Book Review: Middle School Shapeshifters

Title: Middle School Shape Shifters

(I don't get a commission on this e-book, but you can see the jacket image here, anyway.)

Author: Luke Loaghan

Date: 2013

Publisher: Luke Loaghan

ISBN: none

Length: 237 e-pages

Quote: “[S]hape shifting existed in the mythology of every culture, in every part of the world.”

Whether or not the stories were seriously believed, people have always made up stories about what might happen if a human could become another animal—at the person’s own will, or at someone else’s. Some of the stories may have been simple metaphors: when a real man pursued by enemies “became a deer,” what the storyteller meant was that he used his abilities to run and hide rather than fight. Some may have described early efforts to expand people’s real or perceived abilities: some people who put on animal skins wanted to be perceived as putting on the animal’s abilities. Some were serious parts of shamanic and pantheistic religions. Shape shifting was seen as an attribute of good spirits and evil spirits, given to humans as a gift or as a punishment.

In Middle School Shape Shifters, Luke Loaghan spins a plausible story of how shape shifting might work in a modern city. The main character, Breccan, slips in and out of any form so easily that he’s apt to transform in his sleep. A friend, Sabel, and her sister and cousins can become jaguars. Other people they meet at gatherings can become trees or flocks of birds. The main characters’ parents can’t change shapes, but accept that their children can.

Fantasy novels are supposed to include conflicts of Good versus Evil, so Breccan and his friends have enemies. Some of these enemies have limited shape shifting abilities too, granted them by their “dark master,” a dismal demon who answers to the name of Breinsgorth. Mostly they seem to transform into legendary humanoid monsters but the “wendigos” don’t even get a chance to enchant any followers of their paths, nor does the man-eater get to eat a man, before the kids assume predatory animal forms and chomp their monster forms.

Middle School Shape Shifters is the beginning of a series. A friend’s dreams warn Breccan that he’s going to use his powers to fight off three attackers. Even before the third attack readers can see the plot of Book Two starting to take shape.

The problem with self-publishing is supposed to be that, while working so hard to say what they have to say, writers tend to overlook boring little details and so they release books full of typographical errors. That’s what’s not to like about Middle School Shape Shifters. Nothing major is wrong with it. “Shape shifting” can be written as two words or as one; in this e-book it’s written both ways. There are inconsistencies in formatting, spelling, punctuation—the sort of thing that does not interfere with our reading friends’ blogs or letters, but that causes teachers not to recommend a book to students. Not many adult men are named in the book, but two important ones have the same given name, Robert, and a third one has a similar name, Roblane; in fiction characters with similar names are supposed to be connected in some special way but no such connection is explained in this book. (Maybe the explanation will appear in another volume in the series.) For me the combination of copy-editing experience and reading the e-book on the screen kept me wanting to change the little irregularities in what looked like a manuscript, but no, it’s the published book.

What you’ll like is that it’s easy to read Middle School Shape Shifters, easy to follow the story, easy to relate to the good characters and even to understand the bad ones. The evil principle appears in this book as Breinsgorth, operating through a group of otherwise unconnected people he’s drawn into a secret society, the Black Heart and Dagger. Within this group a woman called Lucinda is far from the nastiest character, but the one who is motivated first by self-pity and envy, then by fear of Breinsgorth and the others, to attack the main characters. The shape shifters are her primary target; when Lucinda wants to move beyond petty harassment like making faucets leak, her first fumbling efforts to do evil only give the shape shifters innocent victims to rescue. We see a man from the group reaching out to a shape shifter’s friend who feels left out of the shape shifters’ adventures. We can imagine that a bully Breccan has had to deal with in animal form will be even easier for the Black Heart and Dagger to recruit. We can expect that those characters will give the shape shifters more of a challenge, generating more adventures for the next book or books...but so far there's not another book in the series. 

If you liked Harry Potter…well, Middle School Shape Shifters is very different from Harry Potter. That could be a reason why some Harry Potter fans would like the Shape Shifters. It’s a completely different plot, set in a different country. The culture is different; the Shape Shifters go to a day school while living at home, and even in grade seven Breccan and Jackson are aware of being especially attracted to Serenity and Sabel, respectively. There is a similar mix of fantasy adventures with ordinary middle-class suburban life. (There’s also a similar insistence on ethnic diversity in casting; we’re not told that Jackson is Black, but it's easy to imagine him that way because, if he’s Black, then Sabel, Sanjay, Breccan, Jackson, and Serenity would represent the five traditional color-types of humans.) Though J.K. Rowling had the benefit of professional editing and Luke Loaghan doesn’t seem to have had that, each story satisfies the fantasy-reading brain in much the same way.

I recommend that the writer known as Luke Loaghan consider either issuing a revised edition of Middle School Shape Shifters with professional editing, or publishing volume two with professional editing, to break down teachers' prejudice against the book. And I recommend that fans of middle school fantasy and teen adventure-romance Kindle-fiction read this book; it's a fresh concept and a lively story.