Customer Reviews

House On Falling Star Hill

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book, I found, quite exciting. You would first think it would not get any better, but it did. It is just so adventure packed. The best part, I would have to say, is the ending. It was so unbelievably shocking. I would definitely recommend this to people who have an imagination.

This evening I finished "The House on Falling Star Hill" by Michael Molloy, which I had bought just because I liked the David Frankland artwork on the dust jacket so much.

This fanciful tale, despite the length of 377 pages, is intended for the juvenile audience, rather than young adult, I'd say. (Man, books for young readers really have gotten longer since I was a kid! Oh, that's not a problem, as long as the novels don't include too much filler, but I continue to be surprised at how much the publishing world has changed since I was the age for which this novel was intended---somewhere between the middle-grade and young adult years.)

The story isn't bad (though where the comparison to Diana Wynne Jones' "Dark Lord of Derkholm" in the School Library Journal review comes from, I have no idea---I would never have thought of those books after reading this one). But overall, I'll call it a "pleasant diversion" and nothing more. Not bad, but it didn't really "grab" me in any way. Though to be fair, the majority of books I read fall into this category also. I would say that I only get excited about ten or fifteen percent of the young adult titles I read nowadays; it's only a minority of titles that make me sit up and take notice. I'm more than willing to concede that if I had read this in my younger years, I may very well have been more enthusiastic about it.

I'm not adverse to trying other books by this author, but he seems to be more well-known in the UK than the US, and I don't know that I'll come across any more of his titles without making a concentrated effort to seek them out.

I still absolutely love the Frankland cover for this one, though! It has been released in two different variations (one for the hardcover, one for the paperback) and both are very attractive. A nice bonus is that every chapter is headed by a silhouette drawing by the artist.