Katherine Rundell is not a stupid person. She is an Oxford-educated academic, and after holding similar fellowships, she is now a Quondam Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. As a side-gig she has published some ten or so books, including novels and books actually aimed at children, and an award-winning biography of John Donne, the subject of her thesis. So why, then, is
Impossible Creatures such a bad book? It has no literary quality beyond superficial imitation. It is a slapdash amalgam of tropes, characters, scenes, etc., lifted from other (better) fantasies, thrown together with minimal thought to make a plot-driven result that doesn't bother to make its causal progressions of scene-to-scene have necessary internal sense. Set in the Archipelago (a pale version of Le Guin's Earthsea), where a young girl obtains a casapasaran (e.g. like Pullman's alethiometer) and a Glamry Blade (like Pullman's Subtle Knife), it also adds various echoes of Tolkien--the Glimourie Tree, a singular version of his Two Trees; a riddle match with a Sphinx, far less interesting than that of Bilbo and Gollum--among other authors, and even from various movies (e.g., Indiana Jones), etcetera, etcetera. This is second-rate commercial product at best. Why would an intelligent person do something like this? My only guess is the readership is aimed at the producers and directors of various streaming services, which is where the bigger money lies.
Impossible Creatures would make a typical vapid mini-series (which may or may not be improved by insidious directors or screenwriters), with all the emotional wallop of a superhero movie aimed at pre-teens. (Of course the ending would need to be changed.) Even the lovely map by Tomiskav Tomic, reproduced in color on the endpapers, doesn't allow the reader to follow the travels of the main characters. And the prose is occasionally laughable. Witness these clunkers: "He looked like a crime scene on legs." ""She walked with the look of a moveable battleground." "His heart was an iron spike."
