Another post of catching up to the Fantasy Forest series that fell by the wayside while doing this project and we get to Shadowcastle. An interesting book in this kid series for a couple of reasons. For one it has an explicitly female hero, Molly which was pretty uncommon for these TSR gamebooks, with the exception of the HeartQuest series which was directed at young women.

Another thing that makes this volume interesting is the fact that it establishes a wider Fantasy Forest universe by bringing back characters from the previous book, Ruins of Rangar. Both Nightshade the skeleton wizard (more like a Lich, but this is a kid’s book) and Sir Gregor, the brother of the main character in Ruins of Ragnar. Here Gregor is still fighting Nightshade and our characters kind of tag along to save Molly’s friend and the brother of a halfling she just met. 

In terms of art  we get a really good Clyde Caldwell cover, but then are really let down by the Mario Macari Jr. art on the inside, which feels very out of place, but with a couple of drawings that get to that “so bad it’s good” point, the golem and the minotaur being two of my favorites.