"Darkbeast" by Morgan Keyes

There are stories that fit nicely in a short middle-grade novel/novella, and this is not one of them.

Let me explain. Twelve-year-old Keara lives in a world where children are granted magical animals, called darkbeasts (hence the book's title), by the gods. The darkbeasts eat their negative emotions and impulses, which helps them become good adults or something. Then, on their twelfth birthday, the children must murderize their darkbeasts. Not murderizing your darkbeast? It's just not done, and also the Spanish Fantasy Inquisition will hunt you down and beat you up until you do it anyway. And then possibly beat you up some more.

But Keara doesn't want to murderize her darkbeast, because he's pretty much the only friend she's ever had. So she runs away from home on the night she was supposed to kill the raven on the front cover, joins up with a troupe of traveling actors, and tries to keep the Spanish Fantasy Inquisition from finding out that she didn't murderize her darkbeast.

 

I feel like this would have worked quite well as some sort of epic five-book series of revolution and societal reform, sort of like one of Cressida Crowell's things - serious, but still for kids. Instead, we have a middle-grade novel(la?) severely lacking in gravitas, and which basically ends with (SPOILERS AHEAD) "so yeah, turns out other people also didn't murderize their darkbeasts and a couple of side characters were some of those, so now we're all hiding in a swamp and trying to do some revolution and societal reform while also avoiding the Spanish Fantasy Inquisition because they kinda want us dead."

It would have been better if written by Cressida Crowell, is what I'm saying. Or at least if it was written in something approximating her style. (In case you didn't know, she wrote the Wizards of Once series, as well as the original How to Train Your Dragon books, which have a rather different plot and overall feel from the movies.) Crowell's characters go through some pretty traumatic stuff, and it definitely gets pretty dark at times, but you always have a sense of "this will end happily, even if it's a bittersweet kind of happily." She always has a light at the end of the tunnel, no matter how long or twisty the tunnel in question is.

 

So, if this was the first book in an epic five-book fantasy series, I would probably search for the other books. As it now stands, it does have a sequel, but it and (presumably) the sequel are quite short on "epic".

This seems to have been more of a "here's how this book could have been better" review than a normal "here's how this book is" review, hasn't it? I think a large part of the reason for this is that it couldn't make me care about pretty much anything that happened in the entire book. This wasn't as egregious a problem as with Dungeon Academy: No Humans Allowed (citation: I didn't DNF this one), but it was still there. When I finished reading Darkbeast, I put the book down and thought something along the lines of "Huh. I feel no emotions about this."

And when reading fiction, I need to feel something. That's part of the reason I read it, in fact; it lets me experience emotions in a context pretty much entirely divorced from reality, so they can't affect anything. This just seemed like the author was trying to do a story about challenging the conventions of your society, but couldn't find the real-world convention she was trying to challenge. In lieu of anything else, this book left me with a feeling of "What was the point of that?" (At least it convinced me of a thing about literature that I hadn't really believed before, which is that a book has to have a point to it somehow.)

 

(Note: Nonfiction is an entirely different matter. I read that to learn things, not to feel things.)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for violent references.

Darkbeast can have three stars, because it wasn't exactly bad. It just also wasn't good. My feeling of "why did I bother reading this" is because the story didn't have a skeleton or anything to really hold it together, not because it was anything untoward.

(Endnote: As presented, the Spanish Fantasy Inquisition from this is nowhere near as scary as the not-Inquisition from The Notorious Scarlett and Browne. I think this is due to the author of this trying to do a "these guys have a fearsome reputation" on her Spanish Fantasy Inquisition, but it instead comes off as all the characters insisting "yes yes these guys are very scary" and the guys in question never actually doing anything. By contrast, the other book's not-Inquisition actually demonstrates its scariness, which makes it have a lot more impact on the reader.)