Carrie Ryan and John Parke Davis’s Iron Tide Rising is a magical-seas adventure for 9 year olds, and it is the fourth book, so please don’t start here.<\/p>\n
Marrill and Fin are aboard a ship called the Enterprising Kraken, on a waterway that runs between every world there is.<\/p>\n
The Kraken is the best thing in these books. Its rooms rearrange themselves overnight. Its rigging is alive and has a name. There’s a doorway with a thousand knobs, and a deck that keeps wandering off to some other ship.<\/p>\n
The crew is captained by Remy, who used to be Marrill’s babysitter, and includes a four-armed grumbler called the Naysayer who objects to working before breakfast, after breakfast, or at all.<\/p>\n
The book opens with the Kraken caught in a stampede of vast ships, all fleeing something, and Marrill working out that the way to stop capsizing is to make the Naysayer run from one rail to the other.<\/p>\n
It’s very funny and it’s very frightening, often in the same paragraph.<\/p>\n
Behind it is the Iron Tide, which turns whatever it touches to metal, and the wizard spreading it. The hard part is that the wizard was their friend. Ardent taught them, travelled with them and lost the person he loved, and grief turned him into the thing they now have to stop.<\/p>\n
So there’s real weight here. Marrill dreams about her mother, who was in hospital with tubes in her hand. A friend has died. Fin has lost someone too. None of it is dwelt on, but it’s all there under the jokes, and a sensitive reader will feel it.<\/p>\n
Which brings us back to the warning. Book four opens with the cast mid-catastrophe and explains almost nothing, because it assumes you were there for the first three. Coming in cold, your reader will meet a dozen names and a lost wizard and feel like they’ve walked in at the interval.<\/p>\n
Fin’s own thing is the best reason to start at the beginning anyway. He’s one of the Fade, which means nobody remembers him. Attention slides off him. People he’s just met introduce themselves again. Watching a boy work at simply being noticed is the strangest, saddest idea in the whole series, and it hits hardest if you’ve followed it from the start.<\/p>\n
If your reader loves invented worlds with their own slang and their own rules, this series will keep them busy for a long while.<\/p>\n
So begin with the first Map to Everywhere book. A boy who nobody can remember and a girl who can’t get home go looking for a map that’s been broken into pieces, and the pirate waterway does the rest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Carrie Ryan and John Parke Davis’s Iron Tide Rising is a magical-seas adventure for 9 year olds, and it is the fourth book, so please don’t start here. Marrill and Fin are aboard a ship called the Enterprising Kraken, on a waterway that runs between every world there is. The Kraken is the best thing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":10134,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"lr_next_read_post_id":9222,"lr_next_read_anchor":"the first Map to Everywhere book","lr_seo_hook":"Book four on the Pirate Stream, with the wizard they loved now the enemy."},"book_tag":[1045],"age_group":[24],"book_type":[1044],"book_author":[167,1139],"class_list":["post-9223","our-books","type-our-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","book_tag-adventure-books","age_group-books-for-9-year-olds","book_type-paid","book_author-carrie-ryan","book_author-john-parke-davis"],"yoast_title":"The Map to Everywhere 4 – Iron Tide Rising by Carrie Ryan & John Parke Davis | Little Reads","yoast_metadesc":"Book four on the Pirate Stream, with the wizard they loved now the enemy. For ages 9+. 3,000+ books in the Little Reads app. 7-day free trial.","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n