Page 45 Review by Stephen
"Cogsley, we need to tell the Captain about this! If there's something hidden in that cloud, we need to go back and investigate."
"We won't have to go back."
"What do you mean? Why not?"
"Because it followed us."
Cue yet another Hayao Miyazaki-inspired double-page flourish! You won't have long to wait this time, the action kicks off immediately.
Second only to Luke Pearson's HILDA, this is our biggest-selling Young Adult series of graphic novels and if it wasn't already one of my all-time favourites (it was) it would most assuredly be now.
So much happens, and so much is revealed that makes perfect sense of the strange allegiances in this far from black and white war. But, oh, no spoilers! Why don't you go back and read our previous reviews of AMULET - each of them extensive - instead?
Suffice to say that for once younger brother Navin takes the lead in a desperate mission to reactivate a beacon in the burned-out city of Lucien below and promptly gets trapped there along with Colossus co-pilots Aly, Trish and Rob. Is anyone still alive there? Anyone - or anything - at all?
Meanwhile his older sister Emily and fellow Stonekeepers Vigo and Trellis are captured by another, part of whose past is played out in front of them while they seek to keep their amulets unaware of what they're all up to. What are they up to?
There'll be plenty of new faces along with some old friends long thought lost, and a great big secret, which I'd forgotten was a secret, from the very first book is explained. There will also be fatalities, I'm afraid.
There are so many landscapes to swoon over here, even in the rain, and one of AMULET's strengths has always been Kazu's eye for design, like the Elf King's metal mask whose shallow, vertical, curved trenches are coloured to highlight their topmost ridges. It's a design reflected in their airships and elsewhere, but I don't recall seeing that mask applied before, direct to the face, its razor-sharp, thin, conical spikes slipping into the flesh with a sinister "SHK!"
