The difference is that by Book Three, Rundell no longer has to introduce the Archipelago or establish who Christopher and Anya are. She can simply get on with it, and she does.

The opening is gentler than I expected. Christopher has been living on Glimt for three months. He and Anya look after injured and unwanted creatures, the palace has effectively become a sanctuary, and for a while you get to see what life there looks like when nobody is trying to kill anyone. Baby unicorns. Creatures living in every corner of the building. Jacques being Jacques. Nighthand cooking things that should not be cooked. Preparations for the Midsummer Feast.

For the first time Christopher is not a visitor. He belongs there. Which matters, because the rest of the book is about threatening to take it away.

A villain who is several moves ahead

Astor Morax is a considerable improvement on Claude. Claude was horrible but straightforward: he wanted wealth and power and would kill for them. Morax is colder. He keeps people bound to him with living snake bracelets and can kill them through the snakes, and he uses that. Early on one of his own men tries to explain a failure and Morax simply lets the snake do it.

Carla Venasque is the other good addition. She reads at first as another ruthless enemy, extremely dangerous and hunting Nighthand, and then you start to see that the hatred has a history behind it. That matters later.

Teren

The heart of the book is Teren, the new incarnation of the Immortal, still a toddler. Technically one of the oldest beings alive, carrying memories from thousands of previous lives, and physically a small child who laughs, climbs onto Christopher's shoulders and barely speaks. He is both lovely and faintly unsettling. Christopher becomes fiercely protective of him, and that relationship carries far more weight later than I expected it to.

The quest, and the twist

The story takes off when Irian is kidnapped. A ransom demand arrives: three tasks, three extraordinarily rare objects, starting with golden whiskers from a Cerberus.

My heart sank slightly. This was my complaint about the first book. Go somewhere, find the magical object, go somewhere else, find another one. And for a long stretch The Neverfear looks exactly like it is doing that again. Giants. The Cerberus. Pirates. A race. The Garden of the Hesperides. An enormous amount happening.

Plenty of it is a pleasure. The giants work particularly well because Rundell plays with scale properly, and Christopher being tiny in a world built for enormous people is funny without ever stopping being dangerous. The Neverfear itself is a lovely addition, a ship that by the end feels like another member of the group. There is something very old-fashioned about children setting out across an ocean in a named vessel, and it suits this world.

Then the reveal turns the whole middle around.

Irian's kidnapping draws Nighthand off the island. Senan's situation pulls others away. The heroic adventure they have been completing has been helping him the entire time, and his real target was always Teren.

That is the cleverest turn in the three books. A section I thought was becoming predictable snaps into place, and Morax stops being dangerous because he has an army and starts being dangerous because he is several moves ahead of two children.

What is happening to Christopher

His connection to creatures is changing. In the earlier books they are drawn to him by the glimourie. Here it becomes stranger, and he starts experiencing flashes where he enters the consciousness of an animal. Eventually that becomes the Glimourie Light.

This could easily have turned him into a standard Chosen One acquiring convenient powers. It does not, for two reasons. The ability hurts him. And Rundell ties it to empathy rather than strength. Christopher's power is not that he can throw lightning. It is that he can reach living things, which is what the books have said about him from the start.

The Battle of Glimt

My favourite sequence in the series. Christopher and Anya have almost no conventional army. What they have is a palace full of ridiculous, wounded, unwanted and supposedly useless creatures they have spent months looking after. And now those creatures defend them.

The bonnacon gets its moment. Especially the bonnacon. I laughed.

Underneath the comedy is the point the series has been making all along. These creatures were not cared for because they might one day prove useful. They were helped because they were alive and needed help. That they turn out to be useful is incidental, and the book knows it.

Anya keeps her promise

Anya is now my favourite character in the series, and what I liked most is that Book Three does not quietly undo her development. She is still furious. She still enjoys a fight. She still has that faintly alarming ability to go from ordinary child to total violence in half a second.

But she made a decision in Dousha that she would not kill, and she keeps it. In the fight with Darius she has every reason to break it. She is hurt, Teren is in danger, Darius is trying to take him. She beats him, and she uses the flat of her sword. She remembers the choice, and she refuses to make Teren watch another death, because Teren will remember everything he sees for ever.

That is real continuity. Not a lesson learned at the end of one book and forgotten by the next.

Yes

Morax offers Christopher an impossible choice: hand over Teren, or watch Glimt and everything in it be destroyed. Christopher appears to surrender, and of course he has not. He takes Teren aboard the Neverfear and sails out to Morax with a plan that could very easily kill him.

What I liked is that he is frightened. He is not transformed into a fearless hero for the finale. He is scared and he goes anyway. Courage in these books is consistently something you do while afraid rather than the absence of fear, which makes the title rather good.

And then the ending with Teren. After all the violence and death, after the thousands of years of terrible things held inside that child's memory, he takes Christopher's face in his hands and laughs. Then he says his second word.

Yes.

That is the whole worldview of the series in one syllable. The world can be cruel. People can be monstrous. Creatures die, people betray each other, entire species vanish. And the answer is still yes. Yes to being alive. Yes to loving things you can lose. Yes to trying anyway.

What I liked less

The middle is still extremely busy. There are stretches where it feels as though Rundell has set herself the challenge of fitting every mythological creature she has ever met into five books, and I wanted ten quiet pages with Christopher and Anya instead of another peril. The treasure hunt runs slightly long. The reveal justifies it, but while I was in it I could feel the machinery.

Morax is better than Claude and still very much a fantasy villain. Frightening, intelligent, not especially psychologically complicated.

And Book One has something neither sequel reproduces. Mal. The emotional centre of Impossible Creatures was Christopher and Mal, and what happens to her has not been matched. Gelifen's death still hurts more than any single death in Books Two or Three.

Where it sits

Impossible Creatures still wins for wonder and raw emotion. The Poisoned King wins for Anya's character arc. The Neverfear wins for storytelling, because it takes the pieces of the first two and builds on them rather than resetting everyone for another adventure. Christopher's connection develops. Anya's decision holds. The Immortal mythology deepens. Nighthand and Irian move forward. Glimt becomes a home rather than a location.

Even the last image does it. The Neverfear is destroyed, and a piece of the wreck washes back onto Glimt. Christopher picks it up. It is going to become part of the new boat.

One more thing. Morax is gone, but the snake and whatever is being planned around the Immortal are not finished, and Book Four is plainly being set up for something larger. This is the first time I have closed one of these actively wanting the next book rather than just wanting another adventure in the same world.

Written by a collector who owns the editions catalogued on this site. Independent, unpaid and not supplied by the publisher. Corrections to info@theneverfear.com.