Oh boy…
I have a lot of love for Brandon Mull’s other series (Fablehaven, Beyonders, and The Candyshop Wars) so I’m going to be giving a lot of leeway here, but if this were the first time I’d read Brandon Mull I don’t know that I would be interested in reading anything else from him.
Fun new world, creativity aplenty, a worthy task for our hero to accomplish.
Flat characters, boring dialogue, narrator who knows everything, magic without explanation, implausible outcomes.
It’s highly likely that most 10-year-old’s will be perfectly happy with Sky Raiders, so I’m going to keep an open mind and start book two. Fingers crossed I’ll be interested in book 3.
Stay tuned.
Happy Reading!
One Man Book Club 
7 responses to “#SkyRaiders (Five Kingdoms, Book 1): Holding out hope…”
Ya, I’d give the second book a chance. It’s mostly the same but it finds a better rhythm and if you don’t see an improvement then you might as well stop. The rest of the books are fairly consistent.
(And yet another piece of evidence I’m a 10 year old trapped in an adults body. 😛 )
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Good to know. Did you find the same frustrations with book 1? I remember feeling frustrated with book 1 of fablehaven, but enjoying each subsequent book in the series more than the previous. That’s what I’m hoping for here… I’ve been waiting to read this series for some long I’m going to be bummed if it doesn’t work out!
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Yes, I’ve generally found the latter book in Mull’s series to be generally get better when it came to characters and plot. But the first is always amazing when it comes to world building.
That said, I JUST finished the 5th and final book of the series and the exposition was strong in this one. There was a lot of characters (probably too many) and dozens of story lines coming together so it’s a very different feel to the series as a whole. It was worth it because it was the very end, but generally not that good. Just a heads up.
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Great to know. I’ll probably finish it so I can give good feedback on it to my readers. Hopefully it grows on me!
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Mull has struck me as always middle grade, so I just stayed away.
Better for everyone that way 🙂
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I would definitely not put him in your pile. He is middle grade, but he’s able to find that sweet spot where his books are accessible to tweens without assuming they can’t handle some complexity. This one feels like he’s cashing in a bit.
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Uh oh, the downslide of fame has begun 😉
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