A Breath of Mischief (MarcyKate Connolly)

A Breath of Mischief
MarcyKate Connolly
Sourcebooks
Fiction, MG? Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: A windling child, the blue-haired girl Aria was raised in a floating castle by the Wind itself. She loves watching the world drift by beneath her, listening to the visiting birds and dragons and other flying beasts, playing with her best friend Gwyn the gryphling, reading books in the castle's great library (for the Wind loves to snatch up books and scrolls and other odds and ends in their travels to bring back to their daughter), and being lulled to sleep every night by the Wind's special, secret lullaby they sing just for her.
One morning, she wakes up to find the castle has drifted to earth, and the Wind is nowhere to be found. Worse, she seems to have lost her magical gifts from the Wind that let her float and drift like a dandelion puff, and the air all around them is still and heavy, without so much as a breath of breeze. Aria and Gwyn search, and discover that an alchemist named Worton has the Wind trapped in a great and strange magical machine; he refuses to let her parent go unless the windling brings her three magical artifacts from across the land. She isn't sure she trusts him, but she misses the Wind terribly, and the longer the Wind is away, the more the land itself suffers. Can she solve the riddle and find the items... and, if she does, is she helping free the Wind or enabling something far more terrible?

REVIEW: The cover image looked fun, and the title promised mischief and light adventure. But something about that promise never quite came through, even though A Breath of Mischief has some fun images and ideas.
Aria is an "otherling" chosen by the Wind, an embodiment of the element of moving air. Just what is an "otherling"? The story seems vague on what they are and where they come from, save that they aren't human and don't particularly trust people. I guessed them to be some sort of faerie-like being, but the reader only ever meets a handful, each the adopted "child" of an elemental force who, like her, have been given particular gifts and responsibilities. This thin worldbuilding persists throughout, the sense that ideas, while nice and shiny to look at in the moment, don't always make sense and weren't always thought through and don't necessarily connect in a meaningful or consistent fashion. While many in the target age might not notice, I've read enough middle-grade (and even children's, which this skews toward) fantasy where the worlds felt far more solid to notice that thinness here. In any event, the tale drifts a bit like a seed puff on the breeze before getting to the grounding of the castle and the disappearance of the Wind. Along the way, Aria has her first encounter with another otherling, the waterling boy Bay - the first time she's even considered that other elements might have their own children like herself, and her first real notion that the Wind isn't the only elemental master that's particularly important in the world. She eventually finds her way to a dilapidated keep/mad scientist lair and the alchemist Worton, who tricks her and Gwyn into agreeing to a quest for three suspiciously elemental-based objects. Even for a young and somewhat sheltered protagonist, Aria's choice here is rather hard to swallow, as is her blindness about what Worton is really asking of her - especially when she starts seeing more signs that something's terribly amiss as she and her gryphling best friend pursue the objects. The quest itself is only part of the tale that follows, as Aria and Gwyn deal with several obstacles and a few setbacks, and later a mistake that costs everyone dearly... but this being a tale written for the younger end of the target audience, it's hardly a spoiler that things do work out by the end.
As a read-aloud or read-along with a youngster, A Breath of Mischief might be a decent enough tale. Just don't expect too much from it.

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