Wildwood Imperium (Wildwood Chronicles Series #3)

by Colin Meloy, Carson Ellis (Illustrator)

Overview

From Colin Meloy, lead singer of the Decemberists, and Carson Ellis, acclaimed illustrator of The Mysterious Benedict Society, comes the stunning third book in the New York Times bestselling fantasy-adventure series the Wildwood Chronicles.

A young girl's midnight séance awakens a long-slumbering malevolent spirit.... A band of runaway orphans allies with an underground collective of saboteurs and plans a daring rescue of their friends, imprisoned in the belly of an industrial wasteland.... Two old friends draw closer to their goal of bringing together a pair of exiled toy makers in order to reanimate a mechanical boy prince.... As the fate of Wildwood hangs in the balance.

The Wildwood Chronicles is a mesmerizing and epic tale, at once firmly steeped in the classics of children's literature and completely fresh at the same time. In this book, Colin Meloy continues to expand and enrich the magical world and cast of characters he created in Wildwood, while Carson Ellis once again brings that world to life with her gorgeous artwork, including six full-color plates.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062119643
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	02/04/2014
Series:	Wildwood Chronicles Series , #3
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	592
Sales rank:	562,603
Lexile:	880L (what's this?)
File size:	6 MB
Age Range:	9 - 12 Years

About the Author

Colin Meloy is the author of The Whiz Mob and the Grenadine Kid and the New York Times bestselling Wildwood Chronicles as well as two picture books, The Golden Thread: A Song for Pete Seeger and Everyone’s Awake. He is also the singer and songwriter for the indie rock band the Decemberists. Colin lives in Oregon with his wife and frequent collaborator, illustrator Carson Ellis, and their sons.

Carson Ellis is the illustrator of a number of books for children, including the Wildwood Chronicles, and is the author and illustrator of the picture books Du Iz Tak?, a Caldecott Honor winner, and Home. Carson lives just outside Portland, Oregon, with her family.

Editorial Reviews

Meloy gives his antic imagination full rein to produce work that...is brilliantly sui generis.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

From the Publisher

03/01/2014
Gr 5–8—Wildwood's varied cast of characters gathers once again. Prue, the Oregonian outsider whose "Bicycle Revolution" toppled a repressive government, now obeys the Council Tree, which prophesies that peace will come if engineers Esben and Carol Grod awaken the Dowager Governess's mechanical son. Add the Unadoptable children, the tyrant of the Industrial Waste, the fate of Curtis and the Bandit King, the power hungry Verdant Empress, and the crumbling interim Wildwood government, and the result, ending with reunions and rescues, requires notetaking to keep the details straight. Meloy uses a Dickensian style of alternating chapters to interleaf more than five concurrent story lines. Readers will need to be familiar with the previous books. There is little recapitulation of past events here, and chapter transitions can be confusing. Character development necessarily takes a backseat to events, although the unhinged Jeoffrey Unthank's dramatic reappearance is a delightful cameo. Prue's quest, while important, doesn't seem to personally resonate with her, and there's not much space given to her feelings on the matter. Given the challenging scope of this work, however, Meloy reunites his characters in a manner most of the series readers will find satisfying.—Caitlin Augusta, Stratford Library Association, CT

School Library Journal

★ 2013-11-20
Drawing from wildly original tropes and paradigms and populated by a wide cast of characters old and new, this portrait of a magical world just outside mundane reality (here represented by Portland, Ore.) brings the trilogy to a satisfying conclusion. The opening strikes a somber note as a teenage girl calls up a restless spirit then lightens, turning to Prue and her quest: bringing together toymakers Carol and Esben to rebuild their remarkable mechanical boy. But first, Rachel, Elsie and the valiant Unadoptables must rescue Carol and Martha from the Titan tower, a fiendishly complicated task that depends on the now highly unstable Joffrey Unthank and the Chapeaux Noirs, an "anarcho-syndicalist" collective. Dramatic shifts in tone and mood--by turns politically astute and subversively witty, elegiac, droll and philosophical--are par for the course, while narrative style ranges from intimate to intergalactically distant. These idiosyncrasies make it just about impossible to identify the prospective audience by age. Never mind. Series fans know what awaits, and new readers will quickly determine if it's for them. Interwoven with Meloy's compellingly visual word portraits, Ellis' abundant illustrations, including color plates, again showcase her subtle blend of folk-art simplicity and eldritch imagery. Like filmmaker Terry Gilliam, Meloy gives his antic imagination full rein to produce work that, if occasionally uneven, is brilliantly sui generis. (Fantasy. 10 & up)

Kirkus Reviews