content warnings: violence, bullying, death
representation: black side characters, side character with a prosthetic leg


“‘No, listen to me.’ His wide blue eyes burned into her black ones. Righteous anger rolled off him like heat from the pavement in summer. ‘You asked me if your talent is being cursed? If you have a knack for ruining things? Hear me when I tell you this: you are not a curse on anyone, Morrigan Crow. You never have been.’”


This book has been getting heaps of hype, and it's incredibly well-deserved. Jessica Townsend is definitely an author to look out for.

The book follows Morrigan Crow, a girl who is supposedly cursed and everything that could possibly go wrong is blamed on her. She has just accepted that she is doomed to die at midnight on Eventide, but then is saved by a strange man who whisks her off to the world of Nevermoor. To earn her place and become part of the Wundrous Society, Morrigan must undergo four trials with the help of her strange mentor in an even stranger world.

It's no secret that I love middle grade and will defend it to stuffy adults until the day I die, and this book is everything that I love about middle grade adventure stories. It's fun, it's a little weird, it has good action, an interesting mystery, engaging characters, and it doesn't shy away from deeper themes when the situation calls for it. Townsend has crafted the world of the Nevermoor series perfectly, and the use of Morrigan as a protagonist was a smart choice.

I absolutely loved Morrigan. She's grown up unloved because of the curse and the strain it puts on her family, all who seem to only put up with her until her inevitable death. So when she comes to Nevermoor, a place where people actually care about her, she doesn't quite know what to do with it. There are several times where she just assumes that people are going to be mad at her or blame her for something she had no part in, and it's genuinely heartbreaking to read about this girl feeling like everything is her fault.

Other than Morrigan, the entire cast of characters is just delightful. Jupiter North, the man who took Morrigan to Nevermoor, is a little absentminded and overall just very strange, but seeing how much he cares about Morrigan (or Mog, as he calls her) was so heartwarming. Jack is Jupiter's nephew and doesn't meet Morrigan until he has a break in school. They immediately don't like each other, both feeling as though the other is encroaching on their territory, but they form a begrudging respect for one another and eventually grow to care. For those of you who don't know, that's one of my all-time favourite friendship tropes. There's also another friendship with Morrigan and a fellow competitor, Hawthorne, a boy who rides dragons and is a smol bean I would die for.

Jupiter runs a hotel, the Hotel Deucalion, and it's full of weird but lovable characters. A Magnificat who hates babysitting but is amazing at it, a kind woman who has six different suitors for Monday through Saturday, a vampire gnome party planner, and so on. As odd and otherworldly as all the characters tend to be, they are never reduced to their weirdness and are fully-fleshed characters.

There's also a lot of really great villain set-up in this book. You hear about them a lot, and even get some brief moments with them on-page, but it is largely just a prologue to what's to come in book two (the villain stuff specifically, the book as a whole doesn't read like a prologue). I'm very excited to see where Morrigan's dynamic with the villain in particular goes in the next book because it has the potential to be very interesting.

If you've heard someone hype this book up, listen to them because you will not be disappointed.