A let-down; bland stock-anime art, paired with ren-fairy dialogue. But enough inspiration from the original film remains to buoy this novel to “acceptable” level; readers who can tolerate the flaws of Eragon or Castle Waiting may even be able to enjoy this book.

For its opening pages, the plot hews oddly close to the film: orphaned Gelfling preteens (the boy timid, the girl spunky) find each other in the wake of Garthim attacks, and set out on a quest.

The bulk of the book, however, is taken up by dull talk and aimless fanservice; a council of Gelfling elders endlessly postures while the Skeksis cackle in their castle, but neither party commits to much action. It’s appropriate that the heros find themselves trapped in a hole with nowhere to go and little to do during most of the story.

An action scene at the end revives things somewhat, but even those panels are drawn as emotionlessly as the boring council debates. By the end, there are no surprises; and even though the world is as magical as you remember it to be in the movie, it’s become harder to care about it. The spark is there, but the flames simply haven’t caught yet.

What seems to start out as a simple allegory for coming out of the closet leads to a surprisingly complex conclusion. The book is set in a world of foxes and bunnies; fox-cities are dominated by the giddy slaughter of rabbits, and rabbit-villages are characterized by inevitable terror whenever foxes arrive. One young fox feels more at home among the enemy than with his own kind, and so his friends and family attempt a re-education by taking him on a hunting trip.

You might guess where this story is heading; and for the first half of the book, your predictions will be correct. The hero craves assimilation with his kind, but his failure to integrate drives him to self-exile. But then the self-doubting hero, his psychology wracked with conflict, reaches a surprisingly violent breaking point. The book then jumps ahead several years; and although he appears to have achieved foxy normalcy, the memory of his past resurfaces as he discovers a heretofore unimaginable hybrid of his two desires.

It’s this hybrid that is so fascinating to me. Without giving away too much, it is not the Emerald-City-type idyll that I was expecting. The merging of the hero’s interests is presented as a biological inevitability; something that is in his genes. But it is also grotesque and macabre, surrounded by images of eager violence and carefree destruction. The characters seem grateful to have found peace by expanding both sides’ opportunities for consumption, rather than in a cessation of hostilities. What is the author saying about integration, about otherness, and about the bridging of rifts between cultures? I had expected a happy homogeneity, with the merging of worlds resulting in compromise and peace; but what we find instead at the conclusion is relief in conflict.