Players of Dungeons and Dragons (D and D) will likely enjoy Garth Nix’s recent novel for middle grade readers: We Do Not Welcome Our Ten-Year-Old Overlord.
Set in an alternative version of Canberra, Australia, in 1975, Nix’s novel features the Basalt siblings: Eila and Kim, who are friends with the Chance siblings: Bennie and Madir. On one of their excursions wading in a nearby lake, they encounter a peculiar object just beneath the surface. Resembling a “cut-off head with long hair” (10) or maybe an abandoned cannonball, the muddy object captivates Eila. When Kim tries to wrestle the now glowing orb away from his ten-year-old sister, he hears a voice and senses something trying to enter his brain. Convinced that the “globe thing” is evil, he tells Eila to leave it in the lake. However, Eila has already succumbed to the globe’s power. Soon, she proclaims that the globe is a female named Aster, who has come to help Earthlings.
Already intelligent and a bit of a science geek, Eila decides to serve as Aster’s mentor. Although the pair make mistakes and kill various animals in their lessons, Eila declares they are making progress in helping to heal humanity. Frightened by the telepathic power the globe has over Eila, who is manipulating minds without permission, Kim is determined to borrow Bennie’s prawning net and throw Aster back in the lake. In his attempts to get rid of the globe, Kim learns that “it can make itself heavy, it’s got electric shock power, and can move by itself” (83).
Worried that his sister is under the control of an alien globe with sinister intentions, Kim seeks assistance from his D and D players: Theo, Tamara, and Bennie. From D and D lore, they learn that the hairlike tentacles are eyes on stalks that can cast different spells. The group develops a contingency plan for what to do in case Aster turns out to be an evil alien who wants to take over the planet. After observing and confirming, they deploy their plan.
Besides telling the adventure story of four tweens having to rescue Eila from Aster’s control, Nix also shares some intriguing details about the power of stories: “Stories are how we experience other people’s lives and loves, challenges, triumphs, and . . . defeats and how we get past them” (104).
- Donna