Nevermoor #1: The Trials of Morrigan Crow

I wanted to read this one because I read in a review somewhere that this was for people who liked Harry Potter. Now, I’ve heard this all over the place before. Read this if you like Harry Potter! This is great for Harry Potter fans! It’s like Harry Potter for kids/adults/young adult/dogs, etc. I’ve come to realize that when people say this they don’t often mean it or at least it’s nothing like the Harry Potter I’ve come to know and love. It’s just a buzz word that grabs people’s attention and sells more copies.

However, if you do like Harry Potter, this book is for you.

It’s the story of Morrigan Crow, the only daughter of Corvus Crow, who is an important politician and who doesn’t love his daughter, though he often makes a show of it in public to boost his popularity. Morrigan is spunky and sarcastic, resourceful and clever. She also happens to be one of the cursed children. Strange things happen around her without her intending them to. A derailment of a train. The heart attack of a gardener. A broken arm. Cursed children are children who, for some reason or another, cause all the horrible, unlucky things in life to happen. They also happen to all die on Eventide, which is Morrigan’s eleventh birthday.

So you immediately have the Harry Potter vibe going: a young child raised in a desperate situation and somehow or another causes strange things to happen around them. For Harry, on his eleventh birthday, he got Hagrid. On Morrigan’s birthday, she got Captain Jupiter North, of the Wundrous Society.

Imagine Matt Smith’s eleventh doctor when he first started on Doctor Who: bouncing full of energy and positivity that you can’t help but smile and questionable wardrobe choices. Now imagine him with a beard. And also ginger. And you’d come pretty close to Captain Jupiter North.

He is Morrigan’s patron and has entered her into the trials for the Wundrous Society, believing she has a special knack that makes her a perfect prospective member of this prestigious and secret society. She is whisked away to Nevermoor, where magic is rampant and everyone is pretty much ridiculous but Morrigan goes along with it and takes the reader along for the ride.

It’s like the author combined the magic and wonder of Harry Potter and Doctor Who in one book. You follow the adventures of Morrigan as she proceeds through her trials, with the ever looming danger of the Hunt, which is a gang of shadow monsters that hunt down cursed children, and deportation back to her old home, where she’ll most certainly be hunted down by these monsters. But there’s more at stake here than just certain death: Morrigan finally has a family and a place to call home.

I honestly can’t talk about this book enough. It’s a light enough read that older kids or more advanced kids will whizz by it but it’s not boring, so they’ll be engrossed the entire time. And it’s not too hard for reluctant readers, even though the size of the book (465 pages) may be a little daunting. I really hope there’s going to be a second book because there’s so much to Jupiter North and this Wundrous Society that I want to know about.

The main villain of the book, the Wundersmith, doesn’t really play a big part into this first book and he’s basically the equivalent of Voldemort here, but less present in the story, lurking mostly on the edges of the plot until the very end. He could come back later but it might bring a darker tone to the books than this first one, which I kinda hope for (although I doubt it’d get as dark as the later Harry Potter books), but I bet it will remain a pretty lighthearted children’s series, hopefully one that will last several books!

So this is the second of my 2018 reading challenge list and I hope to keep reading but classes are starting soon, so I may have to stop reading fun stuff for awhile and read boring text books. But not bad for reading two books in one month, right? Torey already has read 3 and I’m so jealous and slightly competitive that I feel the need to read more!

“Fenestra was silent for a while, and Morrigan thought she’d fallen asleep standing up. Then she felt something warm, wet, and sandpapery lick the entire right side of her face. She sniffled again, and Fen’s big gray head rubbed her shoulder affectionately.
“Thanks, Fen,” Morrigan said quietly. She heard Fenestra padding softly to the door. “Fen?”
“Mmm?”
“Your saliva smells like sardines.”
“Yeah, well. I’m a cat.”
“Now my face smells like sardines.”
“I don’t care. I’m a cat.”
“Night, Fen.”

 

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