Review by Booklist Review
The third tome in the Wildwood Chronicles continues the quirky adventures of 12-year-old Prue as she reenters the Wood to find that the postrevolution world she helped create isn't going especially smoothly. In fact, she finds herself involved with a plot to resurrect Alexei, the automaton prince, who is foretold to bring peace to the land. But there is another resurrection in progress, too: naive teenager Zita is gathering the materials to bring back the evil Alexandra. A third story line the most purely enjoyable involves the Unadoptables as they join up with a band of beatnik saboteurs intent on raiding the Titan Tower, where an important hostage is being held. Meloy is the Wes Anderson of authors (characters with names like Ambrose Pupkin are many), and he nails the tone of this gentle, but not inconsequential, adventure; though filled with few genuine surprises, it is a warm, comforting read, and its massive page count allows readers to further lose themselves in the enchanting stroll through some very unusual woods. Final illustrations (including color plates) not seen. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: This best-selling series continues to get a major publisher push: an author-illustrator tour, launch events, limited-edition art prints, stickers, videos, playlists, you name it.--Kraus, Daniel Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 5-8-Wildwood's varied cast of characters gathers once again. Prue, the Oregonian outsider whose "Bicycle Revolution" toppled a repressive government, now obeys the Council Tree, which prophesies that peace will come if engineers Esben and Carol Grod awaken the Dowager Governess's mechanical son. Add the Unadoptable children, the tyrant of the Industrial Waste, the fate of Curtis and the Bandit King, the power hungry Verdant Empress, and the crumbling interim Wildwood government, and the result, ending with reunions and rescues, requires notetaking to keep the details straight. Meloy uses a Dickensian style of alternating chapters to interleaf more than five concurrent story lines. Readers will need to be familiar with the previous books. There is little recapitulation of past events here, and chapter transitions can be confusing. Character development necessarily takes a backseat to events, although the unhinged Jeoffrey Unthank's dramatic reappearance is a delightful cameo. Prue's quest, while important, doesn't seem to personally resonate with her, and there's not much space given to her feelings on the matter. Given the challenging scope of this work, however, Meloy reunites his characters in a manner most of the series readers will find satisfying.-Caitlin Augusta, Stratford Library Association, CT (c) Copyright 2014. 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 Horn Book Review
Separated, Prue (accompanied by talking bear Esben), bandit-in-training Curtis, and Curtis's sisters fight multiple threats to Wildwood. An enormous cast of characters--human, animal, and supernatural, all quirky as ever--and the scope of the kids' respective quests make this trilogy-ender harder to follow than previous volumes, but witty descriptive language and warm black-and-white illustrations invite readers into this enchanting forest world. (c) Copyright 2014. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Drawing from wildly original tropes and paradigms and populated by a wide cast of characters old and new, this portrait of a magical world just outside mundane reality (here represented by Portland, Ore.) brings the trilogy to a satisfying conclusion. The opening strikes a somber note as a teenage girl calls up a restless spirit then lightens, turning to Prue and her quest: bringing together toymakers Carol and Esben to rebuild their remarkable mechanical boy. But first, Rachel, Elsie and the valiant Unadoptables must rescue Carol and Martha from the Titan tower, a fiendishly complicated task that depends on the now highly unstable Joffrey Unthank and the Chapeaux Noirs, an "anarcho-syndicalist" collective. Dramatic shifts in tone and mood--by turns politically astute and subversively witty, elegiac, droll and philosophical--are par for the course, while narrative style ranges from intimate to intergalactically distant. These idiosyncrasies make it just about impossible to identify the prospective audience by age. Never mind. Series fans know what awaits, and new readers will quickly determine if it's for them. Interwoven with Meloy's compellingly visual word portraits, Ellis' abundant illustrations, including color plates, again showcase her subtle blend of folk-art simplicity and eldritch imagery. Like filmmaker Terry Gilliam, Meloy gives his antic imagination full rein to produce work that, if occasionally uneven, is brilliantly sui generis. (Fantasy. 10 up)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
