Kingdom Riders

Gr 6 Up–Kayla is about to buy her best friend Mal out of indentured servitude when a chance encounter extends her credit-debt with the authorities who keep strict societal order after a fierce hundred year war. Incensed, Kayla enters into a gladiatorial race to win Mal’s freedom, and between her low-caste status and her mount Grok—an enormous technicolor toad—she is marked as an unlikely but populist candidate for victory. Autria, the titular kingdom, evokes Avatar: The Last Airbender, with a pan-racial cast in an Asian-inspired setting populated with fantasy beasts of burden, while the society-spanning race harkens to “The Hunger Games.” Those books interrogated moral complexity; Kayla instead seems fashioned in a model more parallel to the “Paddington” films: a resourceful naif who inspires community by guilelessly doing the right thing. In technical execution—in terms of both illustration and broad story structure—this ticks all the boxes, but almost every scene is overwritten, which drags down the action-packed story. While the heartfelt intent of the protagonist is on the page, the omnipresent exposition dulls Kayla’s intended accessibility and makes both her charisma and the comic antics of her sidekick mount feel stilted instead of effortless.