Skulduggery Pleasant: Playing With Fire

Image credit: Skulduggery Pleasant Wiki-Fandom

There’s nothing quite like the thrill of becoming hooked into a new series: be it TV, Netflix, or books, it’s exciting, compelling, and there’s no awful floundering between as you wonder ‘what do I do now?’ This is how I am currently feeling, having just finished the second book in Derek Landy’s Skulduggery Pleasant series.

Thirteen year-old Valkyrie Cain has rather taken to the life of solving mysterious cases and fighting bad guys within the magical community. Alongside her friend and living skeleton, Skulduggery Pleasant, she’s quite the force to be reckoned with. One would think then, that things would settle down after Nefarious Serpine was defeated, but no such luck. The evil Baron Vengeous has escaped from prison and has a plan to bring back the Faceless Ones. Against his army of vampires, an intangible assassin, and a magical Frankenstein’s monster on steroids, Valkyrie and Skulduggery are going to need all the help they can get!

Now that we know the central characters and the prime ins-and-outs of the magical community, we get to have fun with Landy’s magical world and its inhabitants properly. Everything in this book becomes bigger, better, and more exciting with the danger and action factor being raised to eleven alongside the character development and growth.

Image credit: Skulduggery Pleasant Wiki-Fandom

Both Valkyrie and Skulduggery’s characters begin to take on a deeper meaning and a more solid shape; Valkyrie being on the cusp of adolescence, an important time of self-discovery that everyone can relate to, and Skulduggery’s ‘life’ purpose comes into question, providing food for thought as well as internal conflict and struggles for the continuing instalments. 

Landy quite cleverly introduces these deeper underlying themes and character arcs subtly so that the book does not lose its adventurous edge. I recall one of the reasons a large chunk of the Harry Potter readership stopped with the third book was because it rather suddenly became more mature and, too soon, lost that family-friendly adventurous edge that had caught everyone’s attention. Landy brings the maturity factor in slow and steady, so it’s not such a sudden gear change and I am sure that his readership appreciates it.

The action, adventure, and villains are all bigger, better, stronger, making Playing With Fire a page-turner from the very beginning. I can safely say that I’m officially a convert and absolutely love this series!

Playing With Fire is the second book in Derek Landy’s Skulduggery Pleasant series and was published by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2008.