The cover of the Dutch edition looked cool so I bought it. Spoilers ahead.
Tick and his brother Leaf live alone in a cabin in the middle of nowhere with Grandfather. When Grandfather passes away, Tick and Leaf are left to their own devices. Worse yet, the evil Empire is invading the kingdom, and Tick and Leaf will have only a few days to travel to the King's safe keep all the while being pursued by Hunters from the Empire. Will they get to the castle on time?
Solid book, not perfect but I had a good time with it. The highlight for me was the main characters. Tick, Leaf and their horse Pebble all have strong personalities (yes, even the horse) and solid character development. I also didn't have a hard time buying the fact that these are young kid characters, with Tick being ten and Leaf being five. The writing on the child characters really worked (as did it on the adults).
The journey was perilous and there were a few neat characters we met along the way, as well as some cool twists and turns to keep the story engaging.
I do have some issues, though. One: I think that the book started to feel rushed near the end, and that it wrapped up just a bit too quickly and conveniently. When the king is revealed to be a traitor, it goes well for Tick pretty much instantly and the king is dethroned. When the evil Empire is about to attack and has surrounded the castle, Tick instantly manages to kill the entire army by one very lucky shot which causes an avalanche. There's just very little struggle or conflict here. Problem presents itself (the king is a traitor, the army has surrounded us), solution is pretty much instantly found (king is instantly dethroned, Tick causes an avalanche). In most stories there would be a bit more of a struggle to get to the final point, that's what keeps a plot engaging. It just felt really convenient and kinda rushed for stuff to work out like this so fast.
Also, I feel that the book kinda undermines its own message. Basically, it's heavily themed around family, particularly found family. Early on in the book it's implied that Tick/Leaf/Grandfather might not be (fully) related, but they're still a family regardless. Around the midpoint of the book we find out that Tick and Leaf are really not biologically-related brothers and that Leaf is the lost heir to the throne.
This then leads to an arc for Tick where he at first struggles with accepting Leaf as his brother once he finds out they're adopted, but eventually he comes around and is like "screw bloodlines, we are family, he is my brother!" So we've got a strong message for found family set up.
But then at the end it's revealed that no, Tick and Leaf actually are brothers and both are heirs to the throne. So this completely undermines most of the found family message the story was going with. And I know that Grandfather wasn't related to them so there's still some inklings of that message here, but not much time is spent on the whole Grandfather aspect and the focus is instead heavily on the brothers, who are of course blood-related.
I think that if the book really wanted to do a found family message, it would've been much stronger if Tick and Leaf hadn't been related. Now it's all setup with basically no payoff because "lol, guess you're blood-brothers after all". So I think that the book should've either leaned fully into the found family message and not have Tick and Leaf be blood-related, or it should've just not done a found family moral at all so it doesn't feel like it's undermining its own message.
Oh well, I did genuinely enjoy this book, though. It's just not exempt from criticism.
Rating: 3.5/5
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