filled with childish whimsy! and i mean this as the highest of compliments; this book brims with a love for imagination and adventure, but without shying away from more serious themes

there was a lotttt going on. i had trouble following everything at times so this feels a bit packed for a middle grade book. But at the same time, there's also something to be said for not talking down to younger audiences and trusting them to walk away from the story with their own understanding/interpretation

the ending was very abrupt- setting up for a sequel or series no doubt, but i was hoping to get some more answers than we got by the end. likewise, i hope wilmur gets some more exciting plotlines in the upcoming book(s), because despite the book promising to following the two of them, viola drove the entire plot. don't get me wrong, i love viola's character, it was just very noticeable how she's always in some new crazy situation, meanwhile wilmur is like... playing cards on a boat

all around an exciting whirlwind of a book! i enjoyed the strange world of dickerson's sea and i look forward to the next book (need to find out what the hell chase's deal is so bad)

final note: loveeeeed the illustrations, they were such a fun addition + really enhanced the story

Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Stevenson has outdone himself with a more than worthy follow-up to NIMONA. In SCARLET MORNING he evokes a range of nostalgic children's and young readers' genres while telling a unique and heartfelt story all his own. I am so glad there is more of this to come and I cannot wait to see where it goes.

There is so much packed into this book! I definitely got “A Series of Unfortunate Events” vibes, and somehow a hint of “Cowboy Bebop”, albeit for a younger audience (and not in space). Though this is a middle grade book, I did feel that the main characters seemed a little young for their age (Wilmur, particularly). However, this does seem to be part of the narrative surrounding Wilmur and Viola, as they were left alone for many years with no guardians or peers. There are some clear moments of growth for both of them, and I look forward to seeing how this is expanded upon in the second book.

I was very pleased to learn this is book one in a duology. The amount of characters, lore, and mystery is so great that I found myself thinking “there has to be a sequel to tie all this up”, and sure enough! Sometimes there being so many characters and story arcs can make it a little tricky to keep track of who is who, but the illustrations do help with this and the story is so engrossing that I was swept right along anyways. This book really does feel like a mash-up of the kind of eerie and intense fantasy stories I grew up with, alongside the writing style that has developed around stories with a cozy atmosphere and quirky characters (House in the Cerulean Sea, etc). This makes a lot of sense given that ND Stevenson and I are only a few years apart in age, so it’s really exciting to see someone who grew up at the same time as me taking what we had in childhood and turning it into something new. Not to mention, he came up with this story when he was a kid himself!

I’ve really enjoyed Stevenson’s work over the years in both comics and animation, so I can’t say I’m surprised that I also enjoyed Scarlet Morning. I wasn’t expecting to become as invested as I did though, and I am now eagerly awaiting the next book. A great addition to a middle grade library collection, I would recommend this to confident readers with a taste for adventure. While the length might be intimidating for some, I think it could also be a good option for readers that often prefer graphic novels but are looking to branch out.

This book made me feel like a kid again. Reading this book didn’t just transport me to Dickerson’s Sea and the fanatically strange world it occupies. It certainly did, and my imagination still ventures there. Scarlet Morning transported me back to being a kid, spending a day or two tops pouring over a book that had fully captured my imagination, bringing me along on an adventure I can’t turn away from. Reading this book was an absolute joy. I am so excited to share this book with my customers!

I tried to get through this knowing pirates are not my cup of tea. Thank you for considering me for this arc but I let both of us down with my lack of attention. I did enjoy Nimona deeply but this one missed.

Scarlet Morning ties together an apocalyptic ocean wasteland with magic, mystery, and pirates! This book is perfect for anyone who's felt like the world changes around them without their influence who just wants to do more.
I will be thinking about it for months, and I am already eagerly anticipating its publication (and its sequel!) With teenaged main characters and some darker themes, this will appeal to readers across many age groups, and I anticipate singing its praises to tweens, teens, and adults.

The added bonus of ND Stevenson's illustrations through out and the queer normative world really elevates this novel to the next level!

I received digital copy of this book through NetGalley and the opinions above are my own.

Fantasy middle grade readers may enjoy this adventure. This one was not for me but I could see readers in my library enjoying it. I very much appreciated the LGBTQ+ representation throughout.

I’ve always been a huge fan of ND’s work from their illustrated memoir to their Netflix projects and Scarlet Morning was no different. When I heard this was a novel I was expecting plain prose but was pleasantly surprised with all the illustrations throughout the chapters that always came at the perfect time. I truly can’t remember when I had as much fun reading a book as I did with this one and can not wait to get my hands on a physical copy.

ND Stevenson is one of my all-time fave authors/illustrators/showrunners. I was super excited to read Scarlet Morning, the first of a duology about kids and pirates and dug in.

Viola and Wilburn grow up relatively alone, on an island covered in and surrounded by gulls, accompanied by The Book, a coded message that they've been told to protect. The domain's queen and pirate nemesis (think the Dread Pirate Roberts) are mere stories until their door is kicked in and a wild rumpus begins. Mysterious strangers, brave shipmen, strange weather, garbled speech, and maybe a few too many fever dreams and attacking seagulls abound.

This is the kind of book that will make sense once the story is completed. I can't wait to read Book 2.

Wilmur & Viola’s peaceful, boring life gets interrupted first when their guardian disappears, then when a mysterious person crashes through their front door. Everything about her screams danger, but the two children are willing to trade anything to try and get away from the island. And so they meet pirates, royalty, and secrets.

I loved a lot about this middle grade fantasy novel! The characters were all engaging, and the relationships that Wilmur and Viola develop with the people they meet is so sweet to see. The pacing was also great, it didn’t feel too breakneck, or too slow. And the world building was wild. I loved the concept of the disappearing world.

My only real complaint is that the end is less cliffhanger and more cut off in the middle. It felt like I was getting half of the story.

My thanks to both NetGalley and Quill Tree Books for the opportunity to review this arc!

Thank you to NetGalley and HarperCollins for an eARC of this title in exchange for an honest review!

As with everything ND has ever written, I absolutely LOVED this novel. I'm obsessed with these characters and the world and the story and everything. I cannot wait until I can read the next installment in this series.

Thank you to netGalley and HarperCollins for the eARC.

Scarlet Morning is the beginning of a children's series by ND Stevenson about pirates and the children who are somehow caught up in this story.

I'm going to be honest, I didn't realize it was going to be the start of a series, so I was a little let down when there seemed to be more questions than answers by the end of this novel.

I think the writing was fun and the characters had some interesting development, though there were some times that I felt like the story dragged a bit, and I wasn't sure why they ended up where they did just for us to meet a whole nother group of people 2/3s of the way through. I'm really excited to learn the deeper secrets of this story, I thought the world building was incredibly interesting, and it definitely piqued my interest in pirate books, just as Stevenson was inspired in their own childhood.

I loved every second of this book, I really think this is ND Stevenson’s masterpiece. The story is so well thought out, so complex and interwoven, and SO entertaining. The characters are all so unique with rich backstories and strong personalities, and the settings are so creative and enticing. I feel like I’ve been to Caveat, sailed on the Calamary Rose, and the crawled into the Second City and forgot something important in all of them. I will be rereading this ASAP and screeching about it to anyone unfortunate enough to come within 10 feet of me. Also!!! The illustrations are IMMACULATE! They add so much to the story and make the world of Dickerson’s Sea so real and so vibrant. I’m so in love with this book.

I, like many people who will be interested in this, am not a child, nor do I have children, so I won’t try to speak on its appeal for that demographic.

I enjoyed this, it’s an engaging story set in an immersive and unique world. I loved the illustrations throughout. I think the pacing, up until about halfway worked really well, keeping the reader engaged as the story unfolds.

After this point however, more characters started to be introduced, leaving behind the initial crew which meant the characters we had gotten to know were gone, and we now had to learn new ones, both for Viola and Wilmur, and it felt difficult to really care about any of them.

I also hadn’t realised this was the first book in some kind of series, so many questions that came up throughout the story didn’t receive a satisfying conclusion.

Weirdly enough, this kind of reminded me of Metal From Heaven by August Clarke, where the vibes are on point, the aesthetics are lifelike and fun, but there’s just a little too much going on in the space we’re given.

Overall, definitely entertaining and fun from my perspective, again acknowledging I’m not the target audience!

While I was surprised it wasn't a full comic, like ND's other books, it was full of the same heart and vibe as ND's former works. I loved the characters and the setting. The journey (for readers and the characters) is an excellent one. It reminds me of growing up.

Thanks to NetGalley & HarperCollins Children's Books for the early copy in exchange for an honest review.

Heads up: this is NOT a graphic novel unlike Stevenson's last book.

I really couldn't get into the dialogue-driven story. It's not bad per se, but I'm not super into pirates and I felt like it was just using all the pirate cliches possible. Maybe kids will like it because it's pretty easy to read and plenty of pictures throughout. I DNF'ed at 30% of the way through.

You just have to use the words "from the powerhouse creator of Nimona" and I'll be there, it's that easy. But I was surprised to see that Scarlet Morning is not the author's usual graphic novel or comic book, but a middle grade novel in prose. And maybe that's why I didn't enjoy this book as much as I thought I would (Nimona and all of Lumberjanes are very dear to me). The story follows 14-year-old Viola and 15-year-old Wilmur who live on the miserable little island of Caveat where the streets are covered in salt and the sea is poisonous and where no ship would ever go. One day they finally get the opportunity to leave the island and so they join a chaotic crew of maybe-most-definitely pirates. I wouldn't call this book a pirate adventure, though. Viola and Wilmur don't stay with the pirates for too long, and they also split up and have their own story lines. The plot was, unfortunately, all over the place before the book then ended rather abruptly. The characters didn't really have a destination in mind when they boarded the ship, and I never felt like they had a personal goal. The entire story is them reacting to stuff that's happening or to people they meet, and they do meet a LOT of people. I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that there were like 50 named characters in here, and that is simply too much for a 300-page middle grade book. The chapters with fewer characters were far better in my opinion, because I could finally get a grip on their personalities and backstories. I also liked that the traveling made room for many different environments and how the world was expanded through that. The sea was especially interesting, because it's a place of strange occurrences and creatures, but a lot was only told through a journal-like book inside the story. I wish that there was more showing than telling in general, but at least the illustrations were great and plenty, and I just loved to see the art of N.D. Stevenson again. I also have to praise the casual queer representation and I'm overall very glad that the author was able to publish this story after sitting on it since childhood.

Huge thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins Children's Books / Quill Tree Books for providing a digital arc in exchange for an honest review.

This was super cute! I don't often read childrens books (being Not A Child and also Child Free myself), but I love ND Stevenson's work and I thought it would be fun to read outside my genre.

What I discovered is that childrens lit is actually more advanced than I thought. I don't remember much about the kidlit I read As a kid, obviously, but this felt like a story I didn't feel out of place learning about. It was charming, the illustrations were the beautiful ones I've come to expect from ND, and overall this was really enjoyable. I look forward to anything else ND does, whether that's another novel or more graphic novels!

ND Stevenson and I go way back!! Nimona was one of my faves.

This is their first prose novel and I’m so proud of them.
However it did not work for me! From the very beginning I was lost. I couldn’t keep track of characters or the plot which took me out of it

Scarlet Morning is a fabulous illustrated novel! ND Stevenson takes readers on an adventure in a desolate land. It is cut off from the rest of world and most of the sea is solid salt. Viola and Wilmur are two 15-year-olds who having been raising themselves on a deserted spit of land – scavenging food and making up stories. Until one night a possibly a pirate person shows up at the door and adventure awaits. The names of all the pirates and not pirates are wonderful entertainment in themselves. This book is a great read aloud. A thorough joy and I can’t wait for book 2.

Thank you to NetGalley and HarperCollins Children’s Books for this DRC.
#ScarletMorning #NetGalley