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Subverting convention, award-winning creators M. T. Anderson and Eugene Yelchin pair up for an anarchic, outlandish, and deeply political saga of warring elf and goblin kingdoms.
Uptight elfin historian Brangwain Spurge is on a mission: survive being catapulted across the mountains into goblin territory, deliver a priceless peace offering to their mysterious dark lord, and spy on the goblin kingdom — from which no elf has returned alive in more than a hundred years. Brangwain's host, the goblin archivist Werfel, is delighted to show Brangwain around. They should be the best of friends, but a series of extraordinary double crosses, blunders, and cultural misunderstandings throws these two bumbling scholars into the middle of an international crisis that may spell death for them — and war for their nations.
Witty mixed media illustrations show Brangwain's furtive missives back to the elf kingdom, while Werfel's determinedly unbiased narrative tells an entirely different story. A hilarious and biting social commentary that could only come from the likes of National Book Award winner M. T. Anderson and Newbery Honoree Eugene Yelchin, this tale is rife with thrilling action and visual humor ... and a comic disparity that suggests the ultimate victor in a war is perhaps not who won the battles, but who gets to write the history.
"Starred Review. Told in narrative and illustrated pages - Werfel's experiences and Spurge's visual dispatches back home - the story...blends the absurd and the timely to explore commonality, long-standing conflict, and who gets to write a world's history." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Biting and hysterical, Brangwain and Werfel's adventure is one for the history books." - Booklist
"Starred Review. Monty Python teams up with Maxwell Smart for a wrestling match with Tolkien - splendid." - Kirkus
"Starred Review. With the look and feel of medieval lithographs, [the illustrations] include touches of humor, whimsy, irony, and menace; as such, they are well suited to both the acerbic wit and the affecting tenderness of Anderson's prose. The result is a fantasy that couldn't feel more real, obliquely referencing a political climate marked by a lack of civility, underhanded diplomacy, fake news, widespread bigotry and prejudice, and the dehumanization of marginalized people." - The Horn Book
This information about The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
M.T. ANDERSON is the New York Times bestselling author of Feed, a National Book Award finalist and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, winner of the 2006 National Book Award; and Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad, a Boston Globe–Horn Book Prize winner, among many other books for children and young adults. He is also the author of three graphic novels, including The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge, a National Book Award finalist, with Eugene Yelchin. Elf Dog & Owl Head, his most recent novel for children, won a Newbery Honor. He lives in New England.
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