Oliver Mackenzie Brown hates the thought of leaving
everything he knows to live in a run-down house in the country his parents
thought would be a good idea to buy. When the family arrives, there’s no heat,
the roof is leaking, the barn is falling in on itself, and strange rune-marked
stones are appearing everywhere. Olly soon meets KK and Nonny Dreever who
explain that the Stone King wants to take back Gullywith. With only an army of
brass tortoises and bats on their side, and some help from a mysterious
bookseller, will they be able to save the house—and themselves—from the Stone
King?
I think if you are a younger reader than I am, who has read
a lot less than I have, who is more willing to suspend your disbelief, you
would enjoy this book a lot more than I did. Though I am 22 years old and an
avid reader of children’s fiction, I don’t find that I come across books that
make me say “if I was younger I’d like it” very often. (Ask me again when I’m
thirty—attending a university that cancelled classes once a year to encourage
everyone to dress up like fairies might have extended my childhood a little
bit.)
The point is, this was technically urban fantasy (maybe
that’s not the right term—modern fantasy?). It took place in contemporary times
and strange, wacky things kept happening and Olly kept looking at them like
“Oh, isn’t that interesting, I’ll roll with that” and as readers we don’t get
an explanation as to why moving brass tortoises suddenly appear, or why a
colony of bats is helping out, or how the characters know they’re helping in
the first place. We are completely thrown when a Stone King starts turning Olly
and KK to stone. And I wasn’t entirely sold on the Stone King’s role as an
antagonist even after that, because from what I can understand, Gullywith was
his to begin with and was taken away and now he wants it back—legit, right?
And if the plot was confusing, the characters were
irritating. I mean, they actually had their own personalities and acted within each
personality’s bounds, but I couldn’t stand any of them. Olly’s parents were
probably the worst—the mother wanted to buy Gullywith in the first place, and
all she did was complain about it from the second they walked through the door.
The father was a bit of a pushover and reprimanded Olly a handful of times for
reasons I couldn’t understand, and both of the parents kept foisting the
toddler sister onto Olly, who was only 10, and had some saving the world to do.
(I actually wasn’t entirely sold on the sister’s whole purpose in the book. She
probably could have been cut and no one would miss the “dada gaga mama” babble
in the background of conversation.)
It seemed strange to me that Olly himself was so dead set
against Gullywith, and yet a few hours after they arrive, as he’s sulking on
the garden wall, KK appears and magically everything is okay with Gullywith.
Yeah, his adventures start and whatnot, but it just seems too sudden. If he’d
had some internal monologue about “wouldn’t it be great if we’d never lived
here so I didn’t have all this responsibility on my shoulders” I would have
been more okay with it. Alas.
That said, I thought the setting was quite well
done—described well enough to be magical, while keeping in mind that it really
is more modern. Despite all the happenings, it made me want to live at
Gullywith—but I have a thing for cool, old, magical houses.
The book isn’t without its merits, but I had trouble
stemming a flow of questions with each turn of the page. The intended audience
would enjoy The Battle for Gullywith a lot more than I did.
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