If Tony DiTerlizzi’s  work had begun and ended with the art for the old Planescape boxed set, he’d still have a special place in my heart. Fortunately for all of us, it didn’t. He’s gone on to create books of his own—art and otherwise. The Spiderwick Chronicles (in collaboration with Holly Black) are probably the best known thanks to a movie that I haven’t seen and haven’t heard anything good about. They’re good. (I only just learned that he and Ms. Black wrote a second set of Spiderwick books, which will be coming home from the library a few at a time for me and the kids.)

Today, though, I want to write about his juvenile sci-fi/fantasy novels, the WondLa trilogy. (They’re now available in paperback!)

The Overview
Stranger in a stranger land. A world full of aliens, exotic wildlife, and strange technology. Color art plates at the beginning of each chapter. A young protagonist who must save the world from itself while learning to understand her own power. Ecology. Third person limited point of view, with some important events happening off camera. Fairy tale elements combined seamlessly with sci-fi.

The Plot
Eva Nine lives underground with Muthr, her robot mother. An invader destroys the sanctuary and sets Eva on a course of discovery and self-discovery. She befriends an alien named Rovender Kitt, hears a prophecy, and finds her WondLa. In the subsequent volumes, she meets her people, tries to prevent a war, and eventually saves the world through bravery and kindness.

The Cool Thing to Consider
First, an aside: if I had tens of millions of dollars to throw at imaginary art projects, I would get Studio Ghibli and DiTerlizzi to make this trilogy into a movie. (It could be compressed into one or two movies without losing too much, I think.) It has the right environmental overtones, a young female protagonist, flying machines… The story sits comfortably in amongst Castle in the Sky, Nausicaa, Spirited Away, and Mononoke. It would be awesome. (And WondLa is probably easier to translate to an animated film than Spiderwick, which is both more baroque and somewhat more kid-centric.)

DiTerlizzi’s prose is functional, and comfortable in that functionality. WondLa’s plot is not twisty (though there are some nice reveals). The form and content of these books ground them in the “middle grades” fantasy category; they’re kids books. Like most good children’s books, though, there is substance enough in them for adult readers. (This is another thing WondLa has in common with Miyazaki.) There are, as you might expect from an illustrator, fantastic images. Some of them are literal images—DiTerlizzi’s illustrations are every bit as good as you’d expect. DiTerlizzi also creates some fine images with words. WondLa’s environment is visually and conceptually rich.

It would have been easy, I think, for the environment to overtake the story. It’s a common enough problem with worldbuilders. DiTerlizzi avoids the problem in part through his plotting, but mainly through his characterization. Orbona, the world of WondLa, is built on connections. Eva Nine is, especially at first, a stranger to those connections.

The cool thing is that DiTerlizzi introduces Eva to an environment of connected characters as well as a connected physical environment. All of the primary characters and most of the secondary ones have connections to the world. Some also have connections to each other. Eva is the protagonist. She gets to make the important decisions that resolve the novels’ plot. But! The other characters all clearly have places in the world independent of their relationship to the protagonist.

I mentioned in the overview that some important things happen off camera. That’s not an easy thing to pull off. In adventure stories, we never want to feel like the protagonist is ineffectual. She can be overmatched, but even her failures have to matter. In most stories, the things that matter happen to, for, and near the protagonist. Because DiTerlizzi has created a world of characters who exist independently Eva, that is not so vital. It’s not just Eva who has agency.

Secondary characters’ ability to exist and act independently of the protagonist depends on their full realization as individuals. We have to believe that the secondary characters can do things that influence the story. They must have depth and motivation. They don’t need Stephen Daedalus-level complexity, but they need something that makes them seem real. DiTerlizzi accomplishes that by giving most of the characters in WondLa backstory.  Eva never analyzes her friends, and the characters do not ramble through expositional monologues about their pasts. We get hints and pieces and occasional short explanations. Sometimes, characters who have deep connections talk to each other without involving Eva at all. (This works because…this is how people really interact with each other. Sometimes things are not about everybody sitting at the table.)

The result of all this is that we’re never jarred out of WondLa’s world. Because DiTerlizzi has so gracefully written the characters into their surroundings, it’s effortless for us readers to go through the story with them.

What We Nick from this Novel
You can characterize without psychologizing, especially if you anchor your characters in their worlds.
It’s a truism to say “everybody is the hero of her own story.” There’s no doubt that Eva Nine is the hero of the WondLa trilogy, but there’s a distinct sense that every character has his or her own story. Some, like Rovender Kitt, have stories in which Eva plays a major, personal part. Others, like the Queen, experience Eva as an oddity and force of nature intruding on their personal tales. Because all of the characters are anchored in their world, though, we can get a sense of them without further exposition.

DiTerlizzi shows us who characters are without worrying us overmuch about how they think. This is small but vital part of what gives WondLa the wings that let it soar.