Customer Reviews

Shadow of Malabron (Perilous Realms)

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When Will steals his father's motorcycle and has an accident, he mistakenly gets thrown into a world of Story. The world composed of various realms is made up of the stories we read in our world. Characters from stories exist there as real people.

Will discovers that the story-world is in danger from the Night King and his minions. Will also discovers that he has the gift to be in the middle of important events, similar to those events any hero finds himself in. Along with Rowen (a girl with more importance to the world's fate than she thinks), Pendrake (Rowen's grandfather and mage [or loremaster as he is called], Shade (the talking wolf from Red Riding Hood with a slightly different appetite) and Finn (a Knight-Errant) Will sets out on a journey to find the Hidden Folk (the elven equivalent), and through them a way back into the Untold (the normal world.)

On the way he enters a mysterious library, meets the servants of the Night King, confounds two trolls, meets a mage who has fallen to the werefire, and travels with Moth and Morrigan and numerous other companions, to be pursued by a terrible servant of the Night King - who act genuinely enough - and finally must choose whether to remain home or remain to save his friends.

An enjoyable read for me, and I hope to find the sequel, as soon as it comes out.

Anyone who's ever had to move unwillingly to a new city, state, or country, leaving friends behind, can identify right away with Will's sense of loss, his feelings of powerlessness, and his longing for escape--and with his "borrowing" of his father's motorcycle to return to the enticing carnival that their rusty van had passed on the way to the RV campsite for the night. Crashing the motorcycle in the rain, Will is propelled into another world where his life is threatened by relentless fetches until Rowen, a girl his own age, saves him--using her waylight to find a snug. From that moment on, Will's life continues to be in danger. His arrival in The Perilous Realm was expected there and his new friends--Rowen's grandfather, the knight Finn, the Nightwanderer Moth, the raven Morrigan, and Shade the Wolf--are determined to help him discover and fulfill his mission. In the process, traveling on foot through the countryside, through towns and villages, and eventually into a landscape reminiscent of the Columbia Icefields in the Canadian Rockies, Will, Rowen, Nicholas, Finn and Shade (with Moth and Morrigan scouting and protecting from a distance) try to find the portal, the farhold, that will allow Will to return to his father and little sister. Caught in a looping storyshard, nearly consumed by seductive werefire, pursued by relentless Nightbane and Mordogs, Will and his companions have little time to sleep or eat as the Night King plans his next attack. Tiny things, like the flickering blue light of Sputter, the wisp, often make the difference between survival and defeat. Thomas Wharton's powers of invention make the realm of story Will has crashed into more real than the Untold, the world he left behind--so much so that we wonder, when Will finally finds a way back, if he'll take it.