Sam Firke reviewed Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell
Didn't meet my expectations - or I'm too old
3 stars
Too many creatures from too much mythology, too fast-moving - I couldn't get hooked. The book was a smash hit so maybe it's me. From the New Yorker's review, with which I agree:
"That’s often the case when you revisit books you loved in your youth or catch up on the ones you missed or were born too early to encounter at the intended age. As a grownup, you may enjoy such works, but you can no longer wholly enter them. You are, in an inversion of that childhood injustice, too tall to ride the ride.
I was aware of this limitation while reading “Impossible Creatures”—much more aware of it, in fact, than while reading Rundell’s more realist works for kids. That might be because children are so much better than adults at crossing the boundary between the ordinary and the magical, or it might be because the new book …
Too many creatures from too much mythology, too fast-moving - I couldn't get hooked. The book was a smash hit so maybe it's me. From the New Yorker's review, with which I agree:
"That’s often the case when you revisit books you loved in your youth or catch up on the ones you missed or were born too early to encounter at the intended age. As a grownup, you may enjoy such works, but you can no longer wholly enter them. You are, in an inversion of that childhood injustice, too tall to ride the ride.
I was aware of this limitation while reading “Impossible Creatures”—much more aware of it, in fact, than while reading Rundell’s more realist works for kids. That might be because children are so much better than adults at crossing the boundary between the ordinary and the magical, or it might be because the new book occasionally falters in ways the earlier ones do not. Rundell is usually a master of the elegant plot twist, but this book was both less surprising than the others and more convoluted, with an Archipelagic cosmology that involves a magical tree, a maze, an immortal guardian, a heat source called a somnulum, and some crucial moments of overlap with our own earthly history that were a little too “Da Vinci Code” for my taste.
Still, I doubt that any of this would matter to a child. It may be true that adults should read children’s books, but it is definitely true that children’s books should not be written for adults, and Rundell knows her audience; she neither talks down to kids nor shies away from the things that interest them while leaving grownups cold."
I have one of her non-fiction books farther down in the to-read pile.
