Deltora Quest 2

Image credit: Booktopia

And so, like all exciting and classic fantasy series, the adventures continue this week with Deltora Quest 2! A trilogy rather than a saga, this collection of tales is every bit as rollicking, exciting, and action-packed as the first, with more mythical lands, monsters, and dangers awaiting our heroes on practically every page!

Lief has banished the Shadow Lord back to the Shadowlands and assumed his role of King of Deltora, but all is still not well. With so many of his people imprisoned and enslaved in the Shadowlands, the rest of Deltora is pushing Lief to march on the cursed realm and rescue them. Unwilling to engage on such a suicide mission, Lief is distant and spends his time locked away in the library trying to find a way to help his people. He finally finds it in a legendary fable about the magical Pirran Pipe, possibly the only thing that could defeat the Shadow Lord once and for all! And so another quest begins…

Immediately, the first thing that I really liked about this part of the series was how it so simply, but effectively changed my attitude towards certain characters. By now we have a pretty strong sense of who these characters are and whether we like them or not, and Deltora Quest 2 takes those attachments and turns them over so that you quickly find yourself siding with characters you found annoying in the first adventure and looking forward to seeing characters you liked in the first series get their come-uppance because they’ve suddenly become irritating. It’s a very interesting exploration into the reader-character chemistry and Rodda expertly plays on it, morphing it so that the reading experience of this series differs from the first one.

Image credit: Dymocks

In terms of construct and narrative, it’s more or less exactly the same; a solid and perfectly adequate hero’s journey and quest narrative filled with wonderful bouts of action and suspense. Taking place in a world underneath a world, Deltora Quest 2 has more nightmarish monsters and creations than I could have imagined and, as our heroes travel further towards the ultimate bad place, there is a delicious and strongly established feeling of keen hopelessness as every chapter proves to be a classic example of 'out of the frying pan and into the furnace'. Even experienced readers have to take a step back and wonder whether everything will work out all right in the end. 

The entire thing is a wonderful play on the emotional attachment to the quest and characters, making Deltora Quest 2 just as (if not, more) thrilling as the first!

Deltora Quest 2 is the second series of adventures in Deltora written by Emily Rodda and published by Scholastic in 2002. The series is made up of three books: The Cavern of Fear, The Isle of Illusion, and The Shadowlands.