Dragons never go out of style; so naturally, one of them arcs across the cover of Katherine Rundell’s “Impossible Creatures,” wings unfurled for maximum glory.
That seems to have done the trick: The novel, newly available in the [United] States, was an instant bestseller when it came out in Britain last year. It would be easy to overlook the little guy at the bottom left of the illustration — a baby griffin named Gelifen. He is the last of his kind and the true heart of Rundell’s story, in which two kids, Mal and Christopher, must save a magic realm from environmental catastrophe. Griffins are “joy birds,” a scientist tells them. “Cornucopial life admirers."
That also describes Rundell, a fellow at St. Catherine’s College at Oxford and the latest in that university’s celebrated tradition of scholar-fantasists — C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Philip Pullman. She is a high-spirited evangelist for her various passions (in no particular order: children’s fiction, Renaissance literature and the natural world). Her first book for adults, “Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise,” from 2019, was an essay-length retort to the colleagues who claimed that her talents were wasted on the genre.
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