I found this story very imaginative and fun. The main character is a shifter. He finds out in the first couple of pages that he is from another planet and must return home after all these years. When he is presented to the King he is informed that the pirates are taking over and making areas of the world that are becoming like erased and no contact can be made with the people that live there and they have to be stopped before the blackness takes over the whole planet.
As a shifter he has the ability to change forms into pretty much anything that he is thinking about and has to undergo training to stabilize his thinking and maintain his magical powers. He is told that his parents are still alive and his shifter powers are possibly the most powerful that anybody has ever seen. He just maybe the key to saving the planet and finding his parents.
There was a lot of descriptions and world-building so even middle grade readers will need to have a good attention span as there is not a lot of action in the book, but mostly imagery, magic and has a good theme to the ending that is thought provoking and good a discussion topic.