A few months ago, I reviewed Here There Be Dragons, by James A. Owen, of the Coppervale Studios. He self-published a very popular comic book series, among other works, and has been working as a magazine editor, novelist, and general creative sort for quite a few years. This series (the Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica) has been optioned by Warner to be made into a movie, pretty much right after the first volume was released. He lives in the amusingly-named Snowflake, Arizona. The books themselves are a delight to read, having thick pages, nice fonts, lovely dust-jackets, and a good deal of interior illustrations, after the fashion of woodcuts, done by Mr. Owen himself. A third volume, The Indigo King, was released in October.

John, Charles, and Jack parted ways after the adventures in the last volume, to keep the secrets, and they avoided each other for a good nine years, until Jack started having a series of really weird dreams involving giants, children, and Aven, currently the queen of Paralon. He calls on the other two to visit him, and the next thing they know, a smallish girl-child, sporting a pair of mechanical wings, lands in Jack’s backyard. She has a message to deliver — that, yes, Jack’s dreams (which the other two have been having as well) are mostly true, and there is something very wrong afoot in the Archipelago of Dreams. Children and the dragonships are disappearing. Can the trio of caretakers fix things?

This volume is not quite as astonishing as the last volume, primarily due to the fact that the big revelation in the first book is significantly more surprising than anything in the second book. That having been said, though, Mr. Owen weaves in so many stories from so many different kinds of (primarily Western) mythologies that this volume might even be slightly more interesting than the previous one. In addition to the Pied Piper of Hamelin story, he manages to pull together Peter Pan and his Lost Boys and several of the Pan stories (Syrinx, Orpheus), as well as a magic wardrobe — and that’s just the basic few used to further the plot. There were so many references, allusions, twists, and turns that, yet again, I would agree that these books are just as likely to be enjoyed by adults as children and young adults.

The characters are still rich and multi-layered; while a good deal of them are historical figures (J. M. Barrie is the only one I’ll name outright), Mr. Owen still manages to imbue them with all sorts of traits without being untrue to history and, in some cases, legend. The non-historical characters, such as the winged girl named Laura Glue and some of the inhabitants of the isles, are also quite interesting — I’m hoping that Laura Glue, at least, will show up again. I assume that Artus and his family will reappear, and I was glad to see Tummeler again, with his recipes. I’m also fascinated by the steampunk aspect of the books: the clockwork creations, usually anthropomorphic. I believe that they’ll figure in the third volume, and I’ll be glad to see more of them, even though they’re usually not used for good.

While its tone is a bit darker than the previous volume — people react much differently to missing children than to missing adults, and there are some references to post-traumatic stress disorder, or ‘what happened during the war’ — it’s still essentially a story about dragons, airships, and other fantastic things. I couldn’t help but feel thrilled every time they discovered something new, whether it was an island primarily inhabited by pirates, or Echo’s Well. I am very much looking forward to returning to the Archipelago of Dreams, and I hope that the movie (which, apparently, will have the combined talents of the people who made the recent Batman movies and the Harry Potter movies) does the book justice. 4.5/5 stars.