LLAMA QUEST #1

When adventure calls, a youngster leaves his parents’ llama farm and sets out on a quest.

While shoveling llama poop one day, brown-skinned 8-year-old Dak Evans notices a pale-skinned, bespectacled, purple-haired girl nearby. Lucy, a llama owned by the monks at the temple next door, awakens him that night and leads him to meet the girl, an aspiring wizard named Fenn, but it’s Lucy—apparently a magical creature with great powers—who announces that Dak will need to help save everyone from danger. She tells him of a lengthy war fought over magic stones that were later hidden in the monks’ temple. The Kingdom of Ravenwood has been peaceful ever since. But the stones have been stolen, and so the journey to find them, and the thief, begins. Dak’s grit and yen for adventure have caught Lucy’s eye, and she chooses him and Fenn to be her companions. But it won’t be easy: Their search for the first stone takes them to a den full of fire-breathing dragons. The narrative incorporates common fantasy tropes—teleportation, magic shields—but the overall threat feels too vague to be truly menacing. While the book contains little internal conflict and the worldbuilding isn’t especially original, it has enough action to entice newcomers to the genre. Human characters are drawn as standard cartoon types in the grayscale art, but the dragons are impressive, and Lucy is adorable.

Solid, though familiar, fantasy fare for readers not quite ready for Tolkien.