I have recently read and enjoyed the first two books in Brandon Mull's Five Kingdoms junior fiction fantasy series, Sky Raiders and Rogue Knight, so I was quite excited to try the first of his earlier Fablehaven series.
The Five Kingdoms books, although junior fiction, after the first tedious chapters getting into the fantasy world, proved to have interesting imagination and increasingly in-depth characterisation as I read - enough to make me read the second in the series and look forward to the third. Fablehaven did not have quite the same impact, unfortunately. It is kind of a cross between The Secret Garden and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, without the style of the former or the humanity and intelligence of the latter.
As Fablehaven proceeded I found myself increasing irritated with some of the characters. The protagonists, Kendra and her younger brother Seth, are set up as opposite personality types to a degree which becomes at first irritating and then tedious. By halfway into the book I could cheerfully have strangled Seth, who made me fervently grateful that my parents had not presented me with a younger brother. Every single rule or piece of advice the children are given is ignored by him, while Kendra does a good imitation of Susan in the Arthur Ransome books, being sensible at all times. In the meantime, the adults seem determined not to give them any reasons for the rules they set, thereby increasing the likelihood that their guidelines will be ignored.I hung out throughout the novel for the appearance of what seemed to be a dragon on the cover picture, but was doomed to disappointment. It still looks like a dragon to me, even though I now know that it is supposed to be an illustration of a troll. I feel cheated! Fablehaven didn't really grab me, but as I enjoyed Mull's Five Kingdoms books I may give the second book a try to see if this series gets any better.
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