"The key concepts of the storyline are intriguing and this first book has set up a strong foundation for them to continue to be developed in future books."
The first book in a new YA fantasy series of kingdoms, conflicts and magical creatures. ‘Hale: The Rise of the Griffins’ by JK Noble is a high fantasy story that follows the eponymous character Hale, as he escapes kidnapping and finds himself in an unfamiliar, dangerous new world. As we follow Hale, finding out more about his family, his abilities as a Griffin and his connection to the Elder and leader of the Griffins, Bayo, we also get glimpses of parallel narratives. We meet Marcus, a Griffin refugee starting out at the Royal Academy and Ellionna, a young girl with the family curse of a siren trapped inside her struggling to control its power. The synopsis states that the book is broken up into short stories that follow our cast, but as the book is chaptered and not structured as a collection of short stories I would say this is more a multi-narrative story. We check in with one character, then return to the others after a time, with some backfilling of information about what’s happened while the reader has been away. This is felt the most apparent to me with Hale. I would have been interested to see his character fester under Bayo’s tutelage, as opposed to jumping forward and having it briefly described. I feel that more development of that arc would also play into the key themes the author described of manipulation and sets the foundations to show the character deal with his mistakes in future books. The writing is descriptive but I sometimes found the sentence structure simplistic for the suggested YA target audience, there was a lot of “Hale does X. Hale goes Y” which makes the story more accessible to slightly younger readers, but may need further editing to make the writing style more suited to an older audience. There are plenty of elements in ‘‘Hale: The Rise of the Griffins’ that make for a solid start to a series. Fantasy readers will enjoy discovering the creatures that inhabit these new lands and the differences between the cultures in the four different nations that make up Malphora. The lands of Malphora are helpfully depicted in a well illustrated map at the start of the book. The key concepts of the storyline are intriguing and this first book has set up a strong foundation for them to continue to be developed in future books.
Charlotte Walker, A LoveReading Ambassador
| Primary Genre | Indie Author Books |
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