Opening lines:
Well, here's the whole page. It makes more sense with the images: (This is actually the second page. The first page doesn't have any words. It is the image of a hand ...oh, just order it already.)
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This Review, Short Version: Buy this right away.
Long Version:
My favorite books take me so far into other worlds that I get lost in them for a while. Ben Hatke has been doing this to me since I read his first Zita the Spacegirl book. I am not sure how he does it, but I think it involves taking kids from earth who are so real I feel like they live on my block, putting them into very differnt fantasy worlds, and then filling those fantasy worlds with so much activity and such interesting characters that you are drawn in.
In the Narnia books, the Pevensie children discover they are actually kinds and queens in the world they fall into. Harry Potter discovers he is actually The Boy Who Lived. Percy Jackson finds out that he is the son of the sea god Posiedon. In Mighty Jack and The Goblin King, Jack and his friends are in constant danger not because they are prophesied to inherit the kingdom, or bcause there is a powerful wizard out to get them, but because they are in the way, don't kow the rules, or are just hanging out in a very dangerous place. This is another element that grabs the reader.
Right The story. Well, at the end of Hatke's first book, Mighty Jack, a giant creature had kidnapped Jack's autistic sister Maddy and Jacka nd his friend Lily had followed them through a gateway. Goblin King opens as Jack and Lily emerge into the world where Maddy has been taken. Immeidately they are in trouble. Jack fights, and bareley defeats a giant knight, then Lily falls off a bridge and lands on something hard. Jack has no choice but to continue after Maddy. Lily ends up being rescued and nursed back to health by a stquad of goblins.
