Bookworm Speaks!- Amulet #3: The Cloud Searchers

Bookworm Speaks!

Amulet #3 The Cloud Searchers by Kazu Kibuishi 

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The Amulet Saga continues and here is where things get moving. 

Warning: Minor Spoilers. 

The Story: Emily, Navin and their friends have managed to elude the servants of the Elf King and are now trying to find their way to Cielis, a city thought lost long ago. There they hope to solicit aid from the Guardian Council, a cadre of powerful Stonekeepers. Chartering an airship, they take off through the skies, but the Elf King is fast approaching.

The Good: As stated above, this is the volume where things are beginning to get rolling. The previous volume was more focused on setting up the current story arcs and introducing new plot elements but in Cloud Searchers we begin to see the story moving in a real direction. The last book we were introduced to the quest, here the quest begins. 

The Good: What makes stories like Amulet so appealing is the timeless formula of the quest. An epic journey. Here is where the journey literally and figuratively taking off. As they travel on an airship they learn many things about the lore of the stones and about each other, all the while fending off threats. The journey serves as a metaphor for the growth of the characters and we see Emily and Trellis develop in their skills. 

The artwork once again is superb with stunning two page spreads that breathe the world of Alledia into existence. But it is not merely the environments that make this volume and this series so well done. When they were starting out, Emily and Navin were very much children and it showed with their attire and round faces. In this volume both children have matured and even Karen their mother. Emily’s face develops more form, her hair acquires more definition and daresay she begins to ‘fill out’ in body as well as mind. She becomes more mature and more confident. Navin starts to change in his own way as well, but he is largely passed over to focus more on his sister, but even he starts to visibly mature. Perhaps this shows that while the artist is good at stunning vistas, he is also skilled with subtlety.

This could have been mentioned in an earlier review but what makes Amulet stand out from other stories is how a parent accompanies the young protagonist on the journey. That is a rare characteristic in fiction and really sets this book apart. Emily and Navin’s mother has recovered from her injuries and has joined the company. She does not change all that much considering, really just adapting to life in Alledia. However, this works in the book’s advantage as she provides an island of normalcy in a series that changes dramatically with each passing chapter. She still remains ‘motherly’ and treats her children fairly normally. It would have been all too easy to make her into some kind of macho fantasy, instead having her remain the straight woman is a much wiser course of action. 

The character of Enzo, the airship Captain is introduced in this volume and he is a good character. At first glance, he can seem a little one dimensional. A gruff captain that rides his crew hard and doesn’t take flak from anybody. This not a deal-breaker though, not every character has to be a model of depth and multiple facet’s, he can just be what he is.  A deeper look though shows, there is more depth to him than meets the eye, such as his jaded belief in the lost city and his former relationships. 

The Flaws: There is one glaring omission that was put right on the front cover. It clearly shows Navin holding a wrench and wearing goggles and overall looking like a gearhead. While it is made very clear, even since the first volume, that Navin has an affinity for machines and their operation but we never see him dressed in that particular garb. Its not that big a deal but it feels like the author wrote a check and didn’t cash it. 

That aside, the real major flaw of this story is the villain. Trellis and the elf Luger from the previous volume are no longer the main antagonists and so the Elf King assigns a bounty hunter named Gabilan to hunt down Emily and Trellis. His design is fantastic, looking appropriately menacing for a villain, but that’s the problem, his design is pretty cool but his characterization is nothing new. He is a typical amoral thug who tries to capture them. And he wants to overthrow the king…Bookworm thinks he has seen that in other books. Finally, perhaps they are saving him for a later volume, but he is never seen again in the rest of the books. Once again, we encounter a come and go scenario. In of itself, these events are not bad. Many have said that a story is simply when you have characters and make things happen to them. Its just this character is given so much buildup and page time that the fact that he is defeated and never seen again (in a way that’s not funnily ironic) it can seem anticlimactic at times. 

His saving grace is that his action scenes are pretty cool and the fact that he was a catalyst for an important detail about one of the characters and the fact he knows more than he lets on about the stones makes him add another layer of mystery to the story and lends to the book’s strength. That things are not always what they seem. 

Final Verdict:

Five out of Five Stars