The Green Kingdom - Cornelia Funke - ★★★.¼

AUTHOR: Cornelia Funke

GENRE: Middle-Grade Fiction

PUBLICATION DATE: April 1, 2025

RATING: 3.25 stars.

In a Nutshell: A middle-grade adventure mystery about some botanical wonders and some enigmatic old letters. Decent characters, excellent plant-related information, epistolary interludes, fun riddles, clunky plotting, too much of attraction/crush talk. I mistakenly assumed this to be a fantasy. Recommended to the target age group.

Plot Preview:

Twelve-year-old Caspia isn't happy when her parents tell her that they'll be spending the three months of summer in New York City. Caspia is not fond of big busy cities, and it's even worse to experience the New York heat after the cool Maine days. Things change when Caspia finds an old bundle of letters in their tiny new rental apartment. Probably belonging to the sisters who lived there long ago, each letter, written in the 1950s, contains a 'green' riddle with many clues and the answer always being from the plant kingdom. Summer suddenly becomes a lot more interesting for Caspia! But can she solve the riddles alone in an unfamiliar city without help?

The story comes to us in Caspia's third-person perspective.

I had heard a lot about this author's fantasy novels for middle-graders. That, combined with that eye-catching cover art, led me to assume that this was also a fantasy set in a “green kingdom”. 🤭 I'm a bit disappointed that my first experience of a fantasy author's works turned out to be a non-fantasy. So that's the first thing to remember if you intend to pick up this book merely by looking at the author’s name like I did: it's not a fantasy but a general adventure story.

Caspia is a fitting protagonist. She isn’t perfect, especially at the start when she whines too much at the thought of spending summer in a city. But her character shows positive growth over the course of the plot, like all good protagonists do. I especially like how she always kept her parents and their feelings in mind. Even when she was keeping the letters a secret, she felt guilty about not telling them right away. (She did have her reasons, and they were somewhat valid.) Further, she always kept her parents posted on wherever she was going. I love how she said that if her parents could keep her updated on where to get in touch with them if she needed them, then she too should do the same. This is something every tween/teen would do well to remember.

The usual theme in fiction is for city lovers to complain about having to spend time in the country with its fewer comforts and greater farm smells. The reverse was put to good use in this novel, with Caspia’s issues with the bustling city life always sounding genuine. I appreciate how the author didn’t indicate a direct preference towards which one is better. Rather, the ending establishes how we can make a home wherever we are. The open-mindedness towards new experiences is important.

Adventure stories are quite common in children’s fiction, but this one is a modern-day adventure. This means that whenever Caspia needs some information, she uses her phone to get in touch with her friends back home or searches the answers online. I miss the days when child protagonists uses their brains more than their devices to solve riddles. 😒 Still, this access to technology also creates one realistic positive: Caspia keeps regular contact with her Maine friends Laryssa and Elle (both of whom are lovely), unlike other books’ protagonists whose old friends go off page once new friends pop in. Of course, Caspia does find several new friends also in NYC. The balance between old and new is maintained well, and it is great to see Caspia’s rapport with each of her friend sets without any insecurity or jealousy. There is some token diversity across these characters, some of which feels forced.

The adult characters in the book, though fewer in number, are sketched well. Most are shown as responsible adults, which I really appreciate. It’s so tiresome to see untrustworthy adults in children’s fiction! Caspia’s mom shows a lot of enthusiasm towards new recipes, but she almost never made anything that sounded delectable to me. (Mushroom with cinnamon? Eeks! 😬) I found it odd how the mom, considering her tendency to cook new dishes from novelty cuisines, didn’t know the details of some basic spices Caspia learnt about from the riddles.

Considering how much of the plot is dependent on the location, NYC really shines in this book, even beyond Caspia’s complaints about its heat and its noise. The Brooklyn Botanic Garden has a wonderful role to play in the solving of the riddles. I loved reading about something other than Central Park for once! 😅

The best feature of the book is the old letters and the riddles they contain. I love that the author actually included the whole letter in the interlude chapters rather than offering us just some key snippets through Caspia’s perspective. The letters have a charm of their own. Though they are the only indicator we get of their writer’s personality, they help us create a decent picture of the kind of person she was. I wish we got to know more about them though. Some parts of their life left me with queries.

The riddles are mostly fun. As an Indian adult and an avid reader, almost all the riddles were easy for me and all of the plants, familiar. To US-based middle-graders, these riddles could definitely have presented a unique challenge. Unfortunately, there is barely any time of research and discovery. The answer to the riddles is provided instantaneously in most cases. I wish there had been at least a little time of suspense to allow young readers to discern the clues and make their guesses. Further, as the story develops mainly through Caspia’s opening of the letters one by one and going in search of the answer to the latest riddle, the book has an episodic feel to it, with each section having one letter, one riddle, and details on one new member of the green kingdom. This formula gets repetitive after a while.

That said, it is worth appreciating that all the riddles have their solutions in the “green kingdom”, i.e. in plants and trees. Plants don’t often get the focus they deserve, so it was good to see Caspia develop a new interest in them. Hopefully, young readers too will feel the same. The plant facts provided are outstanding.

(On an aside, I was quite surprised that Caspia aged almost-thirteen didn’t know some basic facts about plants such as about onions growing underground. We learn all that stuff here by grade 4!)

What bugged me the most was the unnecessary inclusion of the dating-related thoughts and lines about having “fluttery feelings in stomach”. 🙄 Why is middle-grade fiction normalising dating? Why are we letting kids feel like this is something they ought to do at this age? Kids are anyway overly exposed to sexualised content via other media. It is better that romance/attraction-related tropes are left for older-YA books. I would have let this go if it were just one passing mention, but such content came up too frequently for my taste.

Overall, this was a decent read, though not what I expected from my first Cornelia Funke book. The characters and the riddles combined with NYC charm make for a good one-time read.

A part of me still wishes this were a fantasy like the author’s other books so that I could have got a genuine experience of her forte. This felt like picking up a Stephen King work and finding a mellow romance instead of horror – it’s just not the same!

Recommended to nature-loving and fun-fact-loving middle-graders. Some middle-grade fiction is impressive enough to work for adults as well; this isn't one of them.

My thanks to DK Flip for providing the DRC of “The Green Kingdom” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.