Review by New York Times Review
PORTLAND, Ore., is an analog town, a city of bicycles and bookstores and Douglas firs and old pubs with splintery wooden bars and hulking industrialera bridges. It's a town where the bookish, bewhiskered, occasionally bowler-hatted band members of the Decemberists can play perfect homegrown rock. Now the band's singer, Colin Meloy, has written a fantasy adventure set, appropriately, in the green heart of the city. Within that heart lives a seventh grader, Prue McKeel, who resides with her parents and her baby brother, Mac, in a Portland neighborhood near a great tract of wilderness Meloy has imagined into being: "As long as Prue could remember, every map she had ever seen of Portland and the surrounding countryside had been blotted with a large, dark green patch in the center, stretching like a growth of moss from the northwest corner to the southwest, and labeled with the mysterious initials 'I.W.'" The initials stand for Impassable Wilderness, a terrifying place that Portlanders barely speak of, let alone visit. If they have the choice. But one day while Prue is minding 1-year-old Mac, a murder of crows swoops down and kidnaps him into the Impassable Wilderness. Doughty, brave-hearted Prue realizes there's only one thing to do; head into the wilds and save the baby, Y.A.-style. Folding elements of real-life Portland into the story, Meloy lovingly describes the jungles to the north and the cobbled streets and elegant tree houses of the more civilized south. The result is a richly satisfying weave of reality and fantasy. Into this hybrid world, Prue journeys forth with Curtis, a geeky schoolmate she reluctantly acquires along the way. Cycling into the forbidden woods and towing Curtis behind her in his Radio Flyer, Prue quickly discovers that the seeming wilderness is very inhabited indeed. Locals include a vicious coyote army, an avian diaspora, a gang of Robin Hood-like bandits and a citified population of prosperous animal and human burghers. But things are not entirely rosy in the woods. The evil widow of the former ruler is plotting a takeover. The animal factions face escalating conflicts. As Prue and Curtis search for baby Mac, they find themselves crucial players in a political drama dating back decades. In the end, these troubles can be resolved only in battle, and Prue must rise to the occasion. She sets off to meet her destiny by bicycle: "Never in Prue's life had she been so focused on her riding, so tuned in to every churn of the pedal assembly." Bicycle heroism: it doesn't get any more Portland than that. Sometimes things get almost too Portlandy, as though the characters from the brilliant TV satire "Portlandia" have gotten lost in Narnia. Picture Fred Armisen squinting from behind his glasses as he smugly informs the killer coyotes that he's actually, you know, a pacifist. THE illustrations, too, have an elegantly homegrown feel. In fact, they sprouted very close to home. The illustrator Carson Ellis, whose drawings have graced "The Mysterious Benedict Society," is Meloy's wife. Her work toggles between graphic, quirky miniaturism and a sylvan majesty well suited to these pages. (In case Meloy and his family don't seem talented enough, note that his sister is the novelist Maile Meloy.) One problem: the plot occasionally slows to the speed of a 1974 Schwinn. This is presumably the first book in a series, and there's a lot of setup. But mostly Meloy's efforts pay off. He has shaped the real stuff of Portland into a fantastic epic with a rainy, bicycle-riding Northwestern heart. Claire Dederer, author of the memoir "Poser," lives on an island near Seattle.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 11, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
To follow his familiar but pleasurable fantasy epic Wildwood (2011), where else did Meloy have to go but down (and by that we mean underground)? Twelve-year-old Prue is still recovering from her adventure into the magical forest outside Portland, Oregon, when a new danger brings her back to travel alongside her bandit-in-training pal, Curtis. Though Meloy is tireless when it comes to whimsical details, advanced wordplay, and bone-dry humor, the duo's journey feels much as it did in the first volume. Happily, an intertwined plotline yields dividends: two sisters are dropped off by their parents at the Joffrey Unthank Home for Wayward Youth, a steampunkish secret sweatshop run by a titan of industry obsessed with using the children to gain entry into the Impassable Wilderness. Soon the sisters are below Wildwood, where an army of moles mistake them for demigods. Naturally the plots intersect; naturally there's an inspirational uprising; and naturally this is a light-handed delight for kids who like their animal wars to break occasionally for a cup of mint tea. Bonus: Ellis' 84 full-page and spot illustrations are as delicate and adorable as before. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Movie rights to the best-selling Wildwood were snapped up quickly, and as long as Meloy's band, The Decemberists, remains in the spotlight, so will awareness of this series. Big author tour planned, too.--Kraus, Daniel Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 5-8-In this sequel to Wildwood (HarperCollins, 2011), it becomes clear that Prue's and Curtis's adventures will span numerous volumes. Curtis stops his bandit training to rescue Prue from a black fox Kitsune assassin. Prue then abandons her halfhearted attempts to reassimilate into her family. Her friend, the Elder Mystic of the North Wood, believes unrest in the South Wood provisional government has placed all Wildwood in danger. She asks Prue to reestablish balance in the Forest and sends her some rather cryptic clues as to how to go about it. Prue and the unwilling Curtis end up in Wildwood's caverns where they receive help from the Mole City. Meanwhile, Curtis's sisters see glimpses of Wildwood when a cruel orphanage owner sends them into the Impassable Wilderness to try to unpeel its secrets. Meloy's declarative style combined with vivid imagery makes the descriptive passages jump out at readers. Ellis's illustrations evoke a neo-Currier and Ives style that works well with the forest setting. The numerous plot threads intimate a Dickensian approach to story management. There are almost too many things going on at once, and the book raises more questions than it answers. While not as compact as Trenton Lee Stuart's The Mysterious Benedict Society (Little, Brown, 2007), Meloy's offering is a match for its clever writing, and the numerous types of creatures in the wood will keep readers' attention as will the dramatic tension that fills every corner of this Empire Strikes Back-type sequel.-Caitlin Augusta, Stratford Library Association, CT (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Droll and ornate, elegiac and romantic--the sequel to Wildwood (2011) brings readers deeper into and under the pine-scented, magical world tantalizingly close to Portland, Ore. Prue is drawn back to Wildwood by herons who rescue her from a trio of terrifying shape-shifters, and there she is reunited with Curtis, who stayed to enjoy the exhilarating life of a bandit-in-training. Attacked at their secret hideout, the bandits vanish. Adrift, Curtis and Septimus the rat join Prue on a quest that takes them under Wildwood, a setting straight out of M.C. Escher with a hint of Hieronymous Bosch. In the Industrial Wastes above, Curtis' grieving parents search for him after parking his sisters at an orphanage. In this Dickensian institution, children labor to make machine parts, the owner dreams of extending his industrial nightmare into the Impassable Wilderness he sees but can't reach, and his partner, Desdemona, former B-movie actress in Ukraine, dreams of Hollywood glory. Indulging a free-range imagination, Meloy mulches his verdant wilderness with wildly eclectic cultural references--real (Macbeth, Moby-Dick) and un- (Tax Bracket magazine, Lego replicas of Soviet-era statues). The incomparable Ellis more than rises to the challenge--her sly, wistful, abundant illustrations provide an emotional through line. Reflecting on her Wildwood experience, Prue "learned to not consider the minutiae of things, but rather take each episode as it came." Take Prue's advice and enjoy the ride. (Fantasy. 10-14)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
