I’ve been thinking about my childhood favorite franchises lately and about how they hold up to my current reading palate. My brother and I both really loved these books, and talked about them all the time when we were in middle school and he recently mentioned that he picked one up and realized that the writing style is kind of crappy.
I perused a book I remember really liking (The Lost City of Faar, Spader was so cool), and felt that the writing is a bit juvenile but in a “this was written for kids in the tone of a kid” way in my impression. The protagonist, Bobby, is very similar to Percy Jackson to me in that the author gave him a kind of casual, humorous outlook on his fantastical experiences. The language is not rich and the narrator can be a little dorky but I wasn’t sitting there like “this sucks actually” which is an experience I had going back to Maximum Ride and Warriors but not Percy Jackson or Harry Potter.
The main things I recall loving about Pendragon as a kid had to do with the structure of the books and series as a whole. I much enjoyed that you were kind of situated in Mark’s 3rd person POV as he read Bobby’s 1st person POV. It was enjoyable to have little interlude chapters in which Mark and Courtney discussed Bobby’s journey and had a plotline of their own and this structure ended up having a very clear lead-up and payoff in the final chapter of the final book.
As a kid, I also loved how the series was several individual conflicts on individual worlds involving a sort of guest deuteragonist every book. It a) kept things fresh for me and b) created an actual sense of danger each novel. The story was set around a scenario where Bobby and the villain were sort of capturing pieces (worlds) in a much bigger game involving the whole universe. So Bobby could save the day for one world but also completely fail in the conflict of another book on another world. I remember eating this up as a kid and actually being invested when I loved a world and the traveler on that world. I thought “Geez I really hope he doesn’t lose this one.”
Tbh, if I were to reread the whole thing, I’d probably catch on to some absurdities (Even as a kid, it didn’t make sense to me that “quigs” on each world were like fake versions of an animal on that world and the term quig referred to it being a pet of the villain. So like the Chloral quig was a shark. The issue was that the Denduron quig was a made up animal and the people on that world just called it a quig when really they should have had their own name for it since the term quig was meant to be esoteric). I’m sure I’d notice more things like that as an adult but I do look back fondly in these books.
Thoughts?
by WisteriaWillotheWisp