Author: Clare B. Dunkle
Title: The Hollow Kingdom Trilogy
Age Range: 10 +
Genre: Fantasy, some Romance
For this review I bring a set of three, which I actually found not that long ago. I still enjoy returning to the children’s section sometimes, and a few years back – which is recent because the last time I was the traditional age for it was long before that – I came on these books. Well, I started by just taking out the first one. Technically it could be called quite traditional. Kate and her younger sister Emily are orphaned, and are sent to live at Hallow Hill, which will belong to Kate through her mother eventually. At first they are delighted – the grounds are beautiful, the house large, and their great aunts treat them well. But then they learn a frightening truth: goblins are real. And those goblins have a king. And that King’s unique nature requires that his mother – and therefore, for the son’s sake, his wife as well – be a non-goblin. Elves were the best for their strong magic, but any non-goblin would do, and now that the elves were gone, there were only humans and dwarves – and who’d take a dwarf when a human as beautiful as Kate is right there? You see what I mean by being a typical tale at the surface. It’s a take on the old myth of a beautiful maiden being kidnapped to wed a monster – except it’s not. It’s also a beauty and the beast type story, and a story about perception, and it’s a love story – within its category, the best I’ve seen. It’s been done before – the theme of someone who starts out a villain and is shown to be a hero, or at least virtuous, is nothing new – but often the transformation seems rather contrived. Not so The Hollow Kingdom’s rendering of Marak the Goblin King, which bears the rare distinction among my reads of having managed it so well that when I re-read it, I could see his real character in the very scenes that, the first time around, had convinced me he was evil. That is how it should be done, and such a masterful example demands recognition.
But that’s only the beginning of the delight, because remember, I mentioned it’s a trilogy. These books were her first, and you can see her full potential unfolding as they go on. Good as the first is, the second was even better – and the third, simply excellent. The second book shifts to being about her younger sister, Emily, who followed her to the goblin kingdom in the first book because she thought it sounded like wonderful fun. Well, as far as she’s concerned, she wasn’t wrong. She loves it down there – but when her best friend Seylin grows up ahead of her, things get less fun, as his own realization of his feelings clash with her immature obliviousness and create something of a fiasco of impulsive decisions. Suddenly, a heartbroken Seylin has left the kingdom to wander in search of surviving elves, and Emily – under carefully calculated pressure by Marak, who has a very good idea of what’s going on – is out there after him, being escorted by her most hated teacher, Ruby, who teaches the young goblins about humans despite the fact that she loathes them. In the process of both their journeys, we learn a great deal more about the elves, what happened to them, the history and relationship between goblins and elves, and even something about humans. And, like the first book, there are some wonderful plays and experiments in perspective. These books excel at nothing so much as fascinating works in perspective.
And, as if to prove the point, the third and final book makes such a play of reversed perception, making such perfect use of the grounds established by the previous books, it deserves nothing less than unreserved admiration. The Elvish race has revived! A long time ago they lost their king and began to die out, until there were next to none left, but now a new leader has arisen. He has the power, the magic, and the leadership. He’s gathered all the remaining elves, and he knows many of the most prized – but hitherto lost – elvish spells. But most of all, his magic has a mind of its own, telling him what to do – and, in his negotiations with Catspaw, the present Goblin King, a ironic switch occurs. The human girl who had been intended as Catspaw’s bride – who in fact had been raised in the goblin kingdom, not kidnapped – becomes the Elvish leader’s bride, and the elvish girl that the leader had intended to marry before seeing Matilda becomes Catspaw’s! The phenomenon of shifting feelings between Catspaw and his new bride is portrayed but not in great detail – we’ve been there before. What this book focuses on, and makes it the ultimate treatise in perspective, is the shift between Matilda and her new husband. It’s a bizarre reversal of both the first book and the classic it was founded on – now the human girl has been cruelly taken from the goblins by the elves, and forced to marry their king. And having been raised by goblins, being handsome doesn’t impress her much, and this pretty elf is going to have to work just as hard as Marak once did. In addition to this we are treated to a lovely final resolution to the elves vs. goblins thread that wove through the previous two, as the elve’s tragic past is finally explained in full, and their immediate future resolved. All in all, it fulfills the obligation of every book that concludes a set: it surpasses them, and establishes both the high point of the series and the final tying off of all the loose threads. And that’s as satisfying as it gets.
The titles, in order, are The Hollow Kingdom, Close Kin, and In the Coils of the Snake, by Clare B. Dunkle. They may not be toted as the top ten, but they are well worth reading, and available at most libraries and bookstores.
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