I’ll be curious to see what — if any — medals this book wins as 2024/25 awards start going out. My initial instinct was that it wouldn’t really have a shot at a Hugo (the one award I sorta keep up with) as it’s not really for the right audience but some googling shows that Harry Potter And the Goblet of Fire took a rocket in 2001, and Coraline did also in 2003, meaning books written for younger audiences are perhaps as likely to win as anything else.
What I can tell you, is this book had the marketing team behind it. I’m not sure if it was just one source spamming my inbox or if the book really is everywhere, but in the run up to its release, it seemed like it was all Impossible Creatures, all the time. Mostly I feel like the books that I end up reading come to me through other sources (award winners, recs from friends, authors I’m already interested in, random niches I’m curious about, stuff I just happen to see as I’m shelving books at work), and so I’m aware of whatever the big publishers (in this case Knopf) are pushing, but I don’t always get to it.
But I happened to see one comparison in the headline of a Washington Post article which (as click-baity as I knew it was) I couldn’t ignore. I’ll reveal the headline and discuss the comparison later on, but I want to get some of my own thoughts down first before delving into the rest.
This book is good, potentially great, but a far cry from the “instant classic” it’s purported to be. Where the book is strongest is (thankfully) in its premise, the impossible creatures. Longma, Griffin, Lavellan, Mermaid; the book is a veritable who’s who of mythic tradition including all your western favorites — Dragons, Centaurs, Unicorns etc. — but also a whole heap of other creatures which are likely not as well known to traditional fantasy audiences. Creatures like the Al-miraj, or the Karkadann (though the Karkadann featured briefly in the Daevabad books).
The inclusion of such disparate mythic traditions accomplishes a few things: 1) it prompts the reader to investigate and familiarize themselves with a wide and diverse group of legends and cultural heritage (a plus in my book) and 2) it lends itself to the overall sense of wonder, which I would say this book has in droves.
This general sense of awe the reader feels while reading is probably the book’s second biggest strength. The Archipelago — the hidden secondary world accessible to our world through random portals in which all this fantasy can live and thrive — is just jammed full of marvels, some large, but many small. Since most of the fun of reading this book is just being stunned by what you’re seeing, I won’t give away any more examples (after all no spoilers), but I greatly appreciated the effort which went into giving each page just a tiny bit of magic to hold on to.
Despite everything I’ve just written, I struggled with this book in many places, most of which probably had more to do with editorial than anything else. Take a look at the following passage:
” ‘Sorry?‘ The larger man breathed hard and angry on them, and his breath had whiskey on it.”
You can breathe hard, and be angry while you do it, but I’m not sure you can breathe angry (though I suppose if Nick Cage can Drive Angry lol). For any wondering (and this will probably ruin my point) the next sentence was:
“Sorry is for farting near the fruit bowl, girl!”
Which is perhaps one of the funniest things I’ve read this year.
In any case, I had many hang ups like this which caused me to stop and try to decipher what I’d just read. Often it was the type of thing I’ve written about above, but just as often it was convoluted sentence structure. Some word choices I was trying to chalk up to being for a British rather than American audience, but when one of the characters gives a “slither” of a smile instead of a sliver of one, I knew that we just hadn’t had enough eyes on it before the book went to publication.
Now I’m sure there is an argument to be made that in a Fantasy book about dragons and centaurs which is written for nine-year-olds (and above), perhaps we can’t and even shouldn’t expect poetry from every single line. But I would almost argue it’s MORE important that we model great writing for younger audiences. They’re not going to be bored by it. They can handle more than you think.
(Also, there were plenty of words in this book which were clearly only included as ‘vocabulary builders’ — which I think is a trend in books written for this age range — so why worry about if something will be hard for young readers while at the same time adding in elements which are intentionally hard)
We’re starting to get into the weeds here, and I still want to touch on the WaPo headline, so I’ll mention only two more critiques, both of which are a little larger in scope than individual lines of prose. The first has to do with a main character’s death. To avoid spoilers, I won’t say which one, but I will say that it felt completely pointless. Or rather that the point was too clear. The only reason this character had to go, was because the author wrote too compelling a reason for the other MC’s not to finish the main quest and needed a big emotional event to get everything started again.
This is not an uncommon trope, and there are plenty of examples where it works just fine, but the more I see it, the more I view it as kind of lazy and in its worst iterations, legitimately harmful (think “fridging” and please read Cathrynne M. Valente’s Refrigerator Monologues). Personally, I felt the stakes of saving the world were plenty high to compel the quest to continue, but apparently we needed just a little extra push, and for me, it was just a little push too far. The whole thing felt pointless and for the rest of the book I felt mad when I think I was supposed to feel sad.
My final critique is that there seemed to be frequent portions of this book where one of the main characters just seems to forget they can more or less fly. Of course if they had remembered, all the tension in the scene would have fled with them, but it was frustrating to say the least. Perhaps a more observant reader will be able to point out that no, they actually couldn’t fly because of X condition, or Y limitation, but I feel if readers are asked to stop and perform this kind of calculus during a scene, there needs to be a different (ahem better) scene.
Alright, let’s talk about this Washington Post headline. It reads: “Katherine Rundell is her generation’s J.R.R. Tolkien“
Bold. And ultimately misleading. A claim which sets an impossible expectation for the book to live up to no matter how good it truly is (please note: I completely understand Rundell has probably zero control over what WaPo writes so at this point I’m not critiquing her or the book, I’m basically shouting at clouds).
I could easily compare this book to Harry Potter, or Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Comparison to the Song of the Lioness might fit, but perhaps the story’s best comparison (as it is essentially a portal fantasy) would probably be something more like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
But the The Hobbit? Lord of the Rings? Aside from living in the same genre (Fantasy), featuring dragons, and (ostensibly) being written for children, it is hard to see what connects the stories together, and it feels entirely too soon to predict that Impossible Creatures will have the same impact as Tolkien’s frankly enormous body of work.
Now if we actually read the article — always an important step before rage-posting a response — we’ll understand that the comparison has more to do with Rundell’s career, her fellowship at Oxford, and her academic work. The article IS about Impossible Creatures, but the headline is . . . not so much. I don’t know much of Tolkien’s biography so I’m not really in a position to judge the accuracy of this comparison. I’ll take the article’s author at their word (though after such a misleading headline I have very little trust left lol)
No doubt this is an incredible accolade for the author, but it is one that I think, unfortunately, sets the wrong expectations for a book which, seems to be a smash hit all on its own (#19 in Children’s Fantasy on Amazon as of December 2024).
Give Impossible Creatures a Read?
Yes, despite my very long-winded rant, this book is quite enjoyable (even after all my various critiques). It shines in its essential conceit, the impossible creatures, and succeeds in giving the reader some sense of awe and wonder on every page, whether its a fantastic new setting, or a small but marvelous detail. The prose were sometimes difficult to decipher, and I often wondered how well the plot would hold up under a truly focused microscope; however, as it is, I still greatly enjoyed this journey and am generally anxious for my next adventure in The Archipelago.
I hope this review was able to deliver a sort of even keel for what to expect before starting. I think my own experience was unfortunately somewhat tainted by the coverage I was seeing (in WaPo specifically) and I may have enjoyed this book more if I hadn’t had things like “instant classic” and “this generation’s Tolkien” floating around in my mind while reading.
That’s all I have for you this week. Thanks for reading until the end! Has anyone already read this one? What is your favorite impossible creature? Please leave your thoughts in the comments! I’m excited to talk about this one!
Until next time . . .
alligators and aneurysms! 