It’s become something of a tradition around our house that I read the latest Brandon Mull book out loud to my kids. Even my oldest, nearly-fourteen-year-old hasn’t decided she’s too old for them yet. Which is fine with me. We can usually guarantee a quality experience with Brandon Mull’s works.
Rogue Knight is no exception. A continuation of the Five Kingdoms series begun with Sky Raiders, we pick up again with Cole, Mira, Jace and Twitch as they continue their quest to set things right in The Outskirts and overcome the evil High King–Mira’s father. They’ve joined up with the resistance and have set out in search of Mira’s other sisters, this time in the kingdom of Elloweer, a land with both a rampaging knight conquering city after city and a strange magical force turning the population into an army of drones. On top of that, Cole is still searching for his friends who were kidnapped to The Outskirts with him, and perhaps developing a magical power of his own.
Brandon Mull has one of the most overactive imaginations I’ve seen, and Rogue Knight delivers plenty of interesting and cool stuff. The plot begins to resemble the previous book a bit, but there are plenty of other plotlines to keep things interesting, and we get more pieces of the over-arching puzzle along the way. Elloweer is a new realm with new rules to learn, and there are other players in the grand scheme to make things more interesting. There’s also ample adventure, interesting new sidekicks, and good people trying to do the right thing against terrible odds.
As I mentioned above, my fourteen-year-old daughter likes to listen as well. She’s a sophisticated enough reader and a writer herself, so she and I have a side game going of trying to guess what will happen from the clues given. I’m glad to say we’re maybe right half of the time. Mull may write mid-grade novels, but he doesn’t take shortcuts. His stories make sense and hang together well, but they’re not entirely predictable. He likes to keep you guessing, which is good, because we like to guess. My younger boys have gotten into the game, too, and they’re at least as good as my daughter and I at spotting what’s coming–and they’re not often right either.
These are fun books. Either I’m not so old yet or Mull has a gift at putting wonder in his books, because I’m often as excited about his worlds and interesting elements as my kids. I love reading these to them, and they still put up with me reading to them, even though they could undoubtedly all three read the book separately in the time it takes me to read it to them. But as long as they want me to read to them, I’ll keep reading to them. And as long as Brandon Mull keeps writing perhaps there’s a chance I’ll be reading to them for years yet.