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However much the writing of The Lost Children of the Namuh may have been cathartic for the author, the result just isn't very good, a hodge-podge of clichés "as old as the hills" and inconsistencies even some of the intended elementary school readers won't miss. I managed to read the first 100-odd pages before beginning to skip forward to shorten the ordeal. At the risk of seeming mean and overly critical, though I rather think I'm doing people a favour to steer them clear of this, here follows a sample of some of the most immediate problems I had with it.

• The author uses the odd narrative technique of using the present tense throughout, which, on occasion, leads to some rather awkward transitions from conversation to narration -- though one does get used to it after awhile.
• The names of different types of creatures in Sunaru are not even complex anagrams of their Earth equivalents, but a simple reversal of letters: goblin, vampire, pixies, fairy, werewolves, and leprechauns become nilbog, eripmav, eixips, yriaf, sevlowerew and nuahcerpel, not to mention Namuh-Human, and Sunaru-Uranus...with few exceptions this sort of character naming didn't survive in literature much past the 18th century.
• The children, while they develop different special powers are generic and largely without individuality, unlike, for example, the flaws and fortés of the children in Lewis' The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe (amongst others).
• The children remain almost indifferently calm before startlingly unusual creatures and objects. The boys take a remarkably long time to discover that their sisters have disappeared, and show no great sign of concern either at their absence or later when they discover them to be underground in nilbog tunnels -- they eventually get around to looking for them, but with no great urgency.
• The story is a hodge-podge of genres with magic and the supernatural in a seemingly feudal system mixing with remote spy camera feeds and underground GPS tracking.
• No description is given of societal structure in Sunaru except that the evil Lord Deogol rules with an iron fist sending out sadistic Gestapo-like nilbogs to slaughter people wholesale, or bring back a few specimens for the Lord's dinner. No particular motivation is imputed to the villain, he's just insanely evil -- even the Hitler and Pol Pot's of the world had a motivation, however twisted it might be.
• Along the same lines, the children and their 'local guide' Maximus are unilaterally good and never presented with significant moral dilemmas.
• The author uses tired clichés in an entirely predictable and unoriginal manner.
• As in C.S. Lewis' recently filmed The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), and Mary Norton's Bonfires and Broomsticks (1945) (the basis for the Disney film Bedknobs and Broomsticks) a group of young children are sent to live in country to escape the London blitz, and end up exposed to magic in a fantasy world. A similar plot of children displacement from a threatened city to a place of magic, but where the events of 9/11 substitute for the London blitz are presented in Dale Peck's The Drift House (2005).
• Soon after entering the land of Sunaru, they are told that their arrival concords with an ancient prophecy regarding outsiders who will save the land from evil -- now that one's not been done before!
• Oh, surprise of surprises, they suddenly become aware of their latent supernatural powers.
• An even greater surprise...they defeat the evil Lord Deogol, albeit leaving him alive to give a raison-d'être to the two proposed sequels -- hmm, now that would make it a trilogy, how unique!
• a number of inconsistencies occur:
  • upon their arrival the children are fitted with GPS tracking collars, but somehow, when the villain is looking for them, he doesn't haul out his GPS locator screen, but send nilbogs to search high and low for them. Maximus, the good guy who guides the boys around, conveniently has the device on top of the desk in his apartment. And, come to think of it, why is it that Maximus, an obvious anti-regime activist, equipped with a GPS-collar hasn't long ago been captured?
  • when the nilbogs show up at a bar where a since de-activated spy-camera recently showed the boys and Maximus to be present, the nilbogs completely trash the place and then murder every last patron -- surely, if they didn't know which way Maximus and the boys had gone, they could have tortured the information out of a live patron.
  • and why is it that after Maximus has explicitly warned the bar owner that nilbogs are on their way, that none of the patrons seem to leave, but seemingly just wait to be slaughtered.
  • how is it that after the girls fall through a crevice in the street into underground tunnels, they immediately, without anyone having told them, know them to be nilbog tunnels? not those of dwarves or elves, or giant moles.

Georges Dodds is a research scientist whose interests lie predominantly in both English and French pre-1950 imaginative fiction. Besides reviews and articles at SFSite and in fanzines such as Argentus, Pulpdom and WARP, he has published peer-reviewed articles in fields ranging from folklore to water resource management. He is the creator and co-curator of The Ape-Man, His Kith and Kin a website exploring thematic precursors of Tarzan of the Apes, as well as works having possibly served as Edgar Rice Burroughs' documentary sources. The close to 100 e-texts include a number of first time translations from the French by himself and others. Georges is also the creator and curator of a website dedicated to William Murray Graydon (1864-1946), a prolific American-born author of boys' adventures. The website houses biographical, and bibliographical materials, as well as a score of novels, and over 100 short stories.