The Ironwood Tree by Tony DiTerlizzi, Holly Black Series: The Spiderwick Chronicles #4
Published by Simon and Schuster on April 1, 2004
Genres: Juvenile Fiction / Action & Adventure / General, Juvenile Fiction / Fairy Tales & Folklore / General, Juvenile Fiction / Family / Siblings, Juvenile Fiction / Fantasy & Magic, Juvenile Fiction / General
Pages: 128
Format: Hardcover
Source: Amazon
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Celebrate the 20th anniversary of the #1 New York Times bestselling Spiderwick Chronicles and get ready for the series soon to be streaming on Roku with this fourth installment in the adventures of the Grace children featuring an all-new look.
First a pack of vile, smelly goblins snatch Simon. Then a band of elves try to entrap Jared. Why is the entire faerie world so eager to get their hands on Arthur Spiderwick’s Guide? And will the Grace kids be left alone now that the Guide has mysteriously disappeared? Don’t count on it.
At school, someone is running around pretending to be Jared. To make matters even worse, now Mallory has disappeared and something in the water is killing off the plants and animals. Clues point to the abandoned quarry just outside of town where the dwarves have taken over. Meanwhile, the faerie world’s abuzz with the news that a creature with plans to rule the world has offered the dwarves a gift to join with him: a queen.
I have owned the first five books in “The Spiderwick Chronicles” for several years and always wanted to get around to reading them, but like a lot of stuff I kept putting off reading the five books even though I knew they would be easy reads. I recently started a “read my book shelves” challenge in my mind and it has helped me to start reading my books. I decided to read these 5 books because it would allow my brain to start feeling like I was accomplishing reading and sometimes that is what we have to do as readers when we have lapsed. We have to jump start our reading back up and that is why I chose to read this series.
There was a momentum that I was hoping for when I finished the previous book. I had found a moment with the last book that made me excited and it gave me hope for this book. It didn’t really deliver. It wasn’t bad, but it never delivered a moment that was as good as the scene with an important character in the last book, even though we do finally meet the “main villain” in this book. It felt like umm meh?
The reason that I am not judging this as a 2-rating is because it still was enjoyable. There is a lot of good in this book, but it needed something more original than just the reveal that the main villain had someone and finding out what he “looked like” in the story. It was lacking any real depth, which is an issue in almost all the books. It just feels like the words are not energetic or full of life, unlike other books. This one fell flat, but was still enough to continue the series to me. I was thankful that a character that was not often my favorite in the other 3 books was a bit sidelined in this one, so I guess small favors right?
The thing I would state though is that if I judged this series as a collective unit, it is still enjoyable. This, however, to me would probably be the weakest link of the 5. It just wasn’t as good to me. I didn’t enjoy any of the plot lines here and it felt like it was just set-up for the next book. If you can push through this one, you will see it as a needed stop on the journey though to get to the last book. Not perfection, but who needs every single book to be that? I sure the heck do not. I enjoyed it enough. Meh?
There are five books in the initial series of “The Spiderwick Chronicles”, but a few years later Tony and Holly got back together to write three more books that are called “Beyond the Spiderwick Chronicles” which I have yet to read. I plan on buying these before too much longer so that I can say I have read most of what they have published for this world.
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