drama, levity and freshness of these pages as they should, or will they try too hard to please? What I do see is not only the first sequel (of which I have seen an excerpt) scheduled for September 2024, but the whole foursome complete a year after that. I also see a Dutch translation of this already on the way. And the fact other people see the need to get this out in foreign markets toot sweet only backs my thinking that this is a series with legs, and a welcomely engaging, non-patronising, under-tens comedy fantasy series at that.
I must thank the publishers for my review copy. We first met this author with the series beginning with Podkin One-Ear. The Glorious Race of Magical Beasts by Alex Bell and Tim McDonagh is a further fantasy-based contest, although for an audience a smidge older.
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