Wood Sprites by Wen Spencer
Wood Sprites (2014) is the fourth installment in Wen Spencer’s ELFHOME series. You’ll want to read the previous books (Tinker, Wolf Who Rules, and Elfhome) first.
Wood Sprites takes a surprising turn—one that, frankly, the series needed. Instead of following Tinker’s storyline, we return to Earth and meet two precocious nine-year-old twins, Louise and Jillian, who discover that they were conceived through in vitro fertilization. In fact, they were leftover embryos—which means they must have unknown siblings somewhere. When they hack into various computer systems and uncover the existence of other unused embryos from the same batch which are about to be destroyed, they launch a mission to save their unborn siblings.
Fortunately, the twins are prodigies—brilliant, resourceful, fluent in multiple languages, and more competent than nearly every adult they encounter. They even grasp quantum physics. Their intelligence, knowledge, and skills require a hefty suspension of disbelief, but they’re so amusing that it’s easy to go along with it. Their antics—hacking into banks and other high-security systems, becoming famous internet influencers, stealing precious artifacts from famous museums—all while dealing with middle school girl drama, are totally absurd and totally entertaining. Unfortunately, I found the twins indistinguishable from each other and often had trouble keeping them straight. But as a unit, they worked, so it didn’t bother me too much.
As readers will immediately suspect—and as Louise and Jillian eventually discover—the twins (along with the other embryos) are Tinker’s siblings. This connection ties Wood Sprites back to the rest of the ELFHOME series.
The addition of these lively new characters was a welcome change. As I mentioned in my review of Elfhome, I was getting tired of the brutal, horrific, and sometimes gross events of the previous books. At first, the lively tone of Wood Sprites was a refreshing shift—but, like the rest of the series, it eventually takes a much darker turn.
Eager to see how the twins would shake up the story, I started the fifth book, Harbinger. Unfortunately, it got bogged down with all the previous storylines, and the tone felt much more like the first three books than Wood Sprites. Eventually I got bored and quit.
Tanya Eby continues to do a nice job with the narration of the audio editions of ELFHOME which are produced by Audible Studios.
I was reading along with no trouble suspending disbelief until I got to “internet influencers!” And then I thought, “Well, why not?”