Don’t look back.

This is only the second volume in The Unwritten series to get less than five stars from me, but I think that might be only a preference thing. This is still a great piece of this story. It was just missing a little oomph for me. I’ve got to save my five star ratings for the oomph.

Which is silly, because this was chock full of unbelievably cool things. Little stuff paid off from some of the very first issues. Everything ties together. Stuff happened that I didn’t see coming at all. Didge and Armitage are back! And Tom has to find a way back into storyworld so he can go to the Underworld and rescue Lizzie. And it was fun! And good. But it just wasn’t my fave.

It’s actually split into two main storylines. The first is the main one, with Tom journeying down to the Underworld, meeting up with past storyworld characters like Baron Münchhausen and new ones like Elizabeth Bennet (and that’s an, er, interesting meeting). He also makes some discoveries about the nature of Leviathan along the way. Meanwhile, Richie is still having his vampire identity crisis, and Didge and Armitage have to deal with a kid who can seemingly make stories come alive, even though Leviathan is gone from the world. His stories feature zombies, and things go where zombie stories usually go, but with an Unwritten twist.

I’ve heard the next volume (a crossover with Fables) is dodgy, but hopefully it’s only a bump in the road to the final two books of the series.