A review by jillmccracken
Wildwood Imperium by Colin Meloy

3.0

My kids and I finished listening to the last of the Wildwood trilogy: Wildwood Imperium by Colin Meloy. This novel closes out the trilogy and serves as a satisfying ending. Prue’s and Curtis’s plot-lines clash and eventually crash into new characters’ stories as well as the various subplots of their orphanage friends (AKA “Unadoptables”). While the extension of some plot elements from the previous installments (Under Wildwood in particular) makes this final novel feel overstuffed and busy at times, Wildwood Imperium still serves as a solid closer and wraps up most of the varied plots with a sense of finality. These various plots the kids found to be somewhat confusing at times, and as I stated in my review of Under Wildwood, Mr. Meloy often uses complex and unfamiliar vocabulary seemingly unnecessarily. Overall, the Wildwood trilogy is an impressive middle grade fantasy/magical realism series. While its lead characters aren’t perfect, Prue and Curtis still make for an interesting heroic duo. Heads up: these books are extremely lengthy. The first of the trilogy (Wildwood) seems justified in its length, Under Wildwood and Wildwood Imperium feel overly long as their plots drag. The kids shared that they sometimes had a hard time keeping up with the various changes in perspective. All three of these novels are hefty volumes at close to 600 pages each (14+ hours on Audible). I have nothing against large books for the middle grades, which is the target audience, but I do believe that long books need to justify their length. Finally, these books all include an underlying - perhaps inaccurate and unrealistic - portrayal that all adults are untrustworthy and suspect simply because they are grown-ups. However, Wildwood Imperium makes for entertaining reading, especially for fans of fantasy adventures.