Five Kingdoms: Sky Raiders by Brandon Mull

421 pages

"Cole Randolph is just trying to have fun with his friends on Halloween. But their trip to a neighborhood haunted house turns out to be the start of a wild adventure when Cole watches his friends being whisked away through a mysterious passage.

Cole dives in after them, only to emerge somewhere that's very clearly no longer Mesa, Arizona. He soon learns he's come to a place called the Outskirts.

Made up of five kingdoms, the Outskirts lies between wakefulness and dreaming, reality and imagination, life and death. It's an in-between place. Some people are born there. Some find their way there from our world, or other worlds. The balance of power in the five kingdoms has been upset, and the magic there is becoming unstable. It's up to Cole and an unusual girl he meets there named Mira to set things right, rescue his friends, and hopefully survive long enough to find his way back home..." -Dust Jacket

I love Brandon Mull. He's a great person and a great author and we have every book he's written and have read all but the sequel to The Candy Shop War. I love that you know that a Brandon Mull book is a safe read for kids--there won't be anything objectionable. His Beyonders series is probably my favorite of his books. He creates fun worlds for the reader to live in. Having said all of that, the beginning of this book started out really iffy for me. Sometimes I wish his characters were older. It's hard to imagine a 6th grade boy, who's 11 or 12, doing everything that Cole ends up doing. I'd find it a little more believable if he was 15 or 16. But, Percy Jackson and Harry Potter were both that young when they started their adventures so I can cut him some slack for that. I thought the dialogue was pretty corny at the beginning with talk of Cole's crush on Jenna. There again, 6th grade crushes are corny. It was at that age where my friends and I were passing notes back and forth with guys asking them to rank our friends on a scale of 1-10.

Cole enters the Outskirts voluntarily after hiding from the people who take his friends and following them, but then he's quickly caught and marked as a slave. He's then sold to the Sky Raiders who are basically treasure hunters in the sky. They use flying ships to scout out and raid floating castles. Cole becomes a scout, promised his freedom after completing 50 dangerous missions. He meets Twitch and Jace who are also scouts. Jace is arrogant and Twitch is quiet and keeps to himself. Twitch thinks he'll die before completing his missions because most scouts do. The castles in the sky come from one Cloudwall and float towards another where they disappear. They are inhabited by semblances, who can be dangerous and unpredictable. Once a castle is picked, Cole scouts for treasure and runs from danger. His first mission has him encountering a huge scorpipede. He's chosen a Jumping Sword as his one magical item that can help him. He also gains a magical shawl. At Skyport, he meets Mira who has a secret, which is pretty easy to figure out.

Cole's friends from earth, Jenna and Dalton, have been taken to the High King and once Cole goes to Skyport that's the last you hear of them. Cole constantly worries about what's happening to them and continually tries to figure out how to find and rescue them. He helps Mira and Mira promises to help him. Eventually Cole, Jace, Twitch and Mira have to leave Skyport. Up to that point and minus the first chapter, the book and the world Mull created was really entertaining. Where I had a problem was chapter 26 "Brady's Wilderness." I thought the wilderness full of milk lakes with floating chocolate chip cookie islands, life-size plastic dinosaurs, and murderous skeletons felt out of place. Brady was a 6-year-old boy from earth who discovered he had shaping powers and created everything there. He made a semblance of his babysitter to help him. There's a battle on a 3-story piece of cheesecake that I'm sure kids would probably love, but I just felt like after the images of the cloud castles and floating ships, it was pretty cheesy, pun intended.

The other problem I had with this book is the complicated ending. There's the bad guy (the High King) and then there's a group of other bad guys (a mysterious order) who have powers that have not been heard of before. They use shapecraft instead of shaping powers. We have yet to learn what that means. As Mira gets her power back, there's a complicated explanation of how that's done and who's behind the separation in the first place. I think for kids reading this it would be hard for them to follow and understand. I'm sure more will be explained in later books as this is a planned series of five books, one for each kingdom. This book takes place in the kingdom of Sambria.

Brandon Mull writes likable characters. Cole is a pretty typical kid but he's brave and not whiney. There's only one other literary Jace I know and he's the most arrogant, sarcastic guy around and this Jace is reminiscent of him in a very small way. I'm excited to see where he goes from the end of this book. He's fiercely loyal to Mira. Twitch has a secret that's exposed in the middle of the book that makes him different from everyone else. He's from Elloweer where shaping powers, like in all five of the kingdoms, are different. Mira is an 11-year-old who's been 11 for decades. Liam is a guy they meet after leaving Skyport. On the surface he seems self-serving and uninterested but he's got serious shaping powers. There are some other characters that will probably play a bigger role in the next books. Overall, I liked this book and definitely liked it enough to finish the series. In the back of this book, Brandon Mull hints that he'll be revisiting the Fablehaven world in 2016 which is exciting.