“And what she read came to be all around them, until the bed was like a boat in a river of flowers. They were surrounded by plants of all kinds and colors, both those described in the book and many more besides them.”
The Lost Fairy Tales, Anna James, 2020
Tilly, Oskar, and the Pages family continue their bookwandering adventures in this second installment from Anna James. Like many second books in a series, The Lost Fairy Tales feels like a setup for a proper series, with ongoing animosities and unresolved mysteries and what have you, whereas last year’s The Bookwanderers felt more like a delicious slice of bibliophilic bliss. (Guess it’s probably easier to take chances once your publisher knows that enough people already love your book to keep buying beyond a one-off.) I didn’t feel quite as enamored with this one as I did with the first, but considering just how enamored I felt about the first, that’s not too strong a complaint.
the story
Lost Fairy Tales starts off pretty much where Bookwanderers ended: Tilly’s mother, Bea, is back in the real world after years trapped in a book, while Enoch Chalk has disappeared and the Underlibrary remains in an uproar. Friend of the family and Head Librarian Amelia is forced to resign over the Enoch Chalk scandal, only to be replaced by a man named Melville Underwood. Underwood seems nice, which means he’s probably sinister – as proven shortly thereafter when he bans the Pages from the Underlibrary and attempts (unsuccessfully) to place tracers on Tilly and Oskar.
[FROM HERE THERE BE SPOILERS. YE HAVE BEEN WARNED.]
Back at home, Tilly begins showing signs of rebellious teenagerdom, and Bea continues to struggle with readjusting to her new life. The Pages agree that Tilly should accompany Oskar to spend a few days in Paris with his family over the Christmas holiday. While in Paris, our intrepid heroes break their promise not to bookwander by wandering into books of fairy tales (a notoriously dangerous thing to do) with Oskar’s cool bookwandering grandmother and her mysterious bookwanderer friend, Gretchen. Gretchen happens to have been former partners with Tilly’s grandmother doing research on fairy tales for the British Underlibrary, before they had a mysterious falling out.
Through a series of adventures in fairy tales, Tilly and Oksar discover that someone has begun to collapse fairy tales from the inside, making them even more unstable and dangerous places to wander than before. They also meet a devious set of twins who may be in league with Enoch Chalk. Once again, its up to our favorite young book wanderers to bring the truth to light.
the babble
Just like in the first book, there’s so much to love here. Hats off to James for bringing some political overtones into a book geared toward the middle grade age: maybe it’s just me, but I thought I caught a whiff of Brexit-style nationalism in Underwood’s “British Underlibrary for British bookwanderers” election speech. Not to mention that Underwood clearly rises to power in the Underlibrary by taking advantage of a time filled with panic and promising to crack down on scary outside forces. That’s heavier stuff for the 8-12 age set, and James sprinkles it in without lecturing to her readers or dumbing anything down. (That said, the younger end of the middle grade age range might find the first few chapters, focused on the election and Underlibrary bureaucracy, a bit more boring compared to the last novel? Your mileage may vary.)
There are also plenty of book wandering adventures to savor here – and I might be slightly biased, because this novel involves travel to my two favorite children’s classics growing up, The Secret Garden and The Wind in the Willows. I wasn’t that crazy about The Little Princess or Anne of Green Gables as a kid, so while I delighted in Tilly’s journeys to those books in the first novel, those trips didn’t make me gasp with happiness the way these did. I particularly love the way that Lost Fairy Tales uses The Secret Garden as a way to delicately explore Bea’s depression, just like the garden works for Colin and Archibald in the original story itself. The scene in which Tilly sits reading the book as a “bedtime story” to her mother and pulls Mary’s garden into the room with them, surrounding the bed with flowers, might be my favorite scene from entire series.
Unfortunately, most of the book wandering in this story takes place in disintegrating fairy tales, which results in lots of humorous “fractured fairy tale” scenes. For younger readers encountering this type of thing for the first time, James does a great job, and they’ll probably love it. For me (admittedly not the target audience for this book), having read/watched/been in musical versions of plenty of comedic fairy tale riffs before, I found these parts of the novel less interesting than other book wandering adventures because it felt so familiar to me.
Also less interesting to me were the new Big Bads. Enoch Chalk made for such a great villain, and I’m sorry to see him go, because his motivations were relatable: the guy wanted a life outside of a book that no one had ever read, and he went to extreme lengths to achieve that goal. In comparison, our new Big Bads want book magic for immortality and…world domination, or something? Power in general? The usual stuff, I guess. Way less interesting.
But these are quibbles. I’m still in love with this series and I eagerly await the next book.
rating
*** out of 4
random babble
- I mentioned it briefly above, but I love how James handles Bea’s depression, her trauma, and her readjustment to life outside of a book. It makes sense that she would be wary of bookwandering and might have a hard time connecting with Tilly, through no fault of her own.
- Damn, Chalk’s death is horrific. James uses some effective, creepy imagery in that sequence. I also love the moment of character development in which Tilly recognizes that she could bring down Underwood by vouching for Chalk, yet can’t bring herself to help Chalk in any way.
- I’m so glad James has made Oskar a bookwanderer by lineage, too, and gives him a chance to be excited about it. He deserves to be a bookwanderer in his own right, not just a sidekick.
- Look, I know the book keeps joking about this as a lame, safe outing for training bookwanderers, but I will gladly go have a picnic on the riverbank with Ratty and Mole from Wind in the Willows anytime. ANY. TIME.
Bookshelves & Babble 