Not something I’d want to read again, but I was surprised, a nice fantasy story rather catching; I mean, the first few pages were boring, but sticking to it for a while I started to find it interesting. The fact that the protagonist was a twelve-year-old girl made me worry for a while that I might find it “too” childish to bear, but it progressed well into a real story that I liked. To be clear, it is a story for kids, but it was nice nonetheless.
There wasn’t a lot of magic, a pity really, I love magic, fantasy stories should always have magic, but it had a little bit, just enough to make the protagonist Alexa able to talk to animals.
My only problem with the whole thing is : Warvold and the convicts. It’s not really nice to brand people as criminals, I mean physically brand, for real, specially all in the same way, I mean there is a difference between killing a child or stealing a sandwich, but they would all have the same mark on their skin. Also, the way they speak of the whole matter (well, she speaks, the one who narrates the story is an older Alexa), as if they don’t matter, as if Warvold was something magnificent, some kind of god, and there was nothing wrong in treating people like that.
Details:
Warvold was a traveller and an adventurer until he decided to settle down. He persuaded other people to go live in a place some people considered dangerous. He settled in a valley that became the city of Lunenburg and so many others joined him that there was no room for more. The city of Ainsworth filled up too, and he built another town, Bridewell, all in the Land of Elyon. To be protected from the dangers outside he decided to build a big wall all around the three towns and also the roads that connected them, and also the towns of Turlock and Lathbury - actually I’m not sure that Ainsworth is walled too... anyway, there is a map at the beginning of the book.
He made a deal with Ainsworth and they gave him 300 convicts to build the walls and after ten years he brought them back, minus a few that had died. Now we meet him plus James Daley mayor of Lathbury and his daughter Alexa; Ganesh the mayor of Turlock (the one who said ‘it’s so dry around here the trees are bribing the dogs’ :-p ); Warvold’s son Nicolas, who managed the affairs in Lunenburg (Alexa’s mom manages those in Lathbury). Warvold’s wife Renny died.
We also meet : Grayson, the guardian of Bridewell’s library; Pervis Kotcher, head of the guards, who hates Alexa because senses that ‘she’s trouble’, since she’s always trying to find a way outside the wall; Silas Hardy, someone they met on the road, becomes Daley’s personal deliveryman. In the library there are also two cats, Sam and Pepper, but she can’t talk to them, she can’t always talk to animals, only when she goes out and finds a sort of mystical stone, and that stone gives her the ability to talk to animals but only while she stays in the wild, not in the city.
She meets Darius the wolf, who has been divided from his family when they built the wall, because there is only a small passage, too small for a big wolf, but Alexa is small enough. From a tunnel, she hears some convicts speak of a plan to invade Bridewell: they were not put back in prison, they were let loose. They are all “branded with a C for criminals”, and their leader Sebastian is a traitor in Bridewell. Alexa tells nobody and starts investigating. When Pervis is arrested, and time starts running out, she tells him everything, then she tells her father (leaving out that she talks to animals, smart move), so they can plan a way to protect the city. Warvold hid in a book Sebastian’s identity: Ganesh: of course.
It turns out that only 57 convicts actually attack the city, they are the only ones that are still alive. Yipes and Darius save her from Ganesh, and Yipes goes to call her dad for her.
The convicts gets divided, 20 to Lunenburg, 20 to Turlock and 17 to Lathbury, some of them were rehabilitated. The walls around the roads were torn down, left only around Bridewell. Alexa can’t understand the animals anymore, and also Yipes because he went to the civilised city looking for her father, and thus lost the gift. He still lives out there by the river though. The cats are dead, they were evil :-/
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