Sarah's Reviews > Wildwood Imperium

”Who ever heard of a witch who really died? You can always get them back.”
~a Narnian hag, Prince Caspian

A teenaged resident of South Wood, Wildwood, decides to horse around with parlor necromancy one night and inadvertently summons a spirit far beyond her powers. At first young Zita thinks she’s summoned a primordial being from the deep past, but the true identity of the spirit is tied to the bloody recent history of Wildwood. Zita is no great hero. Her sole claim to fame till now is having marched in the South Wood parade as the May Queen.

She also has to deal with the mysterious new cult that her father just joined, the Synod of the Blighted Tree, whose acolytes all wear blank masks, and who seem to be planning for something…

Across the magical divide in Portland, Prue McKeel promises her parents that she will at least aim to come home safe after saving the Wood. Then she and Esben Clampett, the clockmaker bear with hooks for hands, head back into the forest as a shadow falls on it. Prue has been told that she has to bring Prince Alexei back to life or the whole Wood will collapse.

In the hazy land between the Wildwood and Portland, the Industrial Wastes, the Unadoptable escapees of Joffrey Unthank’s ruined orphanage/child-slave-labor-factory-hellhole have just crossed paths with a team of anarchist men known as the Chapeaux Noir, who spout a lot of fine rhetoric about workers’ rights and the environment, but readily admit that their only actual plan is to (I quote) “blow stuff up.”

The two groups realize they have a common goal in bringing down the Industrial Titans, and soon get embroiled in the chaos deeper in the Impassable Wilderness.
Curtis Mehlberg was last seen searching for his fellow Bandits, who have all vanished without a trace.

And the forest is being overrun with ivy that chokes and drowns everything in its path. Zita suspects the spirit that haunts her has a hand in it. There’s a bustle in this May Queen’s hedgerow, and she’s very alarmed…



Content Advisory
Violence: There’s allusions to heavy violence, although the stuff that’s actually shown isn’t that bad. The people of South Wood have erected a guillotine on the grounds of the Governor’s mansion, and while we don’t see it used, the characters are quick to tell Prue (and us) that the thing is in no danger of gathering dust.

We do see the Chapeaux and the Unadoptables lobbing explosives at various buildings, but the carnage left by these explosions is largely left unexplored.

Sex: Nothing.

Language: One use of “damn”—Curtis remembers his little sister is present and ostentatiously corrects himself, “I mean shoot.”

Substance Abuse: Nothing.

Politics and Religion: The Synod is the archetypal creepy cult, but Meloy uses mainstream religious lingo to describe them. Individual members are called Caliphs, a name that actually refers to an Islamic authority figure, and the term synod refers to a council of Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox bishops convened to decide on doctrine. I understand why Meloy would use established religious terms to give his fictional cult some credibility, but if you’re reading the book with younger kids, you might want to clarify that Caliphs and Synods are not sinister entities in the real world.

The cult members also ingest a fungus as part of their ritual, which was described in terms reminiscent of Catholic Eucharistic rites. As a Catholic, this made me a little uneasy, but I couldn’t tell how much of the resemblance was intentional. At any rate, this is hardly The Golden Compass.

Crude Humor: The only way to extract the Spongiform is by pulling it out of the victim’s nose; once removed, the narrator tells us that the stuff looks like grey spaghetti. When Nico, Rachel, and the kids get caught in a net, some poor boy winds up with his face right against Elsie’s butt.

Conclusions
I wasn’t impressed with the first Wildwood book, but the second one was a marked improvement on the first and made me care just enough to see how the whole thing ended. I’m glad I stuck around.

Meloy ties his whole story together quite nicely here. All the plotlines are addressed and resolved (except for a tiny unanswered question at the end that might be a tentative sequel hook). The many main characters all get page-time and moments of heroism. I feel like the strongest and most memorable of the group turned out to be Rachel when it should have been Prue, but your mileage may vary.

These days it’s commendable when an author focuses on the conflict they created rather than getting tripped up by inane shipping wars. The main relationships in this book are those between parents and children, and those between siblings, which is exactly how it should be in a middle-grade book. There are light hints that the friendship between Alexei and Zita, or Nico and Rachel, might deepen down the road, but they’re only hints. It was quite refreshing to read a MG book that stayed age-appropriate, and didn’t force its younger characters to grow up too fast. Kids have the rest of their lives to worry about dating.

The final showdown reads like the battle at the Black Gate in LOTR combined with the battle of Manhattan from The Last Olympian (can’t say why without giving the whole thing away), with a touch of Sleeping Beauty and what might have happened in Prince Caspian if Nikabrik and his buddies had successfully resurrected Jadis.







So while these images have been used before, they’re still stirring and effective. Ellis brings them to life beautifully in her illustrations, which have never been better.

While the literary ancestors of this series have always been fairly obvious—Grimm’s fairytales, LOTR, Narnia, Tiffany Aching, the Spiderwick Chronicles, and maybe Labyrinth —this installment made me realize its musical influences for the first time. I think there must have been a lot of Led Zeppelin playing in the Meloy-Ellis household during the writing of these novels. Much of the imagery in this particular installment seemed inspired by “Stairway to Heaven.”

I know classic rock connoisseurs mock that song now because it’s been played to death, but the reason it was overplayed in the first place is because it’s so evocative. The melody is a haunting sister to “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and the lyrics, while they have no clear meaning, borrow just enough from Dante and Tolkien to create their own spooky little realm, where pipers lead perceptive souls through tangled forests and down long roads, towards an enlightened age where everything is revealed to be golden and beautiful.

This sort of hippie daydream has become hackneyed now, but it’s reaching for something truly magical, the kind of feeling Frodo gets while listening to Elvish songs in the hollowed halls of Rivendell:

Almost it seemed that the words took shape, and visions of far lands and bright things that he had never yet imagined opened out before him; and the firelit hall became like a golden mist above seas of foam that sighed upon the margins of the world. Then the enchantment became more and more dreamlike…and it drenched and drowned him.

I always felt like that passage described how it felt to read The Lord of the Rings itself, to read other great fantasies (like the Chronicles of Narnia or the works of Robin McKinley), to listen to those ethereal Celtic-inflected classic rock songs, or to gaze upon a painting by Botticelli or one of the Pre-Raphaelites. These things make you feel as if the boundaries between the real world and the infinite realms of Faerie will dissolve at any moment.

There are few books (or songs) written today that stir this feeling in me. Today’s culture is sedentary and sanitized to a fault, immured with our tech far from the natural world—and note that fantasy comes from mythology, which came about to explain the savagery and beauty of nature. I remember reading the part in Throne of Glass where the main characters are riding through the forest on their way to the castle, and being a little startled at how phony the whole scene felt. I actually asked myself, “Has this author spent any quality time in a forest before?” (I don’t think she has, but enough about her).

Suffice that in this case, though, the answer to that question is an emphatic yes. Meloy and Ellis have clearly spent lots of time in forests very much like the Wildwood they created. They’ve also studied folk art and ballads from medieval times through the nineteenth century. They’ve listened to, and made, a lot of good music. And they’ve read all the right books. The last fifty or so pages of Wildwood Imperium brought back a bit of that drenching, drowning enchantment that all the best fantasy stories can bring.

The first book in this series still has a lot of flaws, and given how long it is, I don’t blame people who give up on the series there. But if you slog through, and slog through Under Wildwood (which is much less of a slog), your efforts will quite possibly be rewarded here.

The series lacks the sparkling originality of LOTR and Narnia, or the deep spiritual grounding that those share with the Land of Elyon books. It doesn’t have the innovative creatures of the Spiderwick Chronicles, the twists and character depth of Over the Garden Wall, the wit and world-building of the Artemis Fowl novels, the layers of meta-meaning in A Series of Unfortunate Events, the gothic romance of Labyrinth, or any single character as powerful and memorable as Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching.

But it does have a compelling plot and a fantastic atmosphere, and in this installment, it even grows a heart. Overall, I’m glad I read it.