Book #67 of 2024: Impossible Creatures

[thistlechaser]

Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell.

Quick synopsis: There's a magical world on Earth that most people can't get to. A young boy and girl have to save it.

Brief opinion: Unoriginal story with the worst grammar I've ever seen in a traditionally published book.

Plot: A portal from Earth opens only rarely, and a young boy just happens to pass through it. He lands in a magical world full of mythical creatures.

He meets a young girl and together they go on adventures. In the last 40% of the book they save the magical world and the real one.

Writing/editing: So bad. So very bad. The author loved to use semicolons, and yet at least a quarter of them were used incorrectly (as if they were a comma, like: "I went to the store for apples and milk; and bananas."). Commas were used incorrectly so so so many times. Colons were seemingly randomly used in place of semicolons.

The writing headed really close to purple as well ("the infinitely fragile night") or just plain cliche ("[She was] so beautiful that he forgot, for a moment, the logistics of how to breathe.").

And just plain didn't make sense. The MC boy and girl were walking through a town, the townspeople wouldn't come out of their houses, they were too scared of them:

They would have been right to have found her frightening. She walked with the look of a moveable battleground. She was a one-girl army.

They followed the [compass] through the streets. Her eyes were on it always: more, in fact, than they needed to be. It saved her from having to look up, or around."

Two paragraphs in a row, how do they make senses together? She's a "moveable battleground", a "one-girl army"... yet she's afraid to lift her eyes up to see the townspeople looking at her.

What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like: All the writing and grammar issues aside, there was nothing original about this story. It felt like the author plucked a bunch of ideas from other books and wove them into this one.

The first 60% was a slog, but I kept going because a couple reviews said the second half was better. The last 40% was barely better, but not nearly enough to have made it worth the time reading this book.

Rating: 1-Hated / 2-Disliked / 3-Okay / 4-Liked / 5-Loved: ⭐️ ½ / 1.5 stars. I wish I had DNFed it early on.