Under Wildwood opens with Prue back home, unaware of the discord growing in Wildwood as a result of the “Bicycle Coup.” The Dowager Governess lurks at the periphery of the story (presumably set to return in the third volume) the primary antagonists are a trio of fox assassins dispatched to eliminate Prue and a cartoonish industrialist who exploits orphaned children for factory labor and wants to drain the natural resources of the Impassable Wilderness. There, with the help of her friend Curtis, the talking rat Septimus, and an army of talking coyotes and foxes, Prue rescues her brother from the clutches of Alexandra and helps restore peace to Wildwood before returning home, leaving Curtis behind to join up with the talking foxes as a member of the “Bandits of the Wood.” The Impassable Wilderness is, in fact, a mythic reimagining of Forest Park, the 5,100-acre public-forest preserve along the edge of the Willamette River near downtown Portland.

Prue is swept into a world of talking forest animals and violent territorial turf wars in the Impassable Wilderness when a murder of crows carries away her baby brother to be used in a black-magic sacrifice by Alexandra, the exiled Dowager Governess of the South Wood. The best-selling first volume, Wildwood, introduces Prue McKeel, a quintessential Portland tweener. Both traits are on ample display in the first two volumes of The Wildwood Chronicles, Colin Meloy’s auspicious venture into the world of children’s fantasy fiction, featuring illustrations by the artist Carson Ellis, to whom Meloy is married. Prior to their unlikely popular success, the Decemberists were best known for their darkly ironic sensibility and a penchant for the macabre. From this proudly peculiar milieu emerges Colin Meloy, best known as the frontman and primary songwriter for the Decemberists, an eclectic folk-rock band that stumbled into the mainstream last year with its chart-topping sixth album, The King Is Dead. Portland, Oregon, has long been both celebrated and ridiculed for its unapologetic quirkiness and hipster-friendliness-a place where chunky glasses and ironic mustaches are now only ironic in their ubiquity where the forests are green and the people are greener where fixed-gear bicycles power the lights and refrigerators in fancy craft-beer brew pubs.

Wildwood carson ellis