Hermit Hill

In this third volume of the graphic-novel series “Sueño Bay Adventures” for early-grade readers, young Sleeves, feeling left out from his older sister’s project to build a go-kart for the fall fair, wanders into the forest of their remote Pacific Northwest island and encounters the island’s legendary Moon Creatures, aka the Hivers. They seem as captivated by him as he is by them, and they begin to follow him around, whereupon Sleeves decides he is their king and locks them in an abandoned van when he’s not around. Sleeves, his sister, and their friends gradually realize that the Hivers are responsible for pollinating the island’s lucrative mushroom crop when black slime takes over the plants and they meet an old hermit who warns them about what happened to her when she locked up the Hivers many years before. Racing against time, the group use the go-kart to pursue a scrap dealer hauling away the Hiver-filled van before it is too late to save the mushrooms.

As with the previous books, the story starts off with a fairly light premise—legendary creatures being imprisoned by a hermit years before—but moves into more engrossing territory by focusing on Sleeves’ feeling of being left out and his yearning for his father to come home from a distant work assignment. The plot seems a bit lost until the significance of the Hivers on the mushrooms combines with the growing realization that, if the van is taken to the mainland for scrap, the island might lose the Hivers forever. The very light touch of the importance of natural pollination is welcome but not particularly salient.

Other than Sleeves, the character development is not particularly strong. Sleeves’ yearning to be one of the older kids crowd, and especially his disappointment when he overhears that his father is again delayed, is wrenching; his exasperation with his occasionally intolerant sister Jenna is palpable. The Hermit—one of the Grundle twins introduced in earlier volumes—is mainly a vehicle to connect the kids to the island’s legends, although she occasionally shows flashes of regret at her past behaviour. The final line is not particularly strong: at the fall fair where Jenna suggests filming Sleeves’ performance to show their father when he gets home, Sleeves opines “I guess my sister isn’t that bad…sometimes.”

As with previous volumes, the illustrations provide a focus and will require more time to digest and decode than the text which is mainly dialogue. The sense of place is strong, and the characters’ depiction casually hyperbolic: Sleeves is perpetually wiping his runny nose, and the Hermit’s crooked nose presages the fear the kids have of her. The Moon Creatures are not particularly appealing and almost seem slapdash although, when they appear at Sleeves’ bedroom window when he is crying about his father, their goofy smiles are endearing. Hermit Hill is another charming read with mixed results.