Think the Ministry of Magic, except book magic.
Tilly’s grandparents take the two children to the British Underlibrary, the large and magical library in charge of monitoring the practice of British bookwandering. Eventually, her grandparents reveal that she comes from a long line of “bookwanderers:” essentially, people who read so intensely that they can magically travel into books (or pull characters out of books) while reading them. She also discovers that she can travel into books with the characters – and she can bring Oskar with her. After Tilly tentatively befriends Oskar, the boy across the street, she notices characters from her favorite children’s books mysteriously appearing in the shop as she reads. So, you know, the usual middle grade fantasy stuff. Tilly has never known her father, and her mother mysteriously disappeared years ago under circumstances that her grandparents refuse to discuss. Specifically in said bookshop, Pages & Co.) (Did I mention I want to live in this book? I want to live in this book. The novel follows Tilly Pages, a young girl who lives with her loving grandparents, who live next door to the family’s London bookshop, which sounds like the most wondrously cozy bookshop in the history of ever. Which probably explains why I loved it so much, considering that living in books is the whole point of this book. It’s about feeling.Īnd that feeling? That bubbly, happy sensation of encountering a fun story about a whimsical, alternate version of our reality in which magic exists? In which you wish you could just lose yourself forever? The same feeling that many people – not everyone, certainly, but lots of us – felt when reading the Harry Potter books for the first time? Reading The Bookwanderers was like that for me. Beyond looking at sales numbers, finding that new special series is going to be an individual thing.
Of course, somebody somewhere has labeled every middle grade fantasy series written in the past two decades “the new Harry Potter,” and often that seems like a stretch.
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