FULL CIRCLE

Completing their quest, Trundle and Esmeralda literally reconfigure their whole world.

Five thin volumes ago, Trundle was a humble hedgehog working as a lamplighter on a cabbage-farming planet, and Esmeralda was the scrappy stranger who yanked him into a rough-and-tumble adventure (Trundle’s Quest, 2011). Traveling by skyboat across their archipelago of sky islands, which is called the Sundered Lands, the two hedgehogs seek the sixth hidden crown from an old legend. They don’t know exactly what reuniting the six crowns will do, but they know they have to accomplish it before the pirates do—not to mention Esmeralda’s evil aunt, who wants to run the world. Machinery has “cogwheels and gears and ratchets and sprockets”; bad guys carry “muskets and pistols and blunderbusses.” Loud explosions and thud-and-blunder battles supply plenty of bluster (though the text leans a bit hard on exclamation points) while moving quickly and predictably enough to suit fans of the formula. A few refreshing surprises break the mold without undermining the narrative structure’s comforting safety. As it has been for the whole series, ethnic stereotyping—“I’m a Roamany….I have the sixth sense”—is shameful. Trundle and Esmeralda sail “sunward beyond Nightreef” and end up unwittingly recombining the Sundered Lands into a single planet so breezily that readers may not even question the whereabouts of, well, the archipelago’s entire population.

A happily fanciful wrap-up, with a whole new adventure likely to come.