Of all the the ways for Fairest to end, Reynard knocking up a random mundie girl, a murder mystery among the non-human fables, and the final tale of Goldielocks was not where I expected it to go.
It’s a pretty good story though, all told. One of the best recent ones.
Fables feels like it’s been running for perhaps a bit too long. And things are certainly not Happily Ever After…
Bigby is back… ish.
Fairest, Volume 4: Of Men and Mice. In which one of the mice on that fateful night of glass slippers and dancing and pumpkin carriages … never turned back into a man. And fathered thousands of half mouse, half human (in various configurations) offspring, which are now coming back to ruin Fabletown’s lives.
Oy. Jack of Fables should probably have ended back with Jack of Fables, Vol. 6: The Big Book of War . It wrapped up everything nicely enough. Instead it just keeps going. But here, we have a finale! Except… everyone dies Not even kidding. After we’ve come to know and love all these characters, the big finale is them all getting together for one last battle … and every one of them dies . I guess that’s one way to end a series.
Sucks.
Following Prince Caspian much more closely than it in turn followed The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader follows King Caspian along with Edmund, Lucy, and new character cousin Eustance as they set out on a great voyage across the sea to find a series of Lords exiled before Caspian took the throne.
After that, the entire book basically takes the form of a series of smaller adventures, each taking a chapter or two. It reminds me a lot of Ulysses; perhaps that’s the boat connection. Each of the stories is actually pretty good (my daughter and I both particularly enjoyed the Dufflepuds. They’re just silly enough for her age group. That being said, it’s weird that the King can do something like that (leaving his kindom, potentially for years) and it means that the story doesn’t have much of an overarching plot, but it works well enough.
Onward and Fableward, we’re almost to the end!
In this volume, we have the story of a little girl wondering about Castle Dark / the new Fabletown (cute), Rose Red growing in her position as a Paladin of Hope and refounding the Round Table (it’s weird and I’m not sure what the point is), and Snow White growing darker as she loses her children/at least their childhoods and husband.
Mariel of Redwall takes place between Mossflower and Redwall and once again splits the story, this time between Mariel, daughter of Joseph the Bellmaker on a quest for vengence and a(nother) sea rat attack on Mossflower Abbey.
In a lot of ways, these stories are rather formulaic. There always seem to be two plots: one threatening the abbey, and the other a quest guided by mysterious verse, with Martin’s sword along for the ride. That being said, they’re still wonderfully fun and whimsical stories and the repetitiveness is actually really nice when I’m primarily listening to them while walking/running/driving various places. Deep, attention seeking books these are not. Light fun tales of various woodland animals killing one another in the name of peace… :D
Fairest. The story of Cinderella, this time trying to solve a murder mystery as all the ‘fairest in the land’ (there are amusingly many of them) are dropping like flies. It’s actually a fairly decent murder mystery and while you completely expect that there will be some way (MAGIC!) to bring them back in the end, there’s still a chance that they might not.
It’s decent, although there are better Fables stories. Better Fairest stories even.
“I need to talk to Zapunyo myself,” Hilo insisted. “A misunderstanding between friends is okay. A misunderstanding between enemies isn’t.”
Jade War is the followup to the excellent Jade City, dealing with the ongoing war between the clans (read: crime families) of Kekon, the stories of the Kaul family running it, and expanding into a number of other nations and how they’re dealing with the expansion of the Jade trade and the aforementioned war.
And thus, 19 stories in we have the ‘story of Snow White’. Which details a first husband we’ve never heard of who’s a comically bad guy and wants to ruins everyone’s day… and actually does manager to kill Bigby... . Really?
On top of that, we have piles of backstory with BUFKIN THE LIBERATOR… who is not really that interesting. And apparently will never actually interact with the main Fables storyline? Meh.