#crystal key

4–7 minutes To save Wishblossom Ranch in Disney Dreamlight Valley, you need to save the last horse in the Crystal Cavern and remove the decay crystals. The flow of Pixie Dust should be restored once you complete the tasks. Join your various horse comrades to brave the Crystal Caverns one more time, and liberate the last horse friend for Snow White. Tinker Bell won’t be able to keep things…

3–4 minutes Wishblossom Ranch is in need of help, just like Disney Dreamlight Valley during the Forgetting. You’ll need to combine efforts with Tigger, and some other unexpected allies, to find out more about the Crystal Key. Explore the Pixie Acres area, and help some friends along the way. The fate of Wishblossom Ranch may be up in the air right now, but with this quest you’ll be one step…

3–5 minutes Your efforts to restore Disney Dreamlight Valley and the related lands have paid off, but now you need to work on Wishblossom Ranch. The Wishblossom Mountains are losing their Pixie Dust from an over-abundance of wishes. You’ve found 2 Crystal Keys, but you need to find another one. Search Pixie Acres for help with finding the next key. Prerequisites For The ‘Bounce Up, Never Down’…

3–4 minutes Heroes and villains both live together in the Disney Dreamlight Valley game. The Wishblossom Ranch expansion provides the infamous Cruella De Vil character. She hasn’t exactly been forthcoming about the Crystal Key, so you may need to think of a different way to acquire it. Team up with some local critters to turn the odds in your favor. Prerequisites For ‘The Skunk Rebellion’…

2 minutes In the various lands of the Disney Dreamlight Valley game, there have been some unfortunate circumstances. The Forgetting caused a heap of trouble, and ripples of that trouble have been felt even at Wishblossom Ranch. What once seemed to be a happy, peaceful ranch, now seems to be falling apart and abandoned. The Crystal Key is crucial to saving the ranch, but you may need some help…

by: Robert William Gronewald

genre: fantasy

         I’m not normally one to be convinced to read a book by its cover alone, but the Crystal Key’s artwork really got to me. Upon reading the synopsis, I learned that the story features a young, female protagonist who wields combat magic, and I am all about that. The Crystal Key tells the story of a seemingly regular girl, Felicity, living in a magical world when she is contacted on her birthday and recruited to an order aimed at protecting the portals of their world from beasts that live in The Dark. A little into her training, Felicity finds herself stranded alone in Dark Territory and it becomes her mission to find her way back home. 

If you’ve skipped to the bottom and seen the four-star rating, you will have probably guessed (correctly) that there were a lot of things I like about this book. I really did enjoy this book overall and I would probably read the sequels but there are some things that I found problematic. 

For one, I felt like I spent the first 40 or so pages trying to figure out what the heck a ‘wellspring’ was, how ‘mirrorways’ related to it, and that ‘constructs’ are animal-mechanical modes of transportation. These are all really interesting elements of the world-building featured in The Crystal Key but new concepts like these should be explained as they are being introduced. Obviously, it makes sense for the reader to be a little discombobulated when you are initiated into a magical world with so many new ideas, but a little exposition goes a long way. I'm still not entirely sure what a wellspring looks like other than something that casts eternal light but I guess to enjoy the rest of the story, that's all you really need.

I am also not a super big fan of this type of world-building and I thought it was a little bit cut-and-paste; a snip of steampunk with the magic keys and vehicular beasts, a little bit of urban fantasy with the magical world politics and portalling. Mutated creatures in the Dark are also reminiscent of an apocalyptic Toy Story and while there is nothing wrong with making a hybrid of fantasy styles in one series, it's not really my thing. The villains in The Dark sort of botched the climax for me and I waited patiently for the characters to resolve their issue. 

What I really enjoy about this story is that all of the characters are well-developed and there are bits and pieces of dialogue that intimate thought-out backstories which I hope are revealed in the later books. There are also no characters that I feel like I can't relate to on some level, no one too evil or far-gone that I'm glad when they are no longer in the narrative. The protagonist, while also The Everygirl, still manages to have a personality and be an active decision-maker in her story (compared to some female heroines that simply have things happen to them). 

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and was glad to see that this is part of an upcoming trilogy. I will be waiting patiently for the next instalments. Thank you to the publisher for letting me read this book in exchange for an honest review.

4/5 stars