Before Katherine Rundell released Impossible Creatures in 2023, she had already published a bestselling biography of John Donne, six middle-grade novels, three children’s picture books, and an illustrated collection of essays profiling “unusual and underappreciated” endangered species. But Impossible Creatures was by far her most popular and widely acclaimed book; shortly after its publication she was named author of the year at the British Book Awards.

Born in Kent, England, Rundell spent her childhood in Zimbabwe and her teenage years in Brussels, before studying literature at Oxford University. Accolades aside, I witnessed Impossible Creatures accomplish what all middle-grade books should. Having sent my eleven-year-old niece a copy for her birthday, hoping it would be as good as reviews indicated, her own assessment was emphatic: a video, holding the book in the air, exclaiming, “This is the best book ever!” A few days later, I started reading it to my own children, and from its first, incisive sentence – “It was a very fine day, until something tried to eat him.” – my six-year-old and twelve-year-old looked up at me with wide, astonished eyes, somewhere between alarm and wonder, remaining transfixed until the end.

The premise is familiar and irresistible: What if dragons and unicorns and all manner of impossible creatures were real? When Christopher Forrester, one of two protagonists, discovers a portal between his world and the Archipelago – a cluster of islands filled with magical creatures – he learns that the magic that gives them life is fading. Mal Arvorian, the book’s female protagonist, on the run from a murderer in the Archipelago, reaches Christopher via the portal and tells him she needs him to go with her to the Archipelago to rescue the creatures. Rundell knows how to hold our attention: sensory descriptions, deft language, a lively plot, short chapters, and swift splashes of humor. But Rundell’s true gift is her ability to interweave vast themes of love, friendship, power, and ecological devastation in a way that pulls you so close you can feel its temperature on your skin and taste its flavors on your tongue. If writing can make the impossible real, Katherine Rundell has shown how it’s done.

Rundell has returned to the Archipelago with her September 2025 release of The Poisoned King, Book Two of an Impossible Creatures series. This time, Christopher is summoned by Jacques, the sparrow-sized jaculus dragon he first met in Book One. Jacques tells Christopher that the dragons are dying and they urgently need him to find out what is happening. A guardian of the creatures, Christopher is the only one they can trust.

Before this scene, however, Book Two opens with an opaque, one-paragraph chapter that tells of a girl who “dug into the depths of her heart,” where she found “a hunger for justice and a thirst for revenge.” The story of the girl is told alongside Christopher’s journey back to the Archipelago before their two paths converge. She is Anya, a princess of the Archipelagian island Dousha, whose grandfather, the king, is poisoned. Her father, the heir to the throne, is framed for the murder, and her shady uncle, Claude, assumes the throne. With her father imprisoned, Anya is taken from him as she desperately struggles against the unimpassioned guards who carry her away.

The Poisoned King is loosely based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Rundell has made sure to let us know. Her essay “What ‘Hamlet’ Can Mean for Kids” was published in the New York Times a week before the book’s release. In it, she says, “Books are alive … in the sense that they give birth: They beget more stories. It feels urgently important to show young people that stories have survived and procreated for thousands of years while the world around them has burned and rebuilt and burned again; that the books they read are at once ancient and new, resilient against time and against chaos.”

Hamlet came during the nascent British Empire, when a hunger for wealth drove a massive effort to conquer, control, and extract resources from lands around the world. With the exploitation of land came the exploitation of people. Nations raced to conquer lands not merely for accumulation, but also in pursuit of national security. By making her source material clear, Rundell opens up other associations we might make with Hamlet and the parallel anxieties about power at the turn of the seventeenth century. Hamlet’s rage at injustice and commitment to avenging his father’s death is one of the most lucid depictions of the pressure that younger generations feel to right the wrongs of the world: “Oh cursed spite, that I was born to make it right,” he says. Hamlet drags us into the havoc that a thirst for revenge can wreak inside of us and in the world around us.

In Impossible Creatures, Rundell contends with the grimness of the world. In The Poisoned King, she takes us lower into the depths with renewed precision, sharpening her focus and applying Shakespearean proportions to its two potent themes: rage and revenge. I have to admit that the immediate reference to a thirst for revenge – and a glance at the book’s final section, titled “Revenge” – made me wonder if the book might go in a troubling direction for my children. As far as the author is concerned, that makes my daughter and I her primary audience: in an interview published in the Observer shortly after the book’s release, Rundell shared that the thing she had wanted very passionately for her book “was to present a girl who is allowed her rage, whose sense that the world is unjust is not negated, and is allowed to be furious about it.” As it turns out, the chapter titled “Rage,” just after Anya’s father is taken away, moved me more than any other moment in either book. “She was like a bear escaped from the pit,” Rundell writes, “like a lion let out of a small service lift: five feet tall and all of it claws.”

As the Observer interview suggests, rage and revenge are related to the theme of justice. Rundell is aware of the weight of anxiety borne by young people today. She is concerned about the ways our world of violence and corruption, ecological neglect and Big Tech have failed young people and stolen their attention from healthy avenues to navigate the world. Toward the end of her interview, she stresses, “I think we need to be infinitely more furious at the ways in which a very small number of tech companies have suppressed their own research about the harm of things like social media on the developing brains of young people – the way their unprecedented wealth has been used to lobby for very little control on those projects.”

The relations between power and violence, greed and ecological calamity figure prominently in both books. Christopher and Anya must find a way to get close enough to danger to listen and learn, but must respect what they do not know and come to terms with their own limits. Rundell shows us how children offer an alternative to our destructive desires as they gaze in wonder at dragons and reveal the absurdity of accumulation: “It was so boring, all the money talk,” says Anya, reflecting on castle life and the love of gold. “But not boring like homework is boring…. Boring like death is boring.” 

As we witness shifting political ground, an emerging AI race, continued efforts to extract the earth’s resources, devastating war, extreme suffering, and flashes of violence, even those of us who consider ourselves measured and forgiving will sometimes feel outrage growing inside us. It seems we give political leaders and podcast personalities – and ourselves – more permission to exhibit rage than twelve-year-old girls who want to see injustice end.

When Jesus says, “Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it,” he speaks to two audiences. He is telling children that they are allowed – and encouraged – to be children, and to bring all their wonder-seeking, emotion-filled childlikeness to him. And he is telling adults to watch and learn. Reading The Poisoned King is an opportunity to be pulled into a magical world by children, and to learn from them. Christopher, a child, is the only one the dangerous and glorious dragons can trust. Anya, as she slopes toward despair, has such an intimate relationship with the crow-like gaganas that she is carried forward by their companionship. “A gagana will not allow misery, because gaganas live long. They have seen too many beginnings to believe in anything so final as an ending.”

In a world where powerful governments and companies grow rich on our addictions to abstractions and simulated pseudo-realities, Rundell shows us the wonder we can find in the concrete, mundane gifts around us – if we have a child’s eyes to see them. Hopefully her latest book will help us take a child’s rage seriously and help us see possibilities outside the realm of our limited imaginations. The gospel is the story of a God who is intimately close to us, yet his ways are beyond us; he refuses to treat justice and mercy as two separate choices. Stories like The Poisoned King stir our imaginations – both children and adults – so that we might grow closer to believing the impossible is possible.