{"id":6692,"date":"2015-01-13T20:07:37","date_gmt":"2015-01-14T01:07:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books\/?p=6692"},"modified":"2015-01-13T20:07:37","modified_gmt":"2015-01-14T01:07:37","slug":"the-accidental-highwayman-by-ben-tripptor-teen-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/the-accidental-highwayman-by-ben-tripptor-teen-2014\/","title":{"rendered":"The Accidental Highwayman by Ben TrippTor Teen, 2014"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the start of The Accidental Highwayman<\/em>, which is set in England in the mid-1700s, sixteen-year-old Kit Bristol feels pretty pleased with where he\u2019s ended up: he\u2019s an orphan who used to be a trick-rider in a traveling circus, and now he\u2019s an indentured servant to a gentleman who isn\u2019t much trouble, though he\u2019s fond of drink and gambling. Kit feels respectable, doing his master\u2019s errands in town on market day. But soon he finds out that his master has a secret: he\u2019s actually a notorious highwayman, Whistling Jack. At the point when Kit finds this out, Whistling Jack has been shot, and is bleeding to death on the kitchen table. Kit rides out on his master\u2019s horse in his master\u2019s riding costume to make the attackers think his master is fine. But this dismays the dying Whistling Jack, who tells Kit that by taking on his identity, however briefly, Kit has become bound to take over a task that he was supposed to do, a task he was afraid of. And with that, Whistling Jack gives Kit his horse, tells him to bring his French bulldog to a witch he\u2019ll find in the forest, and tells Kit that the witch will tell him about this task he now has to do.<\/p>\n

Kit isn\u2019t sure what to make of any of this, but goes to the woods and finds the witch, who tells him he has to rescue a lady from an enchanted silver coach the following evening. Kit figures it can\u2019t hurt to try, so he does, and when he succeeds, he finds himself in the middle of magical political intrigue. The lady, it turns out, is a faerie princess who\u2019s rebelling against her father\u2019s wishes by refusing to marry King George II\u2019s grandson. Her father, who is the faerie king, is hoping the marriage will be a shrewd political alliance; King George II is hoping the same. But the princess, Morgana, thinks her father is power-hungry and wicked, and that an alliance between the English King and the Faerie King will be bad news for the magical world and the human world, and some faeries agree with her. So she flees, and Kit travels by her side, and things keep on happening—this is a plot-heavy book, and there are \u201cdark deeds, treacherous villains, and acts of violence,\u201d as well as \u201cbravery, loyalty, and love,\u201d as Kit\u2019s preface to his story puts it (10).<\/p>\n

I liked the magic\/historical setting of this book and the humor of it, and I really liked the animal characters—the horse, Midnight, and Kit\u2019s love for him, and the dog, Demon, to whom we are introduced in the passage below (which is followed by a full-page illustration of the dog in question looking ridiculously cute):<\/p>\n

\u201dVicious, is he? Jaws like a trap?
\n\u201cHe can snap a bone with one bite,\u201d I said.
\nThis was perfectly true. I did not lie about the dog, who was Master Rattle\u2019s constant companion, but rather omitted a few details: he was a French<\/em> bulldog, a tiny beast bred not to fight bulls but to snore lustily, and he could<\/em> snap a bone with one bite, but only a ham bone. In fact, he spent all of his waking moments, which amounted to about an hour each day, gnawing on bones. (17)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That said, I\u2019m not sure if I\u2019ll read the rest of this trilogy: the book sometimes felt too<\/em> plot-heavy (there are at least two major sub-plots I haven\u2019t mentioned here), and I\u2019m not sure I liked the human or faerie characters enough to want to read more about them. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the start of The Accidental Highwayman, which is set in England in the mid-1700s, sixteen-year-old Kit Bristol feels pretty pleased with where he\u2019s ended up: he\u2019s an orphan who used to be a trick-rider in a traveling circus, and now he\u2019s an indentured servant to a gentleman who isn\u2019t much trouble, though he\u2019s fond […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-young-adultchildrens"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6692\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}