Customer Reviews

Wurm War (Outcast)

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To quote Mark from the musical Rent:

"The opposite of war isn't peace -- it's creation."

Through three books, OutCast's youthful protagonist Timothy has grown up quite a bit. He has been taken away from his home, lost loved ones, and fought in battles of epic proportions. In this, the final book of the OutCast quartet, his character is tested when the Wurms come to Arcanum to seek revenge.

I don't want to give away the ending entirely, of course, but I do want to say it was quite impressive. Could there be more OutCast books in the future? You'll have to read Wurm War to find out.

If not for OutCast, though, I do hope that Golden and Sniegoski team up for another children's series. They are a fantastic collaborative team, having worked together for years on comics and horror / dark fantasy novels for adults. Thanks to OutCast, I can finally recommend their works to younger kids and to families. OutCast will spark the imagination of its readers, igniting a special kind of literary magic.

I actually got into this four-part series after picking up the first book in the series which my son had left laying around. I'm not sure what the reading level is supposed to be as he reads above age level and apparently had the book (and second book) for at least two years. Still he had decided to re-read the first two books and said they still were surprising good. So I read them and order the rest of the series for the both of us.

The basic premise of this book reminds me of Raymond Feist's first book "Magician" (which was originally two books entitled "Magician: Apprentice" and "Magician: Master" due publisher demands of shorter books). In "Magician," the protagonist for the first part of the book is a boy with magical potential that just can't get things right, but manages to pull off some major magic in ways that can't be understood. As the series progresses, you learn that he simply had a different form of magic and had to be trained differently.

In the Un-Magician series, the protagonist is a boy born into a world of magic with no magical ability. His father hides him in an alternate dimension, only to be found after his death by his finest student. The father does this out of fear of what the people of this magical world might do to him. As the series progresses, the reader discovers that young Tim is indeed regarded with a variety of responses ranging from pity, disgust, and the true thing his father had been concerned about - fear.

While in hiding, Tim has become a master inventor, coming up with all sorts of devices, including a robot built as a companion, to do what he cannot do with magic. Again, this ability, which is right up there with DaVinci in scope, is viewed with a variety of responses positive and negative. As the books progress, however, Timothy discovers that he does have a form of magic that is rightfully feared - he cannot be detected by magic, affected by spells, and as time passes he is even able to 'shut off' the magic of the entire world in an emergency situation.

It's the last part that I find a bit too far-fetched and somewhat taking away from Tim's inventions that were his primary aides in the throughout most of the first three books. He's an archtypical character type such as Anakin Skywalker, having great power and abilities not available to others, except he remains on the side of good though sometimes like a bull in a china shop.

Throughout the series a wide range of topics that are consistently dark are addressed. Again, I can't say what age group I would recommend this to, but from watching my son, it's obvious that the finer subtle details he was somewhat oblivious to two years ago he now can see. The authors manage to put some truly heavy hitting, basic historical parallels regarding politics, wars, and human nature in such a way that is subtle enough to not distract a younger reader, but that can be seen by more mature readers.

The negatives I would have about this series would be that the time frame is just unrealistic. By this I mean that all the massive events, of which each book is almost stand alone in by introducing a new horrible event, etc. for the protagonist to somewhat solve and fix as much as possible, all within times ranging from days to a few months. Each book begins almost exactly where the last one ended. The series also, I believe, could have benefitted from a fifth book. The series did not have an 'and they lived happily ever after' ending, but considering the massive amounts of political, prejudice, fear of the unknown, genocide, and war, it would have been interesting to see how Tim and his new world dealt with the aftermath of all these events. There is also a rather quickly skimmed over growing mutual attraction and unspoken acknowledgement of their destiny to be together that the protagonist, age 13, and the grandmaster of his order, a girl that grows closer and closer in age to him with each book as the authors apparently realize that having this underlying romantic theme would be more believable if they were closer in age. So in book one she is briefly glimpsed and described as a young woman, book two she is described as three or so years older than him, book three it becomes 'a couple' of years, and by book four her age difference is described as being about a year older. These are pretty small details, but for those who like continuity and realistic time frames, it could grow slightly irritating and possibly confusing for a tween in regards to how romance usually grows.

Overall, the series is nowhere in the range of Harry Potter or a lot of other popular and long-standing children's series, but it is engrossing and potentially educational about difficult subjects in a gently handled way.