Someone had to bring back the rains, and apparently it was going to have to be him.
All towns have a little magic somewhere, but the luckiest ones have their own mage. A mage is handy to have around to deal with small problems like poison ivy, or gremlins in the mill. It’s been years since the town of Loosestrife needed any magic stronger than charms and herbs, but a drought is quickly drying up the wells and killing all the crops, so it’s vitally important for the town mage to travel west through the dangerous Harkhound Forest and into the Rainblade Mountains and meet with the mysterious Cloud Herders in order to bring rain back to the town.
Sounds simple enough, except for the fact that our hero is 12-year-old Oliver, a decidedly minor mage. The townspeople aren’t exactly happy about sending a child alone into the wilderness, especially a child who’s only armed with three spells, an armadillo familiar, and his mother’s smallest cooking pot. But that doesn’t stop them from sending him anyway, since he’s literally the best they have.
The description of T. Kingfisher’s latest novella says that Oliver’s armadillo familiar reminds him of his minor-mage status on a daily basis, so I thought Eglamarck was going to be something of a pain. But it wasn’t like that at all. An armadillo may seem like an odd choice for a mage’s familiar, but Eglamarck is quick thinking and very protective of Oliver. It’s just that he also has zero interest in sugar-coating anything. If he thinks something’s a bad idea, he’ll say so. If he thinks a question is stupid, he’ll say that too. And if he thinks an Invisibility spell is way out of Oliver’s league and would also be a useless spell to know, then he’ll tell Oliver at length why he’s wasting his time by trying to learn it anyway.
Oliver would – and does – fight enemies twice his size to protect his armadillo, but it’s understandable when he sometimes wonders why familiars need to be able to talk.
Oliver’s viewpoint is a pleasing combination of “This is how it is” and “NONE OF THIS IS NORMAL”. He’s had to learn a hard lesson about grownups, namely that scared adults will act badly, and scared adults in a group will act worst of all. But he refuses to hate the townspeople for making him go on a quest that needs to be done, even while he’s fully aware that it was kind of cowardly for them to wait until his mother was away before they did it. And a small part of him is resentful that being forced into this means he won’t get any credit for the fact that he was already going to go.
An older, more powerful (and less kindhearted) mage might have told the townspeople where they could stuff their demands. But Oliver is protective of his town, and he’s going to use all the magic at his command to get this done. Even if most of that magic is what he’s been able to scrape together from his Encyclopedia of Common Magic and 101 Esoteric Home Recipes.
He knew six charms to banish fairy lights (which one to use depended on the weather and it generally took at least two tries before he’d hit the correct one), and he could tell when a gremlin infestation was bad enough to merit a charm bundle made out of anise and quail bones, and when to just send in the cats.
T. Kingfisher as usual comes up with an entertaining blend of magic and monsters in a very down-to-earth setting. Her love from gardening comes shining through with all the ways that small town farmers have to deal with a creeping magical infection in a field (it’s usually the potatoes that get it the worst, although the way Brussels sprouts react sounds downright disturbing), and you’ll have all kinds of weirdness crop up when you’re not expecting it. Oliver makes an offhand remark about how Unicorns are basically pests, the armadillo has to explain that pigs don’t have an actual language per se, and the two of them pick up a traveling companion with broken lute, no musical skill, and probably the worst magical talent I’ve ever heard of.
“You’re a cynical kid,” said Trebastion.
“You make harps out of dead people,” said Oliver.
“Yes, but I haven’t allowed it to taint my basic optimism.”
The hilarious back-and-forth dialog between mage and armadillo (with occasional commentary from Trebastion, when he’s not face-planting a tree branch) is up to Kingfisher’s usual standards, but there’s also a very dark undercurrent that’s less about what adults do and what adults allow to be done. Being chased through the undergrowth by cannibalistic monsters is horrifying enough, but it’s almost worse to deal with grownups from another town who are actually going to stand by and watch a murder happen because putting a stop to it would mean admitting that they never should have let things go this far in the first place.
When kindness came from murdered ghosts and lost pigs, and the adults that were supposed to help you were monsters that walked like men…What was he supposed to do?
Apparently quite a few people have told Kingfisher that this is not a children’s book and shouldn’t be marketed as such. I honestly don’t know what they’re talking about; I would have loved this when I was 
younger. Having a very unsure-of-himself 12-year-old main character facing an impossible task who just decides he’s just going to do it would have been right up my alley, but the story is more than that. It’s the talking-animal best friend and the faerie-possessed root vegetables. It’s practical bandits, hapless musicians, and an ethereal mountain village of people with glowing tattoos and amorphous livestock. It’s an entire adventure from start to finish packed neatly into a dozen quick chapters, with an ending that wraps up with just the right amount of armadillo.