Nevermoor: The trials of Morrigan Crow

The UK paperback cover of Nevermoor: The trials of Morrigan Crow

“The Journalists arrived before the coffin did”

What a first line!

I heard lots of hype about this book on booktube (notably from MercysMusings and Laurenandthebooks), and in particular I was drawn in to read it at this time of year because I heard that there were a couple of Christmas themed chapters, and I just love Christmassy books at this time of year. I used to have a number of short Christmas stories as a child, and would write myself a list of which ones I was going to read which night in December as a little story advent calendar. (As I grew older I especially loved Jostein Gaarder’s book “The Christmas Mystery” about a magical advent calendar.)

I don’t want to do a full review of this book, suffice to say that I enjoyed it, and here are some of the thoughts I had whilst reading it:

I couldn’t prevent myself from comparing it with Harry Potter, all the time. I enjoyed some of the nods to that most hallowed of series, notably Morrigan receiving her letter from Jupiter North on her eleventh birthday, which really reminded me of Harry getting his Hogwarts letter. I think that this reference shows the author’s self awareness of how this book will be compared with the Potter books even as she’s writing it. One major difference however, and I think this is a sign of changing times in writing, particularly in writing for younger audiences, is there is much more representation of POC in this story than in Harry Potter. Townsend often refers to the colour of a person’s skin as part of their character description or introduction to that character, with no judgement implied, just as a fact about that character. (I think J.K. does do this with a couple of characters in Harry Potter, but only to characters of colour, not for anyone else, the implication being that everyone else is white). One person Townsend doesn’t apply this treatment to is Morrigan herself, and although this could be seen has her being ‘white by default’, I’d like to think that this was a deliberate decision on the part of the author so that anyone can picture themselves as Morrigan. Obviously the front cover of this UK edition doesn’t go along with this theory, but I don’t know how much of a decision the author would have had in the cover design. I’d like to know what some others think about this!

Having compared it to Harry Potter, the next thing to say is that actually, the world created here is very different from the wizarding world, and has lots of new, quirky features that I very much enjoyed. I liked all of the extra titles that Jupiter has, particularly ‘chairman of the charitable trust for decommissioned robot butlers’. (I thought I was done comparing it with Potter, but I did think that Jupiter was like a cross between Lockhart and Dumbledore).

The Hotel Deucalion was a great setting, although I did often wonder how I was supposed to pronounce it, and I loved Fenestra the Magnificat. She was a great character, in many ways more of a teacher to Morrigan than Jupiter was, and mostly I just loved the name ‘Magnificat’. It made me hope that Jessica Townsend dreamed up these giant cat beasts whilst in church waiting for the choir to finish singing.

The book is just full of excellent lines that made me smile, like ” you look like broccoli”, which 1. reminded me of Drop Dead Fred (what a film), and 2. shows just how juvenile my sense of humour can be. I also loved this part in particular:

“Morrigan woke on the day of the chase trial feeling peaceful. For about five seconds, obviously, until she remembered what day it was and her peace turned to panic”

because who amongst us hasn’t had that feeling? I’ve never seen it expressed as succinctly as this before.

There were some topics in this book that I wasn’t expecting to be tackled in a middle grade fantasy novel, but I’m glad they were there, like the treatment of ‘illegals’ in the land of Nevermoor, and this use of dehumanising language to describe migrants from other parts of the world was done at a level that I think children would be able to understand.

All in all, I really enjoyed this book, but it did very much feel like the first in a series- lots of world building and set up, which is to be expected, and although the trials aspect did feel a little formulaic at times, there were enough surprises to keep it interesting. I’ll definitely be reading the next one!