Das hat Kayla sich anders vorgestellt. Die 14-Jährige wollte eigentlich nur ihren Freund Micky aus dem Reitclub besuchen. Doch dann gerät sie auf geheimnisvolle Weise in ein Land namens Tagor. Durch den Fluch des bösen Zaubrers Zilman sich aus diesem Land alle Tiere verschwunden. Um in ihre Heimat zurückkehren zu können, muss Kayla Mikal, dem Prinzen von Tagor, helfen, den Fluch aufzuheben. Erst, wenn sie die Stardust-Pferde finden, können die Tiere nach Tagor zurückkehren. Doch auf der Suche nach ihnen warten viele Fallen und Hindernisse auf die beiden Abenteurer …
The Cover
Yay, Photoshop! I don’t even have an opinion on this cover. It doesn’t fit and yet it sort of does. Jennifer Bell would have created the most perfect cover art, but it would have been wasted on this book anyway, so let’s just stick with what we have here.
The Background
Jenny Hughes is one of the PonyClub regulars. I really adore her older books but I’m not really into her newer novels, although there has been an exception. This one, unfortunately, was the weakest of her books I read so far.
The Story
In short, Kayla gets into a storm in the woods and is transported into a high fantasy parallel universe where she has to do Gymkhana games to defeat a wizard in order to find her way back home. Like … what?! As much as I love both horses and high fantasy parallel universes, and horse novels that make use of parallel universes or time jumps, this novel just wasn’t for me.
I didn’t dislike it in the beginning though. However, the farther the plot proceeded, the more annoyed I got. I would have enjoyed this so much more if Kayla hadn’t pulled out a pony club game solution for every dangerous trap and the other issues were just charmed away. It would have been much more fun if the other tasks would have been something else. Like a treasure hunt with different tasks so that both Kayla and Mikal could have shone. The finale was equally disappointing. It’s a MG book, so of course there couldn’t be anything too graphic, but the solution felt so very rushed.
The Characters
I started out liking Kayla but then she unnerved me with her humour and her constant solutions like a terrible know-it-all. Mikal on the other hand was as flat as a pancake. He was constantly in Kayla’s shadow, he didn’t talk much, he didn’t do much except for discovering the traps and complaining about them so that Kayla could come up with a plan. A little more balance between those two would have been nice.
