Adventure–and-magic-filled middle grade adventure

James Rhyder and the Cave of Dreams is an adventure–and-magic-filled middle grade adventure, that adult readers will also enjoy.

Narrator, Alexander Keys, does a great job of bringing the excitement to life in the story, with lots of expression in his voice, but I did find his pace a little fast and found that setting the speed to 0.85x worked for me best.

There are obvious comparisons to another famous series here, as young James is whisked from his difficult ‘Muggle’ home-life to a mysterious magical camp where it turns out he has special powers and that dark intrigue lurks amongst the other student campers and camp tutors.

Despite certain similarities, David S. Brooks has created his own world, with its own unique rules and properties, and peopled it with his own individual characters, with their own motivations and quirks. The result is a fresh novel in a familiar genre, and thoroughly enjoyable in its own right.

I particularly love James’ bookwormish tendencies, which really resonated with me as a fellow bibliophile who also used to hide in libraries and bookshops in my spare time, and befriend librarians (usually in the hope of exceeding the lending limit!). I also found the side characters – Rheyna, Bag, Tasha, Gero, Kane, etc – interesting in their own right, and really want to know more about their lives, histories and talents, as well as more about James and his unusual family past.

Whilst the immediate problems are resolved within this story, there are plenty of pointers towards future adventures to come from Camp Tutis, and I cannot wait to get back there! I hope it won’t be another whole year before the camp reopens its doors and the cabins change to welcome their new, and old, inhabitants. I want to see where James’ dreams take him next!

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