Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow
Ratings104
Average rating4.3
This was such a fun read! Yes it's a middle grade book ( Judge me!). I initially looked at it because I saw Morrigan Crow so no matter the synopsis (or reading level) I was going for it. Great world building, storyline, characters. Very much looking forward to the next one...whenever that comes out :(
Morrigan has always been told that every bad thing in life has been the result of her being born on the wrong day. One of the cursed children she has known that she will not make it past her eleventh birthday. Even within her own home she has not felt as if she has had a place. Until one day she is swept into a world that is unlike her own...
This storytelling brought me back to the absolute joy I felt while reading as a child. There was something so magical about Nevermoor and the world that Morrigan was brought into. Jupiter is the type of overseeing adult who makes questionable decisions but ultimately wants the best even if he might not do it in the best way. This story brought me back to feelings I had when I first read H.P.
What I absolutely adore about this story is how much growth we can see in Morrigan's life within the time frame of this story.
Please do yourself a favor and listen or read this book.
[reread 2020] I continue to absolutely love this book and how it feels like a warm hug. Lots of Morrigan's negative self talk is so true to how I talk to myself as an adult. I know I comped this for HP previously and still holds true but the immediate adults in Morrigan's life and found family seem to actually do a lot more for her than HPs did for him?
Between 4 and 4.5/5. This was such a breath of fresh air! Nevermoor had a lot of heart, colour, and just all around good storytelling. The fact that it is a middle-grade offering also makes this a great choice for a palate-cleanser: just formulaic enough to be comforting, but also imaginative enough to keep things interesting as you go along, guessing what's going to happen next.
As a protagonist, Morrigan is a pretty solid one. She's got a boatload of insecurities that possibly middle-grade audiences may find relatable, but it's also never over-dramatic or annoying enough to annoy me either (and I am a few decades away from being at the age for middle-grade). Her patron Jupiter North, however, is my favourite character. He feels a bit like a cross between Willy Wonka and Dumbledore - alternately goofy and wise, comedic and menacing. They're joined by a very colourful cast of characters that have distinct personalities: Fenestra the Magnificat, Hawthorne the dragon rider, Jack the eyepatch boy, Dame Chandra, Kedgeree, Frank the dwarf vampire, and so on.
Nevermoor felt a bit like Enid Blyton meets Harry Potter meets Umbrella Academy, while the titular Trials remind me of the Triwizard Tournament from HP Goblet of Fire. There's something very magical but yet down to earth about Nevermoor, almost a bit steampunk but without the machines. There's also something a little gothic about everything here too, from a celebration called the Black Parade to Morrigan Crow herself always being described as being deathly pale with black hair, black beady eyes, and always wearing black.
Despite all this and the tribulations of the Trials that Morrigan goes through, there's an element of child-like optimism throughout the whole story that isn't over-done. We don't get saccharine-sweet morals of the story, or having the world be so black and white that it doesn't feel real adults. Characters, whether they are “good” or “bad”, are always more than what they seem. First impressions can sometimes be an accurate reflection of the person, but often they turn out to be completely different from how Morrigan had first thought of them.
The storytelling here should also be commended. I picked this book up after a slew of books targeted towards adults but none of them had as solid a storytelling as this one. The structure, the pacing, the build-up of tension, the character introduction, the plot and character development, the revelation of twists, everything was just so so solid and well done. I was so pleasantly surprised and it was a breath of fresh air for me.
I also want to give a huge shoutout to the audiobook production. The narrator, Gemma Whelan, was such a delight to listen to and she really pumped in so much life to the story. She also gave each character such a distinct voice, accent, or tone that they really jumped off the pages. The audiobook also had short snippets of instrumental music in between chapters and I found that it somehow enhanced my experience getting into the story quite a bit.
I would certainly be continuing on the rest of the series for whenever I feel like I need a solid and reliable palate cleanser in between heavier or denser reads.
I love this one! It was so, so, so good! Loved the world, loved the characters, super entertaining, sweet, and charming read.
What I didn't like is the fact Morrigan was kept in the dark for way too long. It annoyed me at times.
Overall, a very solid, strong beginning for a series that I want to continue reading.
I like the twist on ‘kid learning they are magical' trope. Morrigan is a cursed child and that infects the way she sees herself and the world around her. I liked seeing how her character developed. I liked seeing how Jack's character developed as well. I like that Hawthorne was there to just be a friend. The characters that populate this world are strong and likable. Plus I am a sucker for living in a hotel.
There was a time, before the stories hit the big screen and the secret got out, where a small collection of avid book lovers fell in love with a little character called Harry Potter. Not everyone knew about the secret and when you read the books you got the opportunity to build the Wizarding World in your own imagination before the iconic faces of Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson were assigned to the roles of Harry and Hermione. It was a magical time and one difficult to recreate and yet here I think Jessica Townsend may have done just that.
The Trials of Morrigan Crow, the first in her new series Nevermoor, is a children's fiction novel about 10 year old Morrigan who has been classed as a cursed child for her whole life and held accountable for everything that goes wrong in her home town. Morrigan also lives with the knowledge that on her eleventh birthday she will die because that is just what happens to cursed children. However, on the eve of her 11th birthday a stranger by the name of Jupiter North bursts into her world and helps her cheat death by magicking her away to the mysterious world of Nevermoor.
Nevermoor is a world full of unusual sights and sounds, a huge cat who can talk, a hotel where the rooms adapt to create the room you would love the most, Vampire Dwarf's and a strange society known as the Wundrous Society where each year children compete to join their ranks through completion of 4 unusual magical trials. Morrigan finds herself thrust into the trials for the Wundrous society with the help of her patron Jupiter but the road ahead will not be easy.
This book was something really very special, from the very first chapter it is full of magical innocence. The world Townsend creates in Nevermoor is full of colour and magic and amazing characters that you fall in love with. Morrigan is a wonderful lead character, she is a child who has been devoid of affection and love in her home life but finds warmth and friendship in Nevermoor's colourful characters. Her relationship with her patron Jupiter is one that will be full of mystery but you hold faith with Jupiter's belief in our heroine and his amazing strength to pull her through.
I flew through this book, I couldn't stop reading, each chapter is so full of new discoveries about the world of Nevermoor and gives you plenty of characters to cheer for and those you just distrust and dislike on sight plus with the mysery of the strange Mr Jones who keeps appearing and offering Morrigan a change to form an alliance with his mysterious boss Ezra Squall there is much to engage us plotwise.
Book 2 in this series is scheduled for release later this year and I cannot wait to read it. I have a feeling that like Harry Potter once this reaches the awareness of the general public it has the potential to become iconic.
Copy/paste from BLC: Wow I really enjoyed this book! The narrator was amazing with the different voices (she made sure Noelle was terribly annoying like her existence :dogelol: ), I think right off the bat the characters were intriguing, I definitely laughed here and there. I loved all the main characters, and how they acted on friendships, relationships, and trust. Like Fen trusting Jupiter, and Morrigan proposing to leave Nevermoor so it doesn't jeopardize Jupiter. It had fun parts but also the painful ones too. In addition, it was a nice, easy read/listen to in between harder reads, so it was a nice change!
i was really hoping this would be a new favorite middle grade series, I read about half and it was alright, but I'm not loving it. I ended up putting it down because life got in the way and never got the motivation to pick it back up.
4 stars I love Morrigan! I hate her family! I'm a sucker for the ‘found family' trope so this was right up my alley :)
I listened to this on audiobook and I really didn't like the narrator, so I'll definitely continue reading this series physically instead!
Tellement fantastique, amusant et surprenant! Je revisiterai certainement cet univers avec les tomes suivants de la série. J'ai bien aimé le concept de la malédiction et les indices sur certains sujets qui on été donnés au compte-goutte. Les révélations et l'histoire si bien tissée ont très bien réussis à me surprendre sur certains points. J'ai adoré la finale et j'ai vraiment hâte de reprendre ma découverte de ce monde merveilleux et des personnages qui y habitent dans le 2e roman de cette merveilleuse série.
I don't like series (too many times I've loved book one and read on to find more of that and was disappointed) so it was with great trepidation that I began listening to The Trials of Morrigan Crow (Nevermoor, #1).
I couldn't resist reading about a Cursed Child, blamed for all the bad things in her world, who is chosen to compete with others to become a member of the Wonder Society (I am completely fascinated with the idea of a Wonder Society; I may start such a group here on Earth).
Book one did not disappoint. Now I'm on the waiting list (very, very long...a good sign) for book two. Not sure if I can wait!
Loved this. Couldn't put it down.
I was screening this for my 6 year old daughter and I can't wait for her to have this experience!
my younger brother said he only liked this book, that he didn't love it. i asked why, and he said: i think diana wynne jones could've done it better. i can't help but agree.
there are pockets of loveliness throughout: i love the image of the gossamer line, the idea of magical train stations. i think this book is filled with strong and beautiful images, because i could envision all of the magical images in it extremely well. morrigan is an extremely down-to-earth character, believable and sweet and a little bit insecure. it's also a funny, witty book and the wittiness is very well placed.
it's a little too arbitrary in other places. ie: each of these children has a “knack”, an ability of some kind, ranging from supernatural to superhuman, but there's not really an explanation for it—makes the worldbuilding seem a little too random, somehow? i thought that it'd have something to do with wonder, and maybe it does, but i wasn't able to tell from the first book alone.
the antagonistic characters were very boring. the most interesting one goes and has their big evil villain speech and it made them a lot less interesting in my eyes. the speech is also meant to clarify what their big evil motives are, but only made me a lot more confused, and also unintimidated by them. people like morrigan's father corvus and her stepmother were supposed to be antagonistic in a way too, but come off comically evil rather than actually bad. same for noelle and baz.
but this wasn't boring! and the book held my attention very well while i had the audiobook on during work or at the gym. it's a light and easy enough read for sure. but i wish it could be a little darker, or realer—i KNOW it's a kid's book, but there are some parts where townsend seemed extremely interested in those darker and realer conversations, like the erasure of history, or the brief discussion of illegal immigration...i would like to see her embrace those concepts more, because they did not only interest me, but my younger brother! kids like having hard conversations!
The introduction to the new world and cast of characters is done incredibly well. The characters are distinct, and the relationships develop in a very natural way over a realistic amount of time. The emotions feel very real. The pacing is perfect, and the overall intrigue remains present throughout the entire book. I figured out the character “twist” right away, which is to be expected since I'm considerably older than the target audience. However, I was so engrossed in Morrigan's emotional journey that the big reveal took me completely by surprise! That's how you know a middle grade book is well done. It accomplishes everything it sets out to do and much more.
This is absolutely a book I will be revisiting and a series I will continue. I wish Morrigan Crow had been around when I was a kid.
Similar premise to Harry Potter: A girl who is made to believe she is bad luck by her family learns the world is much more than it seems and is taken away. It was a great mindless read that scratched the found family, belonging and friendship itch. I really enjoyed it and was happy to immediately move on to the next books. I would recommend it for MG or younger teen readers.
I've seen the Morrigan Crow series called “the next Harry Potter” by almost everyone who's read it, and honestly? They're right. This book is Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire meets Alice In Wonderland.
We follow Morrigan Crow, the most unlucky girl in all of Jackalfax, a province in the Wintersea Republic. Born on Eventide, Morrigan grew up knowing she was cursed simply because of the day she was born- and that she was to die on the day of her twelfth birthday.
That is, until she is saved by an unusual fellow by the name of Jupiter North and smuggled to the mystical and zany world that is Nevermoor of the Free State. Morrigan is then given a task- pass a set of dangerous-yet-fun trials and earn her place in the illustrious Wunderous Society. If she fails, she will be sent back to the Wintersea Republic to face her curse. Easier said than done, right?
As it turns out, everyone in the Wunderous Society has a Knack. That's sort of like a Quirk, if you're a My Hero Academia fan. If you're not a My Hero Academia fan, though, a knack is like a special talent infused with a superpower. For example, Morrigan's friend Cadence is a mesmerist- everyone she ever meets forgets her once she's gone. What's Morrigan's Knack, you ask? ...well, you'll just have to read and find out!
(Honestly, if this review doesn't immediately intrigue you into wanting to dive in to the world of Nevermoor, I don't know what will.)