Review: Impossible Creatures
Gaby Meares
Oh how I would have loved to discover this book when I was a child! Katherine Rundell has written a beautiful story populated by characters you want to know, sharing an adventure in a world you want to visit. It’s like Susan Cooper, mixed with J.R.R. Tolkien and with a dash of Philip Pullman.
Christopher Forrester has a way with animals. His mother did too, but she died nine years ago, ‘and his father had contracted, as if a weight had settled on him’. Christopher is waiting, hoping ‘that there was something more than that which he had so far seen’. Saving a baby griffin from drowning is only the beginning of his adventure.
Mal lives in Archipelago, and has learned how to fly. Her world is populated by creatures of myth and legend. But the glimourie is fading: the glimourie that all magical creatures depend on to live and thrive. How can she stop her world from disappearing?
When their worlds collide, Christopher and Mal join forces to stop the malignant power that is destroying the glimourie. Christopher knows their friendship is special, ‘that sometimes, if you are among the very lucky, a spark of understanding cuts like lightning across the space between two people’.
This book is perfect. It has wonderful creatures (and terrifying ones too), it has riddles (just like The Hobbit), it has wry humour and frightening obstacles for Mal and Christopher to overcome so they can save not only the Archipelago, but our world too. But the best thing about this book is the friendship that Mal and Christopher share - it’s the sort of friendship we all yearn for and if we’re lucky, might only get once in our lives, ‘but once is enough. You need it only once - so that you may know what your human heart is capable of’.
This is the best kids’ book I have read this year. Just brilliant.