Going out of order just a bit here, this one was published
before Eulalia! but I didn’t get my
hands on it until now. Whoops.
Personally I just find the whole premise of this one just a
bit odd. The idea is that an otter at Redwall realizes that her destiny is to
be the queen of this island of otters that are being enslaved by cats. So she
travels there, frees them, and stays to be their ruler.
I guess Jacques wanted to show more of otter culture, and
demonstrate how Martin the Warrior isn’t the only mythical figure in the
Redwall universe. However I just have so many questions. First of all, why are
all of these otters ok with having some random otter chick show up and rule
them? She has no idea who they are, and hasn’t had to endure the years of
slavery that they have had to. No one is making her do this either, she is
doing this because she wants to, which seems suspiciously ambitious to me.
Having said that there’s more riddles in this book, which is
always fun. And we are going back to the trope of freeing slaves which hasn’t
really been seen since Martin the Warrior
or Mossflower. There are also a lot
of bird characters in this book, and I’ve always been curious about the birds
in this series.
The character who takes the cake here is the possibly
schizophrenic hare Cuthbert Blanedale Frunk. After the death of his daughter he
begins to suffer from some mental problems, mainly that he changes his identity
from time to time. Sometimes he’s a shrew sailor, or an otter captain, or a
Long Patrol hare, or even a hunting badger! Despite this, the other creatures
greatly respect and admire him and go along with his different transformations.
I think this series as a whole does a great job of portraying characters with
disabilities, I wish that there were more instances of this.
This isn’t one of the more popular Redwall books, and I can
understand why. Most of the action isn’t at Redwall, and the whole otter queen
thing is a little odd. However, there are some buried gems here, if you bother
to look for them.
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