Illustrated by Tim Probert
2.5 stars
At Dungeon Academy the monsters are the students. The only problem is Zelli isn’t a monster. She’s a human adopted by a minotaur couple. When students at the academy mysteriously disappear, Zelli sees her chance to set out beyond the school walls. Accompanied by a group of loveable misfits, she searches for the missing students as well as her human mother.
I’m a bit conflicted about this one. I expected to like it more than I actually did. I love the idea of flipping the script and following the monsters and creatures of the dungeon rather than the adventurers.
But the story itself really dragged. It felt so drawn out and slow. It’s an odd critique, but many of the sentence were weirdly long. Like four full lines long, heavy on unnecessary description. It was really distracting from the story and felt like an odd choice considering this is a children’s book.
It does have fun characters and I especially loved Hugo and Bauble. Zelli’s minotaur mothers were also so sweet.
The artwork is wonderful and I expected nothing less from Probert. Great details and really fun designs. I will admit, that sometimes they didn’t actually match the descriptions given in the narration. But they are still gorgeous to look at.
Cool idea for a story, the writing just didn’t really work for me.
2 stars for the story. An extra .5 for the illustrations alone.