Complete the Quest: The Poisonous Library

Written and illustrated by Brian McLachlan

Imprint

978-1-250-26829-7

128 pp.

Ages 8-12

June 2021

For those middle-graders who want an adventure that is uniquely their own, or for those who love RPGs and have been told to get off their tech, or for those who love a good story with amazing characters, humour, and fantasy worlds of surprising elements, Brian McLachlan's Complete the Quest: The Poisonous Library ticks all the boxes.

From Complete the Quest: The Poisonous Library by Brian McLachlan

To undertake their quest in the world of Chimeria, readers are invited to pick a team of three heroes from Javen the Elven Druid; Coran the Human Priest; Blade the Flowerkin Sneak; Zix the Dragonfolk Wizard; and Crax and Tonk the Dwarven Barbarian Brothers. Each has unique powers and optional backstories about family, fears and habits which will help the reader complete the quest.

From Complete the Quest: The Poisonous Library by Brian McLachlan

And the quest? Queen Evergreen, who rules over Chimeria, with her friend and advisor Marisha and daughter Princess Violet, has been gifted with a poisonous book, imbued with bad magic. Instead of working towards keeping harmony with all the people of Chimeria as she has always done, she begins to see Marisha as tricking her into discriminating against the human-like Kith. She tries to fight it but she slips into a deep sleep. While her people look for the source of the book, the heroes of the story, i.e., whoever readers have chosen, are tasked with searching out the five ingredients needed to cure her of the book's poison. These include a star diamond, a blank lotus, a ghost cloud, a dragon lime and a skrim (a water creature).

Like the original pen-and-paper role-playing game of Dungeons and Dragons, it's advised that young readers keep track of their characters and their abilities as well as the items they acquire or lose, including different coloured pearls. 

From Complete the Quest: The Poisonous Library by Brian McLachlan

As they enter realms that include caverns and a maze, a jungle, the mountains, the sky and a spheramid, your heroes meet centaurpedes, phantomcap mushrooms, rock blobs, dragonfolk bandits and more. There are opportunities to join forces with others like the Flowerkin Glowvin or the bard Harmony but it's all up to the reader how the quest will be completed.

From Complete the Quest: The Poisonous Library by Brian McLachlan

The fun thing about Complete the Quest: The Poisonous Library is that Brian McLachlan has set it up so that the quest is always completed and young players (readers?) don't have to worry that they will be killed off before achieving their mission. Even better, they can complete the mission repeatedly but with different combinations of heroes with different backstories while altering their selections along the way. There will always be laughs with riddles and jokes, a fart elemental or a ghost barf, and much play with words like the Widow the Wisp and the Hot Steppers.

 

But the artwork is what will draw young readers in. It's vibrant and imaginative, fantastic in its diversity of characters and elements, landscapes and stories. Brian McLachlan bases his characters in animals, plants, humans and otherwise. They use different pronouns, i.e., she/her, he/him and they/them, and are coloured everything from purple or brown to green and pink. These differences, in fact, are what the poisonous book wants to use to separate Chimeria, encouraging discrimination and strife between distinct creatures. Thankfully the Queen recognizes that the book was a mask "to hide the truth and frighten us with a false image" (pg. 102) and that "We might look different, but we share universal needs and feelings." (pg. 103)

He will get kids reading and imaginatively playing with Complete the Quest: The Poisonous Library while paying homage to books and book people–there are books everywhere and librarians and readers galore–but Toronto cartoonist Brian McLachlan has made some powerful statements about diversity and inclusiveness and done so with colour and whimsy. This is certainly a quest worth undertaking.