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Title: Mabel Gray and the Wizard Who Swallowed the Sun
Subtitle: The Adventures of Mabel Gray Volume 1
Author: Clayton Smith
Narrator: Veronica Leckie
Format: Unabridged
Length: 7 hrs and 13 mins
Language: English
Release date: 07-27-15
Publisher: Clayton Smith
Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 1 votes
Genres: Kids, Ages 5-7
Publisher's Summary:
All is not well in Brightsbane, the village of eternal night. An evil wizard - the very wizard who swallowed the sun, in fact - has stolen the Boneyard Compendium, a book of powerful spells that could bring about the destruction of the entire town. When an elder enlists the orphans of St. Crippleback's Home for Waifs and Strays to help track down the wizard, the ever-intrepid Mabel Gray sets out to find the three keys of bone that unlock the Compendium before the wizard gets his diabolical hands on them.
Armed with only her wit and a frightfully small bit of magic in her pocket, Mabel embarks on an adventure that brings her face-to-face with talking scarecrows, high-ranking monsters, babbling witches, ill-tempered daemons, a riddlesome owl who fancies himself a raven, and more. But the wizard isn't a wizard for nothing, and his evil magic may prove to be more powerful than Mabel ever imagined....
Members Reviews:
A Terrifically Engaging Heroine
Plucky, practical, polite and steadfast, with a keen appreciation of irony, and an appealing touch of wistful melancholy, Mabel is a heroine you can really take to heart and root for.
She's launched on her adventure because she really wants a "Letter of High Station", the reward she's been promised and the item she needs in order to advance in her socially regimented world. But like Dorothy in Oz, what she really needs is to find her home and her family. So, sent on a hopeless quest to frustrate an evil Wizard's evil plans, she charms, reasons, argues, and lucks her way from adventure to adventure, always tantalizingly close to realizing her dreams.
This book has a lot of moving parts, but they all fit together seamlessly. The narrator is ever present, frequently confiding to the reader or wandering off on whimsical digressions. This device is often, ultimately, cloying or distracting, but Smith pulls it off, and manages to use this narrator's voice to keep the younger reader focused and on track, while amusing the older reader. The world in which the action is set is nicely imagined and realized without being so overbuilt and overexplained that it becomes top heavy or tedious. Interestingly, most adults are a bit unreliable and a bit devious, and it's the supposed bad guys, (Riddle Raven, Bad Witch, the Viceroy, Reginald the Dragon, and so on), who are more forthright and honest. That's a neat trick to pull off.
On top of all that there is some really funny, dry and deadpan, throwaway business that is not in any way essential to the story, but just punches it up enough to make fun of the material in an I-kid-because-I-love sort of way. (For example, there's a Good Witch, a Bad Witch, and a "Witch of Neutral Position". I'm sorry, but that just cracks me up.)
There's also just enough of an edge in some of the throwaways and narration to make this more than a love and kisses homage to fairy tales and storytelling. Between the sometimes tart dialogue, the deviousness of some characters, and the ambiguity of some of the fixes in which Mabel finds herself, there is plenty to think over here.
So, for any younger reader this should be a treat. For the right, or ready, younger reader this should be a feast. An absolutely compelling Kindle find. (Please note that I found this book a while ago while browsing Amazon Kindle freebies.