Monster in the Hollows by Andrew Peterson (2011 — The Wingfeather Saga, Book Three
It took us a while to get this on audio through the Libby app, but we finally scored and were able to enjoy this third book in Andrew Peterson‘s four-book Wingfeather Saga. Personally I wasn’t as much a fan of this installment as I was of Book Two, North! Or Be Eaten, but my kids disagreed—and since it series for children, well, I guess Peterson wins!
For a fuller discussion on why I preferred to listen this series than read it aloud as I’m wont to do, see my reviews for either Book One or Book Two. Suffice it to say, these book are way better on audio!
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One reason this story might have struck a chord with my kids might have been the close ties I noticed to the themes of Harry Potter. It’s not so much ties to the magical realm (though there’s bits of that) but rather in other more obvious ways, for example in the introduction of kids to a whole new world about which they’d known nothing previously. Also in the fact that the kids attend a school with strange teachers, stranger classes, and Malfoy-like bullies. It’s not Hogwarts, of course (and maybe any middle-school aged book will necessarily include school into its plot as an appeal to the his pre-teen readers, since that’s their whole world—I honestly don’t remember!), but the school days and the addition of a weird new sport (not Quidditch but odd enough to be Quidditch-esque) just kept hammering home to me that this thing reminded me tons of Harry Potter.
Most obvious, though, was the book’s title itself, The Monster in the Hollows. Published just 4 years after J.K. Rowling’s The Deathly Hallows, I had to think that this was a catchy play on words that Peterson (or his publisher) thought would be sure to string along some readers who otherwise would never have read his books. Did it work and did this book prove a better seller than the rest? I can’t find that info, but the recent crowd-funding campaign that’s brought the whole series to the animated screen certainly suggests that the series has a blooming and faithful following—and posing as something else isn’t what got them there.
This story ends with another frightfully important plot point to the series, and I could sense it was coming, so even though I personally was losing interest in the story, my kids weren’t, and I was willing to keep with it to the end. We’re not at a place, though, where “we just can’t wait!” to read Book 4, and I think that’s a flaw. With the Harry Potter books (and others like A Series of Unfortunate Events), we simply craved to know what would happen next, and each installment felt like a must-read. Not so with this, so the fact that our Libby waiting list is still in the multiple of weeks doesn’t bother us. I guess that’s OK, but it doesn’t say much to me for the longevity of the saga’s future. I may be wrong of course and the Angel Studios productions may breathe life into it for the long haul. For the sake of decent non-preachy Christian literature: I hope so.
©2023 E.T.
Read More from Andrew Peterson:
- On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness (2008)
- North! Or Be Eaten (2009)
- The Monster in the Hollows (2011)
- The Warden and the Wolf King (2014)
- Adorning the Dark (2019)
- The God of the Garden (2021)