Book 3 of the mesmerizing series The Edge Chronicles. Please read my review here, as my review covers the entire series as a whole:
https://www.librarything.com/work/173650/reviews/228030778 ( )

This one was always my favorite as a kid. I still like it a lot, but reading after reading the Twig trilogy again, I think Stormchaser is probably the strongest of the three. ( )

This one was always my favorite as a kid. I still like it a lot, but reading after reading the Twig trilogy again, I think Stormchaser is probably the strongest of the three. ( )

This review is written with a GPL 3.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at Bookstooge.booklikes.blogspot. wordpress.leafmarks.com & Bookstooge's Reviews on the Road Facebook Group by Bookstooge's Exalted Permission. Title: Midnight Over Sanctaphrax Series: The Edge Chronicles Author: Chris Riddell & Paul Stewart Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars Genre: Children's SFF Pages: 370 Format: Kindle Synopsis: Twig is over the Edge, looking for his father. He finds him, and finds out that a great storm of renewal is coming to the Edge and he must release the floating city of Sanctaphrax out of its way. But Twig, along with his crew, are all blown hither and yon across the Edge, without their memories. Now Twig must mount a rescue expedition for them and try to figure out just what he forgot. My Thoughts: I enjoyed this as much as the previous book. With childrens/middlegrade books it seems that things can go from one extreme to the other in terms of what I like, so I never know how I'm going to come out of these books. Twig does a lot of growing [ha] in terms of becoming the kind of ship captain that will inspire loyalty from his crew. He never gives up in his search for them, even while providing us with some really fun adventures. Fun to read about, not necessarily fun to experience. I am wondering if at some point the adventures will move away from Twig and onto some other character? Mainly because I've seen this [and have catalogued as such] as the Edge Chronicles while concurrently being the Twig series. With 10 books in the series, I can imagine at some point Twig becoming a minor, but famous, character. I haven't cared enough to look ahead and part of me doesn't want to know. I just want to experience the things as they come along to me. " ( )

This is certainly the strongest book of the three, although part of that is it paying off all sorts of karmic debt built up over the previous two books. Twig suffered enormously, lurching haplessly from adventure to adventure, most of them horrendous and horrible, then when finally things seem to go his way, he contributes, unwittingly, to disaster and the loss or death of most of the existing supporting cast. No sooner is book three underway than it all goes horribly wrong again, but this time Twig has experience, determination, agency! Off he goes heedless of the odds or the impossibility of the task to recover his scattered crew and restore his lost memory and save the world! It's all quite thrilling, while the trademark horrors and nastiness are all present and correct, this time we have a protagonist equipped to cope with them and maybe even triumph. He's even got a sidekick as callow and green as he once was and through whose eyes we see most of the action. The mild distancing effect does wonders for Twig's personality: characters on the Edge are boldly drawn but they're not exactly complex or popping off the page.

I enjoyed it very much, all told, but I was slightly put out by the female characters, of which there are few. Sympathetic female characters do exist, but they are scarce, only one rises to the height of an actual supporting character. Two female-dominated species are, er, hair raising in their depiction of femininity, though of course most of the species on the Edge have hair-raising aspects. Still: Shrikes and Termagents? Really?

I do not, oddly enough, expect things to improve noticeably in future volumes, but hopefully it won't detract from my enjoyment. ( )