Kingdom of Wrenly
World building for novices
Hello Snarfs! Apologies for the Snarf-less week last week. I’ll likely be taking a week or two off at the end of the year as well. For now, let’s talk about…
The Series: Kingdom of Wrenly
The Author: Jordan Quinn
The Illustrator: Robert McPhillips
Length/Picture Density: ~120 pages with illustrations on basically every spread
I put off reviewing Kingdom of Wrenly for a while, and I think it’s because I wasn’t sure how much I had to say about it that I didn’t already say about the Dragon Masters series. Once I start thinking about it, there are plenty of differences, but from a distance they feel the same: fantasy series with lots of pictures, and not enough space in the books to develop what I would call a satisfying narrative.
The stories center on two kids, Lucas and Clara, who live in a world full of dragons, faeries, ice giants, and the like. Lucas is the prince, and sometimes has to deal with his loving but stern royal parents, while Clara, his best friend, is a baker’s daughter. Lucas also has a young dragon, Ruskin, whose development provides a mini-throughline for some of the books.
The first few books bring up the fact that Lucas is defying expectations by having a working class best friend but it’s not an enduring tension throughout the books, because no one seems to actually care. There’s also some heavy-handed gender stuff for one book when a snooty knight thinks that Clara can’t do knight stuff because she’s a girl. She holds her ground just fine, the knight learns his lesson, and we don’t really hear about it after that.
One thing that these books do pretty well is world-building. There are different areas of the land, which are associated with various magical beings, such as faeries and wizards, and the two main characters usually end up in one or another. A map at the front of each book helps keep it all together.
There isn’t a whole lot of tying these areas together through references, descriptions, relationships, etc. There isn’t a lot of space within books for that, and not a lot of narrative between books that might allow for the world to come together as a dynamic, inter-relational place. We have no reason to think these various realms don’t interact in all sorts of ways, but the narrative is more of a hub-and-spokes situation with Lucas, Clara, and the castle at the center and everything else outward from there.
So what do we have time for in 10, short, picture-heavy chapters? The usual, really. Establish a conflict, maybe sprinkle in some parental tension, go an adventure, solve the problem. There isn’t a ton of character development in there, but the characters come in reasonably well realized, so there’s some space to reinforce them.
What I found most frustrating with these is how there is little to no follow-up on what seem like big developments for the characters and kingdom-wide issues. The stories barely have room to explain what’s happening in that book, let alone further something that happened previously. It means you can pick up any one of these without worrying about missing backstory, but leveraging what they’ve already established would make this series a more satisfying read.
That, of course, is a choice to make the books more graspable and accessible, but both Leo and I lost momentum with these eventually, and I think part of it is that the stories jump around so much. This one’s about a triter fairy, that one is about a ghost, this one is about some wizard intrigue, that one has ice giants, the last one we read had them facing off against some ill-defined vortex.
All of this — okay, most of this could work with a little more padding and some continuity. They’re not total disasters, and I was seeking them out for a while, but I think the authors ideas are a little too big and far reaching than works with the format.
Still, I’m sure these will really click for some kids, and could be a good bridge to some higher functioning fantasy stories.