The Children’s Fantasy Novel That Flew Off Britain’s Shelves

IMPOSSIBLE CREATURES,by Katherine Rundell. Illustrated by Ashley Mackenzie.

Katherine Rundell, a fellow of St. Catherine’s College at Oxford, belongs to that university’s longstanding tradition of combining scholarship — her biography of John Donne, “Super-Infinite,” won the Baillie Gifford Prize — with writing beloved children’s fiction. “Impossible Creatures,” Rundell’s sixth novel for middle grade readers, became an instant best seller in her native Britain when it was published last year and has garnered numerous awards, including the Waterstones Book of the Year.

The novel begins as Christopher Forrester is packed off to stay at his grandfather’s estate at the foot of a steep hill in Scotland, little realizing that the hill contains a portal to a magically sequestered portion of the world called the Archipelago, islands inhabited by creatures from assorted mythologies. In a parallel story, Mal Arvorian, a girl born in the Archipelago and able to fly thanks to an enchanted coat, investigates signs that the islands’ magic, or glimourie, is fading. This endangers all the unicorns, mermaids, kankos and other fabulous creatures — including her pet, a baby griffin — who need glimourie to survive. Mal enlists Christopher in a journey to find the source of the diminishment. Soon, their party expands to include a surly ship’s captain, an oceanographer and a talking horned squirrel who serves as navigator.

The first book in a series, “Impossible Creatures” marks a departure for Rundell. Her previous novels have their fanciful elements, but this is her first work of fantasy. Oxford’s history of producing illustrious children’s fantasy authors has prompted comparisons of Rundell to J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Philip Pullman, but fantasy doesn’t feel like a natural fit for her. Rundell’s true antecedent is Robert Louis Stevenson, another author of thrilling yarns presented in confident, richly colored yet sleek prose.

In Rundell’s “The Explorer,” children survive a plane crash in the Amazon rainforest by building a raft and learning how to eat tarantulas. The heroine of the sublime “Rooftoppers” discovers a secret community of orphans living on the rooftops of Paris, including a boy who never sets foot on the streets and makes a waterproof tent out of pigeon feathers. In “The Good Thieves,” a professional pickpocket and two circus performers help a girl burgle the mansion of a mobbed-up robber baron in Prohibition-era New York.

Such doings may be improbable, but they’re not impossible, and much of the delight to be found in Rundell’s novels comes from the ingenuity and resourcefulness of her child characters when faced with the daunting constraints of reality. “Children have been underestimated for hundreds of years,” an old woman argues in “Impossible Creatures,” articulating a common theme in Rundell’s work. Another is the stifling demands of decorum, especially when imposed on Rundell’s wild, tomboy girls. Mal’s great-aunt and guardian (like many of Rundell’s protagonists, she’s an orphan) forbids “an immense, book-length list of things,” prohibitions Mal routinely defies. Christopher’s father (his mother is dead) is afraid of almost everything.

These complaints barely register before the plot of “Impossible Creatures”kicks into gear with a hired killer forcing Mal from her home and Christopher plunging through a passage in a lake and into the Archipelago. All this happens so hastily that the wonder of Rundell’s premise never has a chance to fully bloom.