The Thief of Worlds

January 1, 2021

Gr 4 Up-Eleven-year-old Hurricane was born during a violent wind storm. The wind is a part of him-quite literally part of his blood, bones, and marrow-and he needs it to stay alive. He and his mother live in Chicago, the Windy City, where the air has been still for days and its quality is becoming increasingly worse. People are getting sick, and his mother has to be hospitalized. While Hurricane is alone, Zephron Windlord, who is in charge of the wind, appears, and together they set out to find the stolen Aerobellon, which produces wind. Hurricane travels across different worlds, and along the way he encounters new friends who, with their courage and skills, are able to restore order to not just the world in which Hurricane exists but others, too. Coville brings readers another epic adventure, this time with an environmental crisis spin. Through Hurricane, readers are shown that things, and people, are not always what they seem, and are encouraged to approach everything with an open mind. The depiction of characters who don't fit traditional gender roles is another refreshing component of this middle grade novel. VERDICT Light, fun fantasy that touches on current topics. Purchase where previous titles from the author have circulated well.-Alicia Kalan, The Northwest Sch., Seattle

Copyright 2021 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2021
When the magical horn that keeps all of our planet's winds in motion is stolen, young Hurricane finds himself leading the chase to fetch it back. In a tale that suffers from both identity confusion (quest fantasy? Eco-parable? Ontological mishmash?) and a premise that really doesn't hold water (not to mention air, earth, or fire), Coville sends his protagonist out of the formerly Windy City's increasingly deadly fug and through a series of portals to a set of highly localized alternate worlds that are, respectively, rapidly drying out, getting colder, or becoming less solid. Instruments controlling each of the four elements, it turns out, have been stolen from their divine or semidivine keepers by Mokurra, an entity composed of the souls of billions of anguished victims of a mad strongman's unspecified (but probably nuclear) holocaust, in order to create a deathless new Eden complete with a forbidden tree of knowledge. The author drags his readers through a repetitive plot to a thoroughly anticlimactic resolution keyed to the fruit of that aforementioned tree--leaving them to grope after any symbolism or even, for more analytical sorts, to puzzle over the logic of Mokurra's actions. Additionally, the worldbuilding lacks depth and the characters are poorly fleshed out. A paucity of physical descriptions makes the ethnicity of human characters difficult to determine. Coville is usually good for heady, high-spirited adventure--but he blows it here. (Fantasy. 11-13)

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