W is for The Wanderers by Cheryl Mahoney #atoz2025 #booksky

The Wanderers fits into my A to Z Challenge today, as my usual Saturday book review, plus a few of my book illustrations that fit today’s theme.

I’m Jemima Pett, author, blogger, illustrator and guinea pig wrangler. My interests are in fantasy, environment, science (inc. fiction) and thrillers, to name a few things. This is my nth AtoZ Challenge. Mostly I talk about books. This time I’m talking about something I do without much thinking about… my illustrations.

The Princelings books and the two for younger readers, Messenger Misadventures and Cavies of Flexford Common all have illustrations. Most are chapter headings. Cavies is designed for younger readers (c 7 yrs old, Key Stage 1 in UK educational parlance). That has illustrations throughout.

Feel free to comment below!

And … the A to Z is a blog hop, so do go to other people who are doing it. You can find the links here

The Wanderers

by Cheryl Mahoney

Any wandering adventurer hoping to survive needs rules—and Jasper has many. There’s Rule #2: Never make plans; Rule #20: Never make a Good Fairy angry; and the surprisingly challenging Rule #18: Always travel alone.

The talking cat breaks Rule #18 badly enough. The witch’s daughter, desperate to escape her horrible mother, is even worse. Between them, they up-end Jasper’s previously simple life (when all he had to worry about was an occasional giant or dragon), and prove that sometimes, rules are no help at all.

You might recognize the countryside and you may think you know what to expect. But whether it’s a refined ogre, a youngest son in need of lots of questing help or a very dangerous Good Fairy, things here rarely go quite as the Brothers Grimm would tell it. You’ve strayed beyond the tales…

**Look for the companion novel, The Storyteller and Her Sisters, October 10, 2014**.[Goodreads]

My Review

Funny, really… I reviewed the ‘companion novel’ in May 2020. And more embarrassingly, I’ve had this on my kindle for more than ten years. Many apologies, Cheryl.

I knew I was in for a well-written, beautiful, enjoyable read for the final review in my A to Z Challenge this year. I wasn’t wrong.

The blurb describes the Wanderers accurately, and with a hint of the understated humour and enjoyment that pervades the text. The worries of the three main protagonists develop beautifully, with plenty of misunderstandings and things getting muddled.

In a rare moment, I stopped my avid reading… in order to enjoy picking it up later all the more. It is very unusual for me to do that. The Wanderers definitely deserves its five stars. And I added the two other spin-offs to my TBR.

Today’s Illustrations – Walks and Whistles

I was very tempted to do views from Windows, of which I have many. Seeing what’s outside my castles is as important to the story as seeing the castles themselves. But I was more interested in the issue of the Whistles, which I realise links to Wanderers, so maybe I should go with them. Then again, one of our prompts for the art group’s February Sketching Challenge was ‘something seen on a Walk’ so I thought I’d start with that. It’s a very venerable tree near Highland Water, a stream in the New Forest.

But… Whistles. It first turns up in Willoughby’s bag (bk 7), where it appears to be more than just a whistle. But Willoughby loses it, and it seems to be in Kevin’s bag when he has to turn it out later in the series (bk 8). The bags look mighty similar, too. And eventually it appears to be useful during the last book, Princelings Revolution (bk 10).

When I first thought of it, in book 5 where Willoughby first appears, I imagined it might do great things during the revolution at the end, like getting the castle involved… but JK Rowling did that with Hogwarts and the spell that McGonagle always wanted to cast. So, the whistle has its uses, but I didn’t discover what until the revolution was almost over.

These illustrations come from Princelings books 7. Willoughby the Narrator, and 8. The Princelings of the North.