Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow by Jessica Townsend

Goodreads

Pages: 465

Publication Date: October 31st, 2017

Genre: Fantasy/Middle Grade

This is about an 11 year old girl named Morrigan Crow, who is supposedly cursed. She is born on Evernight and every thing that goes wrong, she has to apologize for. Someone burns marmalade, Morrigan has to apologize. She looks at a cat, and it dies. Apology letter needs to be written. Worst of all, she's doomed to die on her 11th birthday. Right before this occurs, Jupiter appears and whisks her away to the Free State to compete for a place in the Wondrous Society. Morrigan must compete the trials to gain her place.

I remember hearing hype about this book, and initially I kind of wrote it off since it is Middle Grade. I find those books to be quite simple most of the time, and not something I gravitate towards, with a few exceptions of course. This is definitely one of them. It was just so fun, cute and the world was so imaginative. It gave me HP vibes, with the imaginativeness and everything making sense. It's very much your typical hero journey, with your usual young protagonist but it really lived up to be so much more. I loved Fen the talking cat, Hawthorne her friend, Jupiter, Morrigan and how many other mythical creatures there were. It's quite funny too. At one point they joke about how Fen is head of housekeeping, despite not having disposable thumbs. How could she possibly dust? It's actually pretty unique too, yes there are classic notes taken from more known works but it twists things enough to be the original. It honestly gave me so many Harry Potter vibes. I read a lot of adult novels, which do sometimes come close to how I felt reading those books, but I think this one captures it just as well.

Morrigan Crow is also everything I could want for a protagonist as an adult, and if I was a kid reading this. She's resourceful, charming, full of flaws and sassy. Most importantly she's a strong and dynamic character.

5/5

Honestly, this is just a fun read and worth giving a shot. Hearing it's middle grade shouldn't turn you off from it. I think if you like fantasy novels this is worth giving a shot.

Cheers,

Jen