Fandom squee post

[evil_plotbunny]

The nice thing about children's book fandoms is they're mostly short (I'm looking at you, Chalet School), so now might be the perfect time to pick up a new fandom or revisit an old favorite.

Tell us why we should read your awesome fandom in the comments. Don't forget to link to legal sources, if they're available. Many long out of print books are now appearing as ebooks. And there's always the library.

Comments

Wind on Fire by William Nicholson

[deep_dark_waters]

Wind on Fire is a fantasy trilogy by William Nicholson (available on Amazon/Kindle, etc). Sometimes literally judging books by covers is a brilliant idea - I bought the trilogy on a whim about ten years ago when I saw a really beautiful hardback box set in a bookshop window :D Lifting a summary of the first book from the Telegraph:

"The book tells the story of how a sister and brother (Kestrel and Bowman Hath), and their stinky classmate Mumpo, dare to challenge the oppressive social order that operates in the walled city of Aramanth.

Under this system, families can move up and down the social scale depending on their children's success (or otherwise) in school examinations, and on the parents' success (or otherwise) in their careers. High achievement brings not just prestige, but promotion up the colour-coded, socio-economic ladder [. . .] What happens during this test sets off a chain of events which results in our three young heroes embarking on a mission to uncover the secret of the wind singer, the magical totemic device which is the historic focal point for all the citizens of Aramanth.

In the process, they meet the unfathomable but kindly sub-class of Mud People, they elude the sinister clutches of the prematurely-aged Old Children, and they fall into the hands of both the Chakas and Barakas, two implacably opposed peoples who pursue a perpetual desert war aboard chariots the size of cities. But all this is just a prelude to their final encounter, with an evil more fantastic and deadly that anything they could ever have imagined.."

The first book feels completely different to the second and third. It's set a few years earlier so the children are a bit younger and (imo) much less interesting. There's a lot of action in the first book but it's a little bit of a lot of stuff and ends up feeling kind of like you're being beaten over the head with ~important messages about individuality~. If you stick with it though, books two and three become more focused on the overall story arc of their journey to find the Manth people's homeland. They get really brutal too - there's slavery, mass murder, a really fascinating gladiator-type sport called the manaxa. It's a little while since I last read them so I'm a bit hazy on details, but I remember being slightly bothered by the portrayal of mental illness and some clumsy racial stereotyping, particularly in the first book. That aside, the worldbuilding is incredible, I love how Nicholson doesn't wimp out of letting things be truly bleak/violent/disturbing and then doesn't wimp out of showing the consequences, and his prose is so rich and vivid it's worth reading just for the joy of his words.