The Land of Elyon #1 The Dark Hills Divide

I read this book a loooooong time ago and I LOVED it. I am so glad that it is available again, and I was able to buy a copy for my daughter. It has the perfect makings of a great story: a girl who can talk to animals and a mystery to solve that is just getting started. I'm always recommending this series and others by this author.

This book is about a young girl who desperately wants to escape the walls surrounding the city. She do d a secret passage way and follows it, at the end she finds a very small man named Yipes. Hopes walks her around to find a magical glowing rock that lets he talk to animals. Once she find the rock Hopes takes her to his house for her to stay for the night. In the morning a wolf comes to take her on another mission, she has to find an evil and help destroy it. She decides to go home and warn people about it, but if she goes home the magic in the rock will start to fade and she will slowly lose the ability to talk to animals. Will she complete this quest or will her city fall and destroy?

AS I SAID EARLIER WE HAD BOOK 3 AND WE WERE HAPPY TO COMPLETE THE STORY

As most people, I purchased this book based solely on the wonderful cover art. It entranced me. So I bought the book without reading the Amazon reviews.First I would like to commend the author for taking the time and energy he devoted to writing this story. However the story is weak and the writing is tedious and tiresome.The story is written in the first person. The author through the main character relieves himself from the duty of actually exploring the various characters, from letting the reader explore the book's environment. Everything is "told", not explored. For example: pg 9. "I was twelve years old, short for my age, with skinny arms and knobby knees." This could have been expressed in some other means, like through dialogue for example. So the writing is sort of tired and lethargic. There is another example on pg 140. We are "told" what is scratching out the window, we as readers are never allowed to use our imaginations to discover it.A problem was expressed by another reviewer. There are absolutely no other women or children in the story. Only Alexa and she is surrounded by lots of middle aged men. Even the talking animals are all men. Sort of weird. Furthermore Alexa communicates and says things as if she is 45 years old not 12. For example, without revealing too much on pg. 157, Alexa is talking to a guard about a drunken prisoner, she asks "Has he sobered up yet?" I ask myself would a 12 year old girl communicate in such a fashion?The circumstances of the prisoner are peculiar as well. Apparently for no real discernabile reason, other than no one liked the guy, one of the characters in the book is jailed. He's put away just for the heck of it, and they need him for protection. Doesn't make sense.Finally, the writing is quite sloppy at times. For example pg 150 there is a bad case of a dangling participle. "'Pervis!', shouted my father, but he would not be stopped." The 'he' is really referring to Pervis, not the father, but the subject is the father. A little confusing.The author did a great job in bringing his story to fruition, however I wish more time was spent sprucing up the writing, improving the story, patching up the holes and cleaning up the grammar.

Book was received very quickly, and in good condition. However, there was a sticker on the cover advertising for some kind of sale, and when I finally managed to remove it, there was the classic sticker goo that seems to take chemical warfare and a bulldozer to remove. But otherwise, the book was in good quality and I'm impressed at the shipping time!

I bought this book for my son, age 10 and I to read together now that he is on summer break. He told me that this wasn't just a good book, it was fantastic. He loved the main character so much that he decided to write his own story with a girl as the main character too, saying it was ok for him to do that because this author was male and he wrote about a girl character. I thought that this book was great because it inspired my son so much to want to write his own story. Of course we are now reading the rest of the Land of Elyon Books.

I really enjoyed this story, but found the writing to be a bit choppy in places. I even occasionally had to reread something to make sure I had followed it. The main character is interesting and relatable, I think girls and boys will enjoy reading about her. Some of the action/situations seem a little intense for younger readers to me, so I'll probably wait to pass this on to my son (8) until he's a tad older, but he is kinda sensitive to those kind of things.

In the end, I found the book entertaining. Yet I'm not rushing out to buy Book 2. But I'm an adult, and that fact raises the bar at least one star. Children will enjoy it if they get past the first half or two-thirds of the story, which is the basic problem with the book. It fails to introduce conflict and charcters -- but mostly conflict -- in a fast, efficient way that readers expect these days. And that's a criticism I offer with a grain of salt because I think it applies to my own first novel, The Key to Space. That being said, it still is an entertaining, creative story that works well in the last third or so of the book. In fact, the charm of the book is the fact that it was not built out of the formula of success for novels today but from a fresh perspective. So though it may not live up to exactly what you expect from a young adult or children's novel, it is something different. On that basis, I would recommend it with the caveat that it is the author's first novel.

Liked the premise and characters, it lacked the “edge of your seat” kind of story quality that Harry Potter and others have!!