Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes by Jonathan Auxier

The tale of Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes by Jonathan Auxier is a wonderfully unique one, filled to the brim with action and emotion. This novel is about a ten-year-old blind orphan named (you guessed it!) Peter Nimble. Peter has had a horribly hard and sorrowful life. When Peter was less than a year old, his eyes were pecked out by ravens. Then, he was forced to become a thief, living on the streets to have any chance to survive. However, Peter is a surprisingly good thief, as because he’s blind, his other senses are heightened. He can sense changes in the air and smell gold from miles away. Sadly, this doesn’t mean that Peter’s life is all jolly and well. Poor Peter was found by a terrible, terrible man named Mr. Seamus who makes him steal from hard-working people and give all the riches to him. He leaves Peter with leftover scraps of food and provides him a locked and dingy cement basement to live in, because that’s just what a ten-year-old needs. Peter doesn’t have any friends or any personal belongings besides his burgle sack. Just when things seem like they can’t get any worse, they get better. For a few days at least…

It all changes when Peter meets a haberdasher, a hat seller, on one of his robbing jobs. During the job with the haberdasher, Peter gets a mysterious tug begging him to rob one of the haberdasher’s boxes. Peter does, and when he returns home, he finds out that they are the best thing he could ever wish for, the thing he’s been missing for almost his entire life, the thing that could and will turn his life completely around. It’s a box of three pairs of fantastic, magical, eyes. Peter tries on the eyes and vanishes.

He reappears in a lake full of clinking bottles next to a cursed knight named Sir Tode. Peter climbs out of the lake, pulling Sir Tode with him, and sees the haberdasher once again. The haberdasher, named Mr. Pound introduces them to another inhabitant of the island, Professor Cake. Professor Cake was the creator of the fantastic eyes. Cake tells Peter about a note containing a mysterious rhyme, a plea for help from the Vanished Kingdom. Cake believes Peter to be the perfect candidate for the quest and gives Peter and Sir Tode some other magical items alongside the eyes to help them along the way. This adventure could certainly kill both Peter and Sir Tode, but it might also be the adventure that they’re looking for.

I enjoyed this book quite a bit. It wasn’t quite as good as Auxier’s other books, such as Sweep, but it was fairly enjoyable and definitely very unique. Peter was a very lonely child, and the thing he really needed the most was friends which he made along the way. Peter was always terribly lonely, so the journey really helped him as much as it helped the residents of the Vanished Kingdom. It was also incredibly fun to try and figure stuff out along with Peter during his mystery. I did actually figure some things out and I was very proud of myself. Pat on the back for me. This story was filled with loyalty, friendship, mystery, and last, but certainly not least, betrayal.