The story is set in a small and unknown town in Ireland called Darkmouth, and is about a boy called Finn who is the son of the Legend Hunter Hugo the Great. Twelve year old Finn is a Legend Hunter-in-training. The first book starts with him fighting a minotaur, but the minotaur is winning, so his father comes to the rescue and dessicates the beast. (No, he doesn’t turn him into tiny pieces of dried coconut – dessication is a common method for legend hunters to defeat monsters in this fantasy world.)
Finn’s training leads him to uncover a plot where his father’s old friend, Mr Glad, is working with monsters to destroy Darkmouth. In book two, Finn’s father has disappeared whilst working on his Dessicator bomb, through a gateway to the monster realm, known as the Infested Side, and Finn tries to rescue him.
I really enjoyed these books because they were fun and exciting and had a lot of hidden twists along the way. The storyline was full of action and well plotted. Characters aren’t what they seem and the books are full of surprises.
Finn loves animals and isn’t a natural fighter, whereas his father Hugo is one of the greatest Legend Hunters to ever exist. Finn’s mum is a dentist, ordinary on the outside, but being married to a guy who turns monsters into leathery balls makes her an interesting character, because she accepts all of these weird things happening around her. Other characters are also the mysterious Emmie, who has suddenly arrived in Darkmouth with her father Steve, also a Legend Hunter but one who has never actually fought a monster. Emmie becomes Finn’s friend, but Steve is there for OTHER reasons… Steve adds to the mystery of the story and the comedy, as he is always trying to insult Hugo.
A good addition to the books are the clever and detailed illustrations, which add a lot of humour to the story but also help you to imagine things and bring the story to life.
The author Shane Hegarty has a brilliant imagination, because the books are filled with lots of strange monsters and interesting characters. It’s packed with small details, like names and setting descriptions, that make this original and unusual – for example, the Wolpertinger, the Hobgoon, the Fomorians and the books within the book ‘The Most Great Lives of the Legend Hunters’ and ‘The Purge’ etc.
Hegarty creates an imaginative world, with its own history and myths that is also quite modern and is like our own world – except for the rampaging monsters! It’s a world where good and evil aren’t necessarily obvious and that makes it intriguing. I can’t wait for the third book!
• Buy this book at the Guardian Bookshop
