The villains are well-drawn and interesting and have relatable motives. Kingfisher does some nice extrapolation: Baba Yaga's walking house becomes the basis for a land filled with walking houses, where houses you have to build yourself are inferior. Like I said, I liked Reginald, and I also enjoyed the entire visit to his family's estate and the associated civilization. Summer, like a lot of child portal-quest protagonists, succeeds through being nice and attentive (I'm thinking of Baum's characters here), and I enjoyed her attempts to decode what her role in events was, and respond to the needs of those around her without being duped. The book is filled with a lot of charm, a lot of clever concepts, some metafiction, and a lot of jokes.
Summer is a good protagonist, the daughter of a single mother who sometimes feels oppressed by her mother who ends up travelling to another world and meeting a variety of travelling companions, including a werehouse (a wolf that transforms into a house) and, my favorite, Reginald, a bird who is a bit of a fop if you imagine him being voiced by Hugh Laurie in his Wooster mode, it works perfectly. Still, that's picking too much at something that's basically a whim of preference. Orcus is more a collection of mythologies, which I don't like quite as much. Like, I like those fantasy lands where one draws maps of kingdoms and continents, like Oz and Middle-earth, or at least could do so, like Narnia. This isn't quite my flavor: Orcus feels more like a mythology and less like a place, if that makes any sense. I grew up reading portal-quest fantasy, and I love the stuff. Ursula Vernon) actually wrote the story for an adult audience, namely herself and her Patreon backers.īut anyway, it's the story of Summer, who's sent into a fantasy world called Orcus by Baba Yaga and ends up going on a quest, meeting a number of distinct and vivid characters on the way. One, the protagonist Summer is 11, which skews a bit more middle-grade, and two, T.
Summer in Orcus was technically a finalist for the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, but I'm not sure it's YA per se, for two reasons.
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