Morrigan Crow and her friends have survived their first year as proud scholars of the elite Wundrous Society, helped bring down the nefarious Ghastly Market and proven themselves loyal to Unit 919. Now Morrigan faces a new, exciting challenge: to master the mysterious Wretched Arts and control the power that threatens to consume her.
Review:
These books get a little better, a little smarter, and a little more developed with each installment. The world building and character development has grown leaps and bounds by this book 3. This book has also gotten a little darker, and you can’t help but pull parallels to the world pandemic that is currently taking place. How long ago did Townsend write this? I know it takes a long time to get books published…but, there is no way Covid hadn’t started yet, right? That would be kind of scary.
There are also some very clear stories Townsend drew inspiration from. I kept thinking back to the story of Wicked (book and musical), and the movie Zootopia. But, I loved both of those, so it didn’t really bother me. Also, the book gets a tad political, in a fantasy children’s book kind of way -where it’s clear who the bigots are and there are some top-notch HP level quotes like:
“We don’t ignore bigotry, Jack. That’s how cowardly bigots turn into brave bigots.” and “The thing about numpties, Mog, is that they can always find plenty of other numpties to believe their numpty nonsense. You know what they say: you're never more than six feet away from a numpty.”
I think my favorite parts though involved Morrigan’s lessons, called Ghostly Hours (possibly inspired by scenes with the pensive in HP). I was fascinated! I think maybe I was more interested in it than Morrigan, and that’s saying something because she was obsessed. The one thing I felt was a little lacking in this book were the side characters (aka: her friends). So much focus was on the world building and Morrigan becoming a Wondersmith. And again, I was totally fine with that. I was fascinated. Oh, and there was this one scene in a magical library! I couldn’t put the book down.
This book ends with quite the cliffhanger, and I have such a wait before book 4 comes out…I tried to wait a bit before diving into this one, but I couldn’t hold off that long. These books are just that good. I highly recommend them to any all middle grade fantasy fans. I give it a 9/10.
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