Children’s fantasy books aren’t my usual thing, but after sticking with a couple of TV series only to have them turn WAY too dark for my liking, someone suggested A Leap Into Darkness as a sunny change of pace and, well, I leapt.
I am glad I did. I knew from the book’s cover that the story’s hero was a dog, and when I saw a map to Leap’s whereabouts after the table of contents, it reminded me of Richard Adams’s Watership Down, which features a cast of rabbits and was my favorite book as an adolescent; as a young child, my favorite book was Beverly Cleary’s Mouse and the Motorcycle. With those old classics in mind, I was prepared for Leap to be a massive disappointment and frankly imagined putting the book down after a chapter or two.
Instead I was surprised, at times delighted and even amazed, and finished Leap in two nights.
In terms of the book’s suitability for age and the gravity of its themes, Ray Petrolino’s A Leap Into Darkness sits somewhere between Mouse and the Motorcycle and Watership Down. It is easy to imagine Leap being turned into a movie, as were both Watership and Mouse (though I never saw the latter). Leap is a strongly visual read, which is one of the reasons I couldn’t put it down.
The vast majority of the story finds our canine hero Jake living with his royal family in a castle, though quite importantly the royal family is Jake’s second; the few early, quick chapters beforehand with Jake’s first family are important both to our hero’s character and to our empathy for him; Jake wasn’t born into privilege but rather into the day-to-day struggles that families would face in 1588, when the story was set and when the middle class as we know it didn’t exist. Jake almost certainly came from a serf’s background.
It’s that background—Jake’s “real” upbringing—that separates him throughout the story from his castle-mates. There’s an independent streak inside Jake that’s either weak or missing altogether from other characters born into the home of the king, though Petrolino does a superb job of portraying Jake without a hint of arrogance or defensiveness; the dog never once falls back on any mean-streets-of-Gorseland schtick, though there are ample occasions to do so. Instead Jake genuinely cares for his fellow animals and especially for James and Janice, the respective son and daughter in the royal family.
It is also Jake’s background, one feels, that give rise to the story’s central conflict, centered around a wizard, Beezeldorn. To pretty much everyone but Jake—at least at first—the wizard is a miracle worker. For Jake there is something very off about Beezeldorn, something ominous. It is a visceral reaction that’s all too familiar. But Jake trusts his gut throughout, even though there is plenty of very human self-doubt as well, and this self-doubt…. well, it dogs Jake again and again.
Things don’t go Jake’s way most of the time, but he stays true to himself and takes his allies where he can find them, however unlikely those allies might seem at first. The book’s hero, in other words, is believable at the same time he’s successful in the things that matter.
It’s truly a wonderful book. It’s not perfect, of course, but, man… BRAVO, Petrolino—I hope you follow A Leap Into Darkness up with many more books!
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From the Publisher
2023 Readers' Favorite Silver Medal Winner
Readers' Favorite is proud to announce that "A Leap into Darkness" by Ray Petrolino won the Silver Medal in the Children - Preteen category.
"...an enjoyable and exciting read about a thoroughly enchanting little dog." —The Children's Book Review, 2022
"...we will add this book to the library's collection!" —Wake County Public Libraries (NC, USA), 2022
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