The Wrinkled Crown by Anne Nesbet.
Time Stoppers by Carrie Jones.

The “wrinkled” or magical mountain village of Lourka where “stories have a way of coming true.”

A twelve year old girl named Linny who breaks the law and makes her own musical instrument, also called a lourka.

Linny’s best friend and almost twin, Sayra, who pays the price for Linny’s rule-breaking.

Add in the apprentice, Elias, a wrinkled half-cat, and the city of Bend at the foot of the mountains where the people are divided between wrinkled and plain, magical and logical, tradition and progress. Linny must find the medicine in Bend that will cure Sayra, but she also runs into numerous other obstacles and diversions that take her into danger, conflict, and finally, a very hard decision. Will she be able to take the medicine back to Lourka to cure Sayra, or is she the prophesied Girl With the Lourka who must stay in Bend and save everyone?

I found this story slow going, and by the time the action picked up in the middle, I still didn’t really care about the characters. And the ending was . . . weird, probably a set-up for a sequel. Which I probably won’t read. However, if the synopsis of the first part of the novel sounds like something you would enjoy, you might get more out of it than I did.

Time Stoppers features another magical village in the mountains where magical creatures like elves and dwarfs and hags and witches go to be safe. They are protected by a garden gnome. Yes, a magical garden gnome statue protects the village of Aurora until it is stolen by trolls. And little Annie Nobody is the child who is destined to be a Time Stopper, find the gnome, bring it back to Aurora, and defeat the evil Each Uisge and the Raiff. With her friend Jamie, the dwarf fighter Eva, and the elf Bloom, Annie does manage to complete some, but not all, of those tasks, leaving plenty of room for Time Stoppers, Book Two.

The action in this one was non-stop, but the whole thing was an outlandish caricature from the beginning. The bad guys, trolls, are horribly, outrageously bad. They eat children, but also before they chow down, they abuse them, refuse to feed them, send them out to sleep with the dogs/wolves, make them smell underwear(?), cackle at them, insult them, etc. The trolls are ridiculously bad, almost laughable, but then they’re not really funny because they are abusive in ugly, bad-parent ways. And the good magical beings of Aurora also behave in outsized, but stereotypical ways. Eva is a loudmouthed, battle-hungry, boastful, warrior maiden. Bloom is quietly strong and spends most of his time annoyed with Eva, which is understandable. Annie and Jamie are bewildered and timid, just happy to find themselves in Aurora where the trolls can’t get them, until the trolls, and other creatures even worse, invade. Then, Annie and Jamie are told that they must be brave.

The Wrinkled Crown felt dream-like (Alice in Wonderland) and over-wrought, with too many directions for Linny to follow and too many tasks to complete. Time Stoppers felt grotesque and buffoonish, slapstick but not very funny. Kirkus says about The Wrinkled Crown: “With hints of a sequel to come, this agreeable adventure introduces an appealing, spunky heroine and sets the stage for more conflict and compromise to come.” And SLJ called Time Stoppers: “”An imaginative blend of fantasy, whimsy, and suspense, with a charming cast of underdog characters.”

I just don’t think either of these is the best middle grade fantasy has to offer.