#oa:4

[youngestrunningleek]

The Heir of Mistmantle

yeah that’s right they have hair now

This book review, I’m looking at The Mistmantle Chronicles, Book 3: The Heir of Mistmantle, by M. I. McAllister and illustrated by Omar Rayyan. Published in 2007, It continues the story of the animals of Mistmantle.

Disclaimer: I fully believed this was the final book in the series, when I was reading it. I’m thrilled that there are two more!

And, honestly, I think it’s a huge compliment that the series can stand alone. You could stop after any of the three books I’ve read so far, and be satisfied.

This book features Mistmantle dealing with a lot of disasters– including plague, floods, and a kidnapped princess. It also features extra attention to Urchin’s friend Juniper. Watch out for more detailed spoilers ahead.

I loved this book, possibly even more than the previous ones. I’m so, so impressed with McAllister (and the illustrations by Rayyan) and the world she makes. The imagery of parties and celebrations is beautiful, and it makes you understand why this place is worth defending. We finally get to see Crispin as king, which is cool. Also, Rayyan puts human emotions onto animals without veering into uncanny valley for me.

We also get AWESOME things like Urchin doing the Dark Knight Rises jump out of a deep hole. I love stories about rodents so flipping much.

It’s also kind of revolutionary, to me, to have a children’s fantasy book where the enemy is fear. There’s no dragon to kill or evil king to dethrone. Sometimes it’s a heat wave, or it rains too much, or the water is polluted. Then, people turn to look for a villain, but there is none.

I don’t want to be too light about it, but, I really did see commonalities with COVID. Some people turn on Queen Cedar, saying she brought the plague because she’s not from Mistmantle.

There’s also a conversation with Fingal the otter that I thought was well done. He spends the first half of this book extremely excited about his new boat. Then, it’s smashed in the storm. Two older otters are trying to console him, but he puts it in perspective. He says it’s not a very big deal compared to the animals who died or lost homes. You can be upset by both, while also knowing one loss is larger. I thought it did a good job of showing all the different scales of loss.

And, uh, if you want to be a bummer… they have a lovely scene at the end where peace is restored. The monarchs have a big court. They say a general “thank you” to the healers. But no one gets a special reward (despite other characters getting wreaths and titles). Sounds familiar. Yikes.

Back to losses, yes, they do have actual losses. Two major characters die, including Juniper’s mother Damson.

I liked the writing of that part. He actually lies to his dying mother, so that he can hear her final confession. Yes, it’s relieving her of stress, but he’s also posing as the priest to do it. That’s morally ambiguous! Plus, there’s the actual confession itself, which is that his father is Husk (the villain of the first book).

We get two freaking amazing quotes afterward, from the priest Brother Fir:

“You hate yourself now because you heard Damson’s confession. If you had not done it, you would hate yourself for that instead.” Dude, that’s intense.

And after Juniper says he can’t continue, Fir says “You can’t yet, [...] but you will. Life consists of doing the impossible”.

I like both of those a lot!

Juniper later admits he wanted to die saving people from a landslide, so that he could do something good with his life. Dang, again.

But then the adults and Urchin tell him he’s worth it, and he confronts his feelings about jealousy and becoming like Husk.

There’s even a conversation with a young hedgehog about why it’s not okay to hit people. I know that sounds very basic, but it’s all so mature! Especially when a lot of fantasy stories are about how cool it would be if we could hit people.

We get a description of children playing a game where you say “find the King, find the Queen, find the heir of Mistmantle”. Then their parents hush them and basically say “that’s not appropriate right now”. That broke my heart, gently.

Going back to the paranoia, yes, the real antagonist was inside us all along. It’s fear. But even the three animals who represent the grumblings and negative sentiments are pretty sympathetic. One of them is a young hedgehog who is clearly just trying to fit in.

Also, the suspicion toward the queen is extra heartbreaking because the king and queen are missing their daughter. McAllister really shows the effect it has on the king and queen to lead through all these problems and keep up the search for their child as well. At one point Cedar reveals she’s depriving herself of sleep because she’s having nightmares. That’s such an excellent parallel with the villainous couple in book one!

About the daughter… She disappears very early on. I appreciate all of the Mistmantle books for not beating around the bush. We don’t spend a lot of time wondering where she went, either. We know an old squirrel, Linty, took her.

Linty is an interesting case. She is old, and confused, and she lost two children to the culling. I love that problems from the first book continue to be relevant. Of course a policy like that is going to leave lasting scars on the population! That trauma is why she confuses princess Catkin for her own daughter, and tries to hide her away.

I love these books, so I want to give them the benefit of the doubt. Yes, if you have to ask, then it’s probably ableist.

But I do admire this book, especially one from 2007, for not saying she’s evil. There’s a good paragraph near the end about how things are never complete and never perfect, and it’s ridiculous that Husk tried to eliminate any different animals from the island. They also say near the end, “There’s always a reason for animals to behave the way they do. It may not be a good reason. It may be a very bad one, or an insane one, but there is always a reason.”

It’s really beautiful for children’s fantasy to have that message.

By the way, that quote was partly in reference to Husk. Juniper leads two friends into the deep tunnels below the island so that they can find Husk’s body and prove he’s dead, once and for all.

But even when they do that, his broken bones and shattered gems are more sad than anything. It’s a tragedy that this guy could have been a good captain, and succumbed to evil. There are a few witnesses to confirm he’s dead, but they make a point that they don’t want to turn his body into a show. Plus, they make the point that good things did come from his life, like Juniper.

Yes, it’s still a very light reading level. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not challenging my worldview in a huge way. But oh boy, I want this on more shelves. For the reading level it’s at, I think it really is approaching important themes and treating them very well. It is very good, for what it is.

To end, here are some fun lore drops: a mole uses the phrase that an idea is “stuck in their little skulls like an otter down a mole hole”. Then he slightly apologizes to an otter for the expression. I wonder if they used to fight?

There are some animals who can leave and reenter the magical mists many times. One was an otter named Lochan. There’s also a mole boogeyman called Gripthroat.

Finally… The squirrel who gave birth to Juniper is named Spindrift. I thought that was wicked funny. Even better than Fiverr the rabbit!

You can definitely tell that I am getting more and more invested in these characters. All three books so far are very consistent (right down to the problems of “huge number of characters” and “a boring early-to-mid section”). But I love an ensemble cast and I’m falling deeper in love with the world.

My personal rating: 4.5

My overall rating: 4

[youngestrunningleek]

Urchin and the Heartstone

We’re going back to Mistmantle, baby!

Today’s review is The Mistmantle Chronicles, Book 2: Urchin and the Heartstone. This was published in 2006, written by M. I. McAllister and illustrated by Omar Rayyan.

Content warning: this review will mention vomit and ableism (again)

This is the first sequel I’ve reviewed. I was not very detailed about the plot in my first review, but this one will get more in-depth. I’m also not going to explain the premise as much since I covered that in the last book.

In this book, the protagonist Urchin is kidnapped and brought to another island called Whitewings. All the while, the Heartstone that Mistmantle needs to crown a king is missing.

I really liked this book’s focus on the difficulties of running the island. The Heartstone is missing because of the bad guy from the last book. And some of the problems on Whitewings are caused by all the soldiers that Mistmantle exiled at the end of book one. It felt like the right balance between new challenges and connecting to the first book. It’s not as simple as replacing a bad king with a good king.

This book had two issues that the first book also had. For one thing, the middle bit is kind of boring. There’s a lot of “character A B C finds out that character X Y Z is doing something”. And we have to talk about the number of characters.

During this book, I started writing a character guide on a bookmark. It was simple things like “Whittle, training as lawyer and historian”. By the end, my scrap of paper was running out of space, with 18 characters, and I was still having double-take moments near the end of the book.

I wonder how this would go over as a visual format. Comics, TV shows, etc tend to be able to get away with more characters.

One other issue I have is with the A and B plots. For a book called “Urchin and the Heartstone” it’s not really about Urchin doing anything with the Heartstone. It’s moreso a book about Urchin, which also has some parts about the Heartstone. Because we had Urchin kidnapped on an entirely different island, it was very hard to care about the Heartstone search on Mistmantle. It sort of just deus ex machina’s itself into appearing, once he’s back home.

And speaking of deus ex machina, the bad guys' castle sinks into the ground at the end. There's no final confrontation.

Urchin is kind of a MacGuffin in his own way. People on Whitewings want a Marked Squirrel, so they take Urchin because his fur is mostly white. He's central to the plot because the bad guys decided he was central to the plot. It does make me wonder why the cover doesn’t show him that way, though. He’s pretty obviously a plain red squirrel on the cover.

All that said… I loved this book. It’s an excellent sequel to an excellent book!

So, let’s list some of the great things.

For one, the reunification at the end of the book really is delightful. Too many characters or not, I love this cast. And it’s so heart-warming to see the whole island celebrating the heroes’ return. After he spends so much of the book trapped alone in a tower, Urchin “was back among animals who hugged you and squashed up beside you and didn’t mind much what you smelled of”. D'aww.

Another cute image is children making snow-squirrels with tails that fell off.

I also think it’s very notable that this book doesn't have many evil disabled people. So often in children’s books, especially in animal books, villains have scars or mental illnesses. There is some of that, but it’s much better than the average story in my opinion.

Ableism, or generally fear of difference, is always a villainous trait. Urchin is called a freak on Whitewings, even though his fur is just a different color.

There’s also a pattern where the priests of islands have some kind of disability, like Brother Fir on Mistmantle having a limp. Juniper is another priest-like squirrel. He was hidden away from the culling because of his turned-in paw, and he also has a lung condition.

Generally, I admire that McAllister tells a solid good-versus-evil story. There’s powerful imagery of dust, decay and death for the bad guys. But, there are still gray areas, such as Scatter the squirrel deciding to be loyal to Mistmantle instead of Whitewings. That doesn’t mean she’s automatically innocent, though. The book doesn’t put everyone into a box of either good or evil, and it doesn’t completely ignore someone’s problems if they’re on the side of good.

I do feel obliged to address the inter-species biases… But frankly, I think this book handles them excellently! There’s a moment early on where a squirrel says otters and moles would rather be in the water, or underground, than rule the island. That got my hackles up.

But, after a second reading, it’s not the text itself saying that. It’s the characters. They’re not treating that opinion as fact.

Later, there’s an attempted coup by hedgehogs. I was very surprised about how firm the book is about their “hedgehogs are the only ones who should be in charge” rhetoric. Basically everyone, hedgehog or not, shuts them down immediately.

I appreciate that because, in real life, there are biases. There will be prejudice, and it’s more realistic to show people working through it than to show none at all.

Also, it’s cool that the dynamics vary over time and in different places. Whitewings has moles, hedgehogs and squirrels, but no otters.

A cool piece of worldbuilding from this book was the way the Heartstone works. It jumps out of your hands unless you’re worthy. Also, the reason people can take mole tunnels between islands is that the tunnels predate the water. Cool! Wind Waker made me love anything where the current world is just a flooded version of the old one.

This book had swans, like the last one. But here they are basically mounts. I don't even think we directly hear dialogue from them, even though last book had an island ruled by swans. Weird.

Also, I am pretty sure these guys are human-sized with human lifespans. But, they mention a dead sparrow on a kind of stretcher, at one point. Not sure what that means. Are sparrows the same size as the people? A human doesn't need a stretcher to carry a dead sparrow.

One final note, since I talked about it in the last review: an early chapter of this book had a squirrel throwing up. Wow… they don’t just have human abilities of language and tool-making, they can also vomit like us…

My rating: 4

Overall rating: 4

[youngestrunningleek]

Urchin of the Riding Stars

This is gonna be a long one, because I liked this book!

Content warning: this review will discuss culling “unwanted” parts of the population, and vomit.

Urchin of the Riding Stars is the first book in the Mistmantle Chronicles. It was written by M. I. McAllister and illustrated by Omar Rayyan, and published in 2005.

The book is about the island of Mistmantle, which has a castle and magical mists around it. The protagonist is a squirrel named Urchin. That’s a little confusing since urchin is also a term for hedgehogs, and this is a world with hedgehogs, red squirrels, otters and moles… but that’s his name.

He is an orphan with a prophecy around his birth. He’s also different because he’s honey-colored instead of red, except at his ear- and tail-tips. Yeah, it’s one of those books. It’s not challenging writing, since it’s meant for children, and personally that was just what I needed when I read this.

“Fantasy with small woodland creatures” is a relatively small genre, but this book is one of the best examples of it that I’ve read. This is the first book I’ve reviewed that is truly in that niche, so it’s a great opportunity to talk about the genre as a whole.

One thing that I think is notable is the violence. My opinion is that having little critters, instead of humans, lets you get away with more in a children’s book. The prologue is about a mother in labor, and she’s dead by the second page. Shortly after that, we hear about culling “undesirable” babies. And then we see the body of the prince, a baby hedgehog, after he’s been stabbed. That’s all within the first three chapters.

Some notes on their level of anthropomorphism:

Clothes are optional. They wear them for special occasions, or for warmth.

They might be human-sized? There’s an important detail about marking leaves with claws, like a signature. That implies the leaves are hand-sized. And, the book cover has a sea urchin next to Urchin, and it’s sized like it would be next to a human.

They have priests, monarchy, and marriage. Fantasy often has those elements and you take it as a given, but when there are no humans it does feel a little more odd.

I’m not certain if they live human lifespans, or if they age like their actual species, but it seems like human aging.

Generally, their species matters a lot. Squirrels easily leap, otters swim, moles are short-sighted. At points they use smell to see who has been in a place, and characters walk on all fours. They use claws or teeth like knives.

Overall, I’m a huge fan of this. I like that they aren’t just humans with flavor text. Using claw marks like a fingerprint is pretty unique.

They also drink alcohol. There’s a great deal of giving the king wine so he’ll be drunk and look bad, and then other characters try to give him spring water instead… You can also tell that McAllister loves the word “cordial”. They talk so much about cordials.

I mention that because squirrels probably wouldn’t drink alcohol in real life. Rodents can’t vomit, so mice and rats don’t drink alcohol.

People aren’t trying to poison squirrels in the same way, but I’m pretty sure in real life squirrels would not drink alcohol. I do know other animals drink alcohol. I’m less sure about otters, moles, and hedgehogs. Two minutes of internet searching didn’t find anything other than a few cool pictures of Sonic.

They imply a kind of racial hierarchy. That’s pretty common in fantasy, and it’s obviously a whole conversation.

What I found interesting was that it seems to have changed, over the years. At the time of the story, the king is a hedgehog, and squirrels could be considered as second in power. The usurper is a squirrel who wants to be in control. Then, broadly, are otters, and then moles. But in the past, there was a legendary Old Palace made by moles. And even before that, a squirrel was king. There’s also an assassin mole in the modern day who thinks a mole should be king, instead of a squirrel. I really like that the history is bumpy, in a way. It’s not as simple as “hedgehogs always get to be king”. We have a little bit from different species saying “we’re the best”.

Another thing I appreciate is that the person/nonperson distinction is relatively clear. You definitely run into that problem, with books like this, but it’s pretty distinct in Mistmantle.

They kill and eat fish, as well as worms and beetles. Those are clearly not people, and they’re not closely related. It’s not like there are fish-people at the same time as we’re eating fish, or even squirrel-people while we eat rabbit meat.

I’m also tremendously appreciative of what species populate Mistmantle. It would really eat away at me if we had, say, otters, weasels, badgers and hedgehogs (three mustelids and then a whole different family). Or mice, rats, squirrels and moles (three rodents and then the family Talpidae). When it comes to evolutionary closeness, squirrels, otters, hedgehogs and moles feel like they’re on the same level of closeness. It’s just something that really satisfies my brain.

There is some gray area with birds— another island is ruled by swans, who talk. But on Mistmantle they mention birdsong, which makes it sound like birds are just another animal. They never employ the songbirds as spies, or anything. But they also don’t eat bird meat or farm chickens for eggs, so it’s not terribly jarring.

I was pleasantly surprised by the number of female characters. I found myself expecting someone to be “he” and then catching my assumption when the book said “she”. The cast has so many gender-neutral names, like Apple, Needle, Crackle, Spindle, Tumble, and other things that don’t end in -le.

I wouldn’t mind fewer characters, though. Or a list of who’s who.

There’s one case of fridging, IMO. The captain Crispin meets another squirrel while banished, who helps him get through it. But she dies tragically before he returns to Mistmantle. She doesn’t really exist independent of him.

I will say, there’s a bit less sword fighting than I was expecting, and more court intrigue. The middle bit of the book gets a little slow because of the machinations and back-and-forth, but I guess that’s to be expected when it’s Macbeth.

Yes, this book is heavily drawing from Macbeth. We have a traitorous murdering couple who aspire to the throne. The bad guy is supremely confident because he thinks the one thing that could stop him is impossible. He is extremely sleep-deprived because he has nightmares about the murder he’s done.

It makes me really happy to think of all the kids who grew up, read Macbeth in English class, and thought “hey wait a second, this is just like that squirrel book!”

Another small note- squirrels do a lot of eavesdropping and rumor-spreading in this story. Intentionally or not, it’s reminiscent of Ratatoskr! That’s the squirrel from Norse mythology who runs up and down the World Tree sending insults from the bird at the top to the dragon at the bottom.

There’s kind of a lot of baby-culling content. I personally wouldn’t have included so much in a book for young people but, hey, whatever works, I guess?

I would say it’s broadly a good depiction. The good guys want to save the babies even though the bad guy wants to kill them for being “too weak”. The language they use is derogatory, but I can sign off on the overall premise of hiding away the children so they can survive. That’s good.

I really like that Urchin is good with children. That’s a very endearing trait, especially from an orphan who was raised by a community. I don’t know if a young reader would feel the same way, but I liked that he was nurturing in that way.

This book also made me think about connection with nonhuman protagonists. Sometimes people think that a nonhuman protagonist is hard to relate to. But, you’re telling me we meet the hero as a baby squirrel shivering in the cold? You’re telling me we gotta defend a baby hedgehog? Of COURSE I’m attached to that character! Obviously I’m rooting for him!

Some other fun worldbuilding things:

I already mentioned the leaves-as-signatures. There are also capital-T Threadings, which I’m curious about for the future books. They seem like just tapestries that tell a story, but it’s capitalized. So they have to be important!

One of the coolest things is that “falling stars” is not metaphorical. Urchin is “of the falling stars” because he was born on a night when the stars leave their orbits. That’s freakin’ sick!

Also, the illustrations are well done. They’re simple and small, at the head of each chapter, but they get the job done. Good job, Omar Rayyan!

One final note about rats, since rats are my faves: the only mention of them is when the swans call squirrels tree-rats. So, that’s treated as a derogatory thing.

Overall, I am pleased as punch with this book. I was approaching it thinking “oh well, it’s in my genre so I might as well read it”. Maybe it’s just that I needed a light read, but oh boy, I really loved it. I would 100% recommend it as an example of little critter fantasy. I’m going to read the next book in the series right away.

My personal rating: 4

Overall rating: 4