Five Kingdoms is a portal fantasy series centering around a boy named Cole and his adventures, some more harrowing than others, in the alternate world of the Outskirts.
My apologies for any defects in the above image. The Windows 11 version of MS Paint is vastly inferior to the Windows 10 version, and I haven't gotten used to it yet.
Book 1: Sky Raiders
We don't actually spend much time with the titular Sky Raiders.
This book seemed like it was going to be serious and traumatic-for-characters and somewhat depressing, and then it... kinda wasn't. I'm not sure whether to be relieved that it's less bad for the characters, or annoyed that it set itself up to be that bad and wasn't.
There's a character in this, Mira, who the main character (named Cole) has a crush on. This is somewhat of a problem, as any actual romance between them is made really weird by the fact that Cole is thirteenish and Mira, while biologically also thirteenish, |has actually been around for like 60 years and is just magically thirteenish forever as a disguise|.
Book 2: Rogue Knight
This book starts in Kingdom 2 of 5 (Book 1 was Sambria the straightforward magic kingdom, book 2 is Elloweer the illusions and shapeshifting kingdom).
Our protagonists are starting to collect a lot of people into their entourage, and I begin to have trouble keeping them all straight. Maybe I should make myself a cheat sheet.
There's a character in this, Trillian the torivor, who is too out-of-nowhere cool not to be important later. He's a sort of ageless extradimensional being who's ridiculously magical but currently stuck in a castle after some normal (well, "normal," they were overpowered wizards fighting a gratuitously overpowered magic being) people sealed him into it. He also may be from one of Brandon Mull's other series, Beyonders, but I'm not entirely clear on that.
(You may, but probably won't, notice that the post image actually says The Rogue Knight on the cover of this one. I didn't notice that until I'd already pasted them all into the single image.)
Book 3: Crystal Keepers
Welcome to Kingdom 3 of 5: Zeropolis, which has decided it's done with high fantasy and wants to be cyberpunk instead. They have Internet.
This is the first book I've ever seen where the climax involves |defeating magic Skynet by siccing a different magic Skynet on her, then blowing them both up with the fantasy equivalent of an atom bomb while they're distracted fighting each other|. Brandon Mull is highly imaginative.
I really liked the twist in this with the Hunter, a character who's been chasing the protagonists in the background since like the first book. I'm not going to describe it here, since it would require explaining like half the lore; also it's a pretty major twist that I think is going to have repercussions down the line. (I'm writing each book's individual review as I read them, so I don't actually know there'll be repercussions until I've read books 4 and 5.)
Book 4: Death Weavers
And here we are in Kingdom 4 of 5, Necronum the kingdom full of ghosts and Beyonders references.
|Cole's superpowers have now been turned back on. (He sort of got them during Rogue Knight, only for that book's big bad to promptly turn them off again.)|
Y'know how I mentioned Trillian? He hasn't been really important yet, but |there's another torivor who is. He's the bad guy of this book, mostly. His name is Nazeem, but I kept forgetting that, so I just called him Craig for most of the book|.
Some characters from Beyonders, one of Brandon Mull's other series, show up in this as ghosts. I suspect their inclusion would be a lot cooler to people who've actually read the series they're from.
I think this is the first book where Cole spends a significant portion of the story separated from his giant ever-growing friend group. It was nice to see how he fares on his own for a bit when all his random friends aren't there.
Book 5: Time Jumpers
Kingdom 5 of 5 is Creon, where they screw around with spacetime. They also use a lot of crayons.
A time jumper is not an article of clothing. It's someone who does the "time" part of the screwing around with spacetime.
We have the final bossfight in this one, |against Craig Nazeem|, and |Trillian gets to finally be relevant|. I do have a bit of a quibble, in that their original plan for defeating the final boss was hyped up to be the only way they could think of to defeat it... |and then the final boss catches on to it, so they just randomly improvise another one? One that the final boss's supposed overpowered-magic-ness should have let him escape almost instantly? I'm not entirely sure what Brandon Mull was thinking when he wrote this|.
Overall Notes
I think the series sort of lost its direction toward the end. It's like Brandon Mull realized that |he'd set up the High King in such a way that he'd be an absolute pushover as a final boss|, so he decided to just |sidestep that whole plot and [ENDING SPOILERS] start a new one based around the High King's evil grand vizier, the grand vizier's torivor master Nazeem/Ramarro/Craig, and their whole evil metamagician cult|. So it went from |"let's stop the king and his minions from recapturing his coughMacGuffincough daughters, who we're already invested in because they're characters we know, and save the world from tyranny"| to |"let's stop the grand vizier and the torivor and both their minions from releasing the torivor, who just recently became relavant midway through book 4, and save the world from destruction"|. And the second one would have been a perfectly serviceable plot, if it had been there from the beginning.
I do like the inclusion of the |"shapecrafters" in this universe; basically, the normal magic (or "shaping," which does somewhat trigger the Renamed Concept Rule) changes the real world, and shapecraft is a sort of meta-magic that changes the normal magic|. That's not something I've seen a lot of things do. (In the first few books, it was still somewhat of a mystery. So I theorized the existence of what I called |"shapecraftcraft", or meta-meta-magic, which was magic that changed the magic that changed the magic|. This was mostly a joke.)
Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for fantasy violence and some scary scenes. It could actually be a reasonably good action-adventure videogame; the quests are questy enough, and it has things that could be bosses.
4 stars.
Favorite lines:
"I'm not running because I'm guilty. I'm running because you're chasing me."
Page 46, Rogue Knight
Ingredients: Camels, microscopes, yams, hydrogen, coral reefs, mannequins, poems, comets, mousetraps, sarcasm, cacti, labyrinths; contains less than 2% uranium, cyanide, cobwebs, magma, polio
Page 111, Crystal Keepers. It's the ingredients list for a candy bar.
(Endnote: I shall now assemble the Kingdoms, the Worlds, the Nights at Freddy's, and the Guys to create the ultimate crossover series. Stay tuned.)
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