A.B. Harms

"You never know what you need to know," Prudence Parks' father tells her at the start of Bewildered: her ensuing quest, which dances from heart-rending discouragement to dazzling hope, through all manner of magical terrain full of dotty good-guys and gruesome villains, surely proves his point. The plotting and diction of this first-in-a-series bespeak an author who's read a lot of fine and whimsical adventure fiction herself, and it's a wonderful book for keeping young-adults turning pages while their vocabularies grow and grow. But the very best part of Bewildered, to my mind, was how the character of Prudence REALLY develops: from being a plain-old pill she passes through a whole array of tentative personae until she grasps some subtle and crucial things about courage, and opts to be "good people". Illustrations by Angie Kwon are brilliant, and perfectly complement a warm and wide-ranging tale.… (más)