The Curse of the Gloamblozer by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell
The Edge Chronicles
Doubleday (Transworld) - September 2001
ISBN 0385602014 - Hardback
Juvenile / Fantasy

Reviewed by Rachel A Hyde, MyShelf.com
Buy a UK Copy

Quint is back - the young sky pirate who was the hero of the hour in Cloud Wolf which was published back in April for a mere £1 to commemorate World Book Day. This time he is the hero of a whole new trilogy that predates the first series and I am glad to report that the quality is still there and then some. Quint wants to be a sky pirate like his father Wind Jackal but straight after the last adventure he is taken to Sanctphrax to be the apprentice of his father's old friend the Most High Academe Linius Pallitax. He doesn't take to the new life at all - dreary school that starts at 6 each morning, his new employer's snooty daughter Maris who desperately wants her father to notice her and the odd things he has to do. These involve getting a mysterious scroll from the library and going inside the rock itself on which Sanctaphax is built, a living structure that is filled with a maze of tunnels and the creatures that live inside just aren't friendly but the stuff of nightmares. And what is Linius up to anyway that is so awful it is making him ill?

I am not normally a reader of children's fiction - Harry Potter aside - but I just can't put these books down. It says on the cover that it is "for children who have read the Harry Potter books" (a quote from a review in the Mail of Sunday) and although ostensibly it is nothing like Potter at all there are a few similarities such as the scheming academic milieu, the magic and some of the genuinely scary creatures that give the Dementors a run for their money. This series is a rare gem of modern juvenile literature in that it manages to entertain from beginning to end without being twee or preachy and is both thrilling and robust enough to appeal to children (and adults) of many ages and both sexes.

The other books in the first series are Beyond the Deepwoods, Stormchaser, Midnight Over Sanctaphrax and preceding this novel Cloud Wolf. Miss them at your peril!