Lillian H. Smith Blog

If you like creepy, and have a fondness for fairy tales in their original, dark, twisted forms, then this is a book for you!  It's England, just before the Second World War.  David refuses to move on as quickly as his father does after his mother's death.  When his father remarries and a new baby comes along, David grows even more resentful and angry.  He starts to have episodes where he blacks out, and is certain he can hear the old books in his attic room whispering and speaking to him.  David's moodiness increases: he fights with Rose, his father's new wife, and wishes his brother was never born.  One night, he hears what sounds like his mother's voice coming from the sunken garden behind his house.  He walks into the garden just as a German bomber comes hurtling out of the sky, and barely manages to escape through a crack in the garden wall.  From there, things get stranger and stranger.  David finds himself in another world, full of dangers nightmarish yet vaguely familiar.  Werewolves, trolls, giant worms, knights, enchanted castles, bizarre human-animal hybrids, and a crooked little man.  The story roars along, full of satisfying conflict and little side-eddys of tales that all eventually lead back to the urgent conclusion.  John Connelly's book reminded me of some of the stories written by the character of Olive Wellwood in A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book.  When innocence is lost on the cusp of adolescence, some may enter the dark warrens of their imagination, never to return.