Where the Kids Hunt for the Malamander

Malamander by Thomas Taylor
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I thought this book fell far short of its promise. It sounds very cool, very imaginative, but it was headed for a 2-star review from me until it was rescued slightly by the final act.

Young Herbert works in a weird hotel near the ocean for some reason (running the lost and found department, which apparently is a full-time job), and he helps his new friend Violet try to figure out the truth of the Malamander, along with the answer to her parents' disappearance years before. Lots of oddball people know a little about strange mysteries in that strange town, a place that apparently exists on the edge of our real world, but nobody gives them anything very helpful. That's pretty much the whole plot until the last part.

*I* don't much recommend it, though it has a high rating on GR, and it has many sequels that might or might not be better.

It sounded better than this, though. It's a MG magical adventure set in an off-kilter England (I guess?) that feels a little like a Roald Dahl story, where impossible stuff exists alongside an otherwise normal world. (Monsters and magic and curses and the like are real, but most people don't believe in them.) The characters are quirky and mysterious with goofy names, and it feels like there's a lot going on behind the scenes. But most of that quirkiness is just window dressing; it seldom affects the plot in any way. The whole book had the feel of something written on the fly without any plan other than introducing lots of weird people. Almost no loose ends are tied up. Questions are answered half-way at best.

To be fair, I am not the intended audience for this book. But I also am *not* NOT the audience. I have always read kids books for several reasons (including just for fun) and I'm always on the lookout for cool series for MG or YA readers. The blurb for this sounds like a perfect fit for kids who want a kind of magical setting with odd characters and supernatural creatures, which is what I hoped to find. But 3/4 of the book is plodding, aimless meandering that never quite does anything interesting. And the dangerous-ish bad guys that I believed to be like the harmless antagonists you might find in a Scooby Doo cartoon turn out in the end to be violent and deadly in a Voldemort way, giving the whole thing a strange mismatched feel and the reader a bit of whiplash.

Of course, that last bit was the only stuff that was good, as it finally has excellent action, with the characters engaging directly with the bad guys as well as the titular monster for real stakes. If the sequels continue that, I bet they're pretty good. If, however, they follow the pacing of this first book, I can't see why anyone continued reading them. I don't think I'm gonna investigate them, myself.

Recommendation? NO harm in trying it, getting the first book for a reader who seems right for this type of book--with lots of quick chapters and good illustrations. Give it a shot. If they do like it, great, you can line the sequels up for them.

If they don't like it--well, they can't all be winners.

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