Today's Checklist Progress

Further to yesterday's post about all the things I need to do to get moving on, er, moving...

Today I contacted the veterinarians in the community I am moving to and collected information about where I can board my cats, if I can't immediately find a place that will accept pets; whether they board pets, what it would cost, etc. Then I arranged to have my kitty's (Sinead) and puss's (Tyrone) vaccination records faxed to the place from their primary care vet.

I used the local ads classified "for rent" to look up the phone numbers of a couple of prospective landlords. Tried reaching one and left a voice mail at an office that is only open Thursdays and part of Friday. Called another and actually heard a busy signal for the first time in so many years that I could hardly believe my ears. On a cell phone, the sound effect comes with a cute little animation that I have never seen before.

I went to my apartment complex's leasing office and submitted a form announcing my intention to move out, effective at the end of the month. The bookkeeper gave me a tentative figure for the buyout on my lease and the kind of payment plan I could use to make it a little less ruinous. Reader, I'm four months into my current lease, but if I make the minimum payment each month I will still be paying off the buyout at this time next year.

Baby steps, and not very many of them, but there's only so much business you can accomplish at the end of a hard day's work... And my work so far this week has accomplished little more than to make me relish the new career path opening before me. God be praised!

Big Changes Coming

The times, they are a-changing. This blog will be a-changing soon. Since February 2007, is has been subtitled "Theology, Art, Entertainment, and Cat Litter in St. Louis, USA." That will be the first obvious change. By the end of the month, for starters, I will be writing it from a different location. And that's because, for the first time since 2006, I will be moving to a different town. This is going to feel weird. I've never stayed in one place nearly as long as I've been here.

My Book Trolley reviews originally ended with the byline "Robbie Fischer, Arizona USA." I started writing editorials and reviews for MuggleNet in 2003, while living in Yuma, Arizona. After 2005 "Arizona" changed to "St. Louis," more or less. There was that one awkward year in the bedroom community of Washington, Missouri, before I took the plunge into the city itself. And then there was one eensy, weensy move, five buildings down the street, when my apartment complex bribed me to shift quarters so they could turn my first St. Louis pad into a model apartment. I had started this blog by then. I remember apologizing for being out of touch while moving. That was in the era when I averaged more than one post per day.

Now things may slow down even a bit more. The art and entertainment threads in my existence may not be as robust as they have been before now. I may never again be involved in classical music at the level I have been since moving to St. Louis. It really saddens me to contemplate the end of my nine-season stint with the Saint Louis Symphony Chorus, the nearly three seasons I participated in the Bach at the Sem program, and many of the other cultural perks of living in this town. I will have to travel a lot farther to take in live performances of music, other than at a high school level. Opportunities to play the organ in church, or to sing and play the piano at social gatherings, may also lie somewhat thinner on the ground. I already regret taking for granted the art museums, theaters, and opera companies that I rarely or never patronized when my future seemed to bode of St. Louis forever.

I'm also a little concerned about my cats. I'm not sure what I'll do with them. I don't know what I would do without them. I seem to have two weeks to find either a place to live that will accept pets, or a place for them to live without me. Yikes.

Steps I have taken so far:

• I gave my two-week notice at work.
• I reserved a U-haul moving van.
• I put in at the post office for a change of mailing address.
• I sent my regrets for the foreseeable future to the two choruses in which I had planned to sing this fall.

Steps I still need to take:

• I need to work things out with my current landlord regarding the remainder of my lease.
• I need to get hustling on finding a new apartment that allows pets and charges less rent than where I live now. I can stay with my parents for a little bit, but the littler the better.
• I need to have the utilities in my apartment taken out of my name.
• I need to update my billing address with everybody who is either sending me money or demanding that I send them money—lenders, insurance providers, etc.
• I need to pick up moving supplies and start getting my stuff packed up.
• I will need to clean this place, and organize my junk, and throw a way a lot of it.
• I will need to turn in all my work-related equipment and materials to my outgoing employer.
• I will need to figure out my approach to the problem of church membership. Enough said for now.
• And then it's only a little matter of picking up the truck, packing up the truck, driving, driving, driving, unpacking, and dropping off the truck.

Whew! Do I really want to do this? Yes, I'm afraid I do. In fact, I'm scared witless that I do. The reason I'm moving is that I've been offered a chance to do something that I started preparing to do at least as far back as the fifth grade. I'm going to be writing for, and eventually editing, a weekly newspaper: The Morgan County Press of Stover, Missouri, population 1,000. I also get to live within a few minutes' drive of my parents for the first time in my adult life. In fact, Dad will be working in the same office, editing the weekly Versailles Leader-Statesman, which is owned by the same publisher. I have a lot of reasons to be excited about this. Though I'm not looking at a big pay rise—indeed, in hourly terms, it's quite the opposite—the full-timeness of the job fills a need I have been struggling with since I left my previous position at a periodical, a year and a half ago. And I am hopeful that I'll be able to set myself up in a more affordable lifestyle, better suited to my current means.

But what really has me excited, what has kept my mind jumping night and day since I learned about the opening just last Thursday (and submitted my resume immediately, and interviewed for it on Monday, and was offered the job the same day), is that I get to live by the sweat of my gray cells and the blood of my pen. I get to make good on the promise that I made to myself when I published the class newspaper in fifth grade, and studied journalism in high school, and either contributed to or edited all the school newspapers and literary magazines at every level of academia from high school through seminary, and went to college on a journalism scholarship, and kept a handwritten journal for a decade just to stay in shape as writer, and thought I was going to be a professional writer someday. This will be my first opportunity to do regularly remunerative writing, after a dozen unsold novels, a massive album of unsellable poetry, eight years of doing everything except writing at a magazine, and eleven years of prolifically contributing to a Harry Potter fansite that has so far paid me exactly $50 and one collectible magic wand. Actually, the $50 was a prize for guessing closest to the date the "Diagon Alley" theme park was going to open. So what I'm saying is, I get to do for a living what I've been doing for love all my life. Isn't that cool?

Once Upon Stilettos

Once Upon Stilettos
by Shanna Swendson
Recommended Ages: 14+

It's been quite a few years since I read Enchanted, Inc. because, frankly, I'm a guy and chick lit isn't my thing. But it was such a funny and magical book that continuing with the series has often been on my mind. And now I find that the Katie Chandler series has grown to seven books. Based on the adventures of a Texas belle who finds adventure, romance, and professional fulfillment in New York, it combines the appeal of a Sex and the City spoof with the charm of a modern, urban fairy tale.

After a rocky first year in the Big Apple, Katie has a great job that relies on her ability to see through magical deceptions and glamors. Her company is called Magic, Spells, and Illusions. It sells its wares to the wizards, fairies, sprites, and other magical beings who call New York home. As executive assistant to the CEO, she reports directly to Merlin himself. Every day she works with women who wear wings, a giantess, an ogre, a talking frog, gnomes, gargoyles, you name it. The fact that she sees them for what they are, and can spot traps and stealth attacks by magic, makes her services to the company invaluable. But that doesn't change the fact that the guy of her dreams only seems to think of her as a friend, possibly a kind of sister figure. Nor does it stop her boyfriend, who also happens to be immune to magic, from dumping her because she is too grounded, too normal. It's got to be disenchanting to know that what makes you special is your complete lack of enchantment.

But then trouble starts to brew. First comes the evidence that somebody at MSI is spying for their nerdy nemesis, Phelan Idris. Katie is put in charge of the investigation, and part of her mission is to restore team morale when distrust and jealousy threaten to bring productivity to a standstill. Another part is to find out which of her co-workers, possibly even a close friend, is working with Idris. Meanwhile, she has to fend off a series of magical attacks, ranging from mildly irritating to downright dangerous, that always seem to target her during an evening out with her young man. Add to that the challenge of keeping her parents ignorant of the existence of magic during a week-long visit, even though Mrs. Chandler proves as immune to magic as her daughter, and Katie's ability to manage crises is strained to the limit. What a perfect time, then, for her to lose her one and only super-power: her immunity to magic!

Katie worries that without her special abilities, she will be of no use to MSI. So she hopes her condition is temporary, while struggling to seem normal amid a world that has gone crazy in a totally new way (for her). The office letch, who never struck her as particularly attractive while she could see through his sex-appeal spell, suddenly becomes irresistible. The security gargoyles tasked with her protection, have become invisible. The constant magical attacks targeting her, are starting to hit their target, since she not only can't see them coming, but can take real damage when they hit. Even her footwear turns against her, part of a magically powered master-plan that you'll probably have figured out before Katie and her dreamboat co-worker Owen do. There are certainly plenty of hints leading up to the crisis when, one cold December night, she finds herself alone outdoors, under-dressed, under attack, and in danger of losing her life, her mind, or her heart.

Though Katie's adventures are sometimes a little on the chilling side, their overall tone is light and sparkly, like the kind of wine served in a flute. You can sympathize with her heartaches and worries as a single girl who isn't getting any younger, knowing that she has found Mr. Right but seemingly unable to make him notice her. It is easy to enjoy her touched-by-magic take on the urban professional world, taken with her self-deprecating wit and her no-nonsense sleuthing skills. As for New York City, its taboo against noticing the people you meet on the street, no matter how oddly they may look or behave, makes it the perfect place for fairy-land to hide in plain sight.

Texas native Shanna Swendson also writes romance novels under the pen name Samantha Carter (no relation to the character on Stargate SG-1). Her other titles in the "Katie Chandler" or "Enchanted, Inc." series include Damsel Under Stress, Don't Hex with Texas, Much Ado About Magic, No Quest for the Wicked, and Kiss and Spell.

Deeply Odd

Deeply Odd
by Dean Koontz
Recommended Ages: 14+

He still keeps saying, "I'm just a fry-cook," even though it's been nineteen months since he last wielded a spatula in anger. During that time, he has followed the tug of his psychic senses from one horrific ordeal to another. He has stopped mass-murders before they happened. He has staved off a nuclear apocalypse, canceled an alien invasion, and unpicked a snarl in the fabric of space-time. He has exterminated nests of serial killers, rescued kidnapping victims from demonic villains and their undead minions, and helped the restless spirits of the dead move on to the next big thing. He has accepted help from spunky old ladies, protected the lives of innocent children, and in all probability, saved the world. But he doesn't like to think of himself as anything more than a humble fry-cook. It's one of the things we love about Odd Thomas.

And it's a good thing we love him so much. Otherwise we wouldn't want to keep going to the places where his Spidey sense takes him. In this volume of his ongoing adventures, Mr. Fry-Cook-Who-Sees-Dead-People gets mixed up with a truck driver who is hell on wheels. (I know, I know.) Besides dressing like a Rhinestone Cowboy and driving a rig that looks like a mobile summoning circle for a demonic entity of breathtaking power—oops! spoiler!—this trucker is somehow involved in the kidnapping of seventeen children in the southwestern U.S. Among the first-time experiences Oddie collects from their encounter is a waking premonition that Mr. Rhinestone Cowboy will be involved in the horrific murder of those children. Another first is discovering the ability to travel between our world and another dimension, which Odd aptly names Elsewhere: a formless place filled not so much with things as with the idea of things. Elsewhere, in turn, proves to be a bridge between our world and a nameless place of horror and darkness, where something dwells that wants to eat Odd's face off, just for starters. The third and final first, if you'll pardon my oxymoron, has to do with the rule that spirits of the dead don't talk. Sure, they don't. Until now.

That should be enough to bring you along for the ride when Odd, a little old lady with a stretch Mercedes limo, and a famous filmmaker who is looking awfully perky for having died in 1980, follow a trail of psychic clues, and arm themselves with some very solid weaponry, before joining the regularly scheduled scene of horror and vileness in the mountains outside Las Vegas. Plan for gouts of blood, hideous death spasms, long stretches of agonizing suspense, and furious struggles for life and death using guns, blades, and the occasional well-tossed piece of fruit. Then adjust your diet accordingly.

This is one of the Odd Thomas novels, but which one is it? Clearly it takes place after Odd Apocalypse and before the most recently published book in the series, Saint Odd. According to Fantastic Fiction, that makes this the sixth novel in the series. By my reckoning, however, it's the seventh—because, unlike Fantastic Fiction, I consider Odd Interlude part of the series rather than a separate entity. The fact that it was originally published as a three-part e-book no longer has any relevance, now that it also exists as a one-volume paperback. The author's own listing makes the matter even more complex, because he includes the graphic novels In Odd We Trust, Odd Is On Our Side, and House of Odd in the sequence, though they are in a different medium, are co-written by other authors, and are partly a reworking of previous books. So, going by one list of the Odd Thomas canon, I skipped over three books to read this one; and by another list, I've read one book too many. So be it. From the top, with feeling: This is the seventh old-school novel in the Odd Thomas series, in canon and publication order, entirely written by Dean Koontz. Disagree with me at your own risk.

Disagreements are an occupational hazard among readers of Dean Koontz's most successful series. I have already mentioned a reader who commented on one of my earlier reviews, stating that she liked the series but, at the same time, hated the right-wing politics to which Koontz gives increasing bookspace. Yes, he says some things that sound like libertarian and Tea Party chatting points, such as rattling off statistics about which government agencies recently bought how many rounds of ammunition. Koontz concludes that our country's leaders may be arming themselves for a civil war. At the same time, the conclusion he wants us to draw is not that we should take the war to them, but that changes in our society's values over the past few generations will soon make such a conflict inevitable. Simply put, the evil that lurks in human nature is breaking loose. A battle between good and evil, a spiritual battle, is daily becoming less the stuff of fantasy novels and more the stuff of everyday life. Monsters are real and there has never been a greater danger that they will destroy our world. Democrat or Republican, libertarian or progressive, you should consider the evidence of that, which Odd Thomas soulfully narrates. The specific battles he fights are fiction. The battleground is the real world we live in.

Most celebrities, journalists, and politicians these days are steering the ideology of our culture in one particular direction. Koontz is one of a view voices crying out to turn another way. It may be a conservative direction, in the sense of being an old way from which a more enlightened age might want to turn. It may be conservative rather in the sense that it aims to pull our world back from a precipice toward which it is bound. Should we close our ears and shout down the voices that call out to us from a path other than the wide crowded road? Should we hate and wish into silence the thinkers and thoughts that deviate from the party line of our time? In my parents' generation and for some time before it, the enlightened class insisted on hearing the views of transgressive thinkers. Now, as my generation comes into its power, those thinkers have staked out their claim in the mind of our society and posted "No Trespassing" signs. I, for one, don't care what wing today's offbeat thinkers supposedly hang out on. I think we should thank them for giving us a different point of view on our world, to rattle the mental chains that we do not realize we are wearing, to challenge the assumptions that blinker our perspective. And we should be more ready to consider ideas that add meaning to our existence, than to dismiss them.

In this book, Odd Thomas is a character struggling to process new information that could radically alter his world-view. He isn't ready yet to deal with their full implications. He is a thoughtful character, honest enough to admit that there are some things about which he has not been honest with himself. In this book, he reaches a crucial point of balance, a tipping point toward accepting a new and awful truth about the world and his place in it. Because I happen to be reading this series alongside F. Paul Wilson's Repairman Jack novels, I am struck by the coincidence that both characters—though different in so many ways, in spite of their ruggedly independent nature—are reaching the same tipping point in the books where I last left them: the point of accepting that evil is not just an abstract idea, but a living power, personified in an Enemy or Adversary against whom every human being must fight. And in each series of books, the hero is one of a handful of people called to stand against that Enemy in an especially significant way. Each installment brings them closer to that head-on confrontation that must finally come. Each adventure prepares them a little more. Saving the world isn't just something you get up and do. It is, in the experience of Odd Thomas as well as Repairman Jack, something you are brought to. Until we see the full design, we readers will be held enthralled.

The Wizard in the Tree

The Wizard in the Tree
by Lloyd Alexander
Recommended Ages: 12+

If Chocolate Frogs Famous Wizard Cards featured beloved wizards from the pages of literature, you know there would be a card each for J. K. Rowling's Dumbledore, and Tolkien's Gandalf, and Peter Beagle's Schmendrick, and John Bellairs' Prospero... I've already got quite a long list in mind. Now that I've read this brief book by the Newbery Medal and National Book Award winning author of the Prydain Chronicles, I have another name to add to that list: Arbican. He doesn't do much magic in this book, and most of what he does goes wrong, and on first acquaintance he may seem a bit brusque and grumpy, not very lovable at all. But in the last few pages of this book, he earns his Chocolate Frog Card, wands down. In fact, for the sake of one paragraph, a single speech in which he finally sets straight what is and isn't true about fairy tales, he's a shoe-in.

We first find Arbican—and by "we" I mean a young kitchen drudge named Mallory—glaring balefully out of the middle of a felled tree trunk. He's been in there an awfully long time, due to a magical mishap that only released him when the tree's life ended. As soon as Mallory busts him out of the dead trunk, he means to set off for the Vale Innis, that far-away country to which all the enchanters retired long ago when the magic went out of the world. He has just this little problem: he seems to have lost his powers. Even after they start to come back, his efforts to do magic fizzle quickly. He tries to turn himself into a horse, for example, and becomes a stag instead. He unintentionally becomes a pig, then cannot change back—even when a farmer threatens to turn him into bacon and ham. If only he can find a circle of gold, he may get all his powers back.

Mallory would really like to help him. In fact, she often seems to care about Arbican more than he deserves. While he is absorbed in his own problems, she has to deal with the hard-handed mistress at the cookshop, the crooked squire of the Holdings, a greedy gamekeeper, and a murder mystery that puts both girl and wizard in deadly danger. Too often, the only thanks she receives is to be crisply informed that everything she learned about wizards from her mother's fairy tales is wrong. Wish granting? Phooey. Powerful spells? Meh. Riding on broomsticks? Not so much. What Arbican slowly leads Mallory to understand—just as he slowly reveals the warmth and affection hidden under his crusty exterior—is that the magic that really matters is what people do for themselves, when they wish for something hard enough to do what needs to be done.

Lloyd Alexander's books, mainly fantasy novels for young readers, sound the depths of folklore from many cultures. In a 52-year writing career (from 1955 until his death in 2007) he wrote some of the most movingly beautiful stories I have ever read—fiction that is powerfully lyrical, dramatic, and epic at the same time. He is simply one of the best. The list of his books that I have read is long, but the list of those I have yet to read is even longer. I have not touched one page of his Westmark trilogy or his Vesper Holly sextet. More of his titles that I intend to find and explore include The Cat Who Wished to Be a Man, The First Two Lives of Lukas-Kasha, Gypsy Rizka, and The Gawgon and the Boy.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: The Magical Car
by Ian Fleming
Recommended Ages: 10+

We've run into this problem before: First it was a novel. Then it was adapted, more successfully than faithfully, into a movie. Then came a film novelization, a novel designed to be more faithful to the movie than the movie was to the original novel. They did it to Pierre Boulle's Planet of the Apes. More recently, it happened to Cressida Cowell's How to Train Your Dragon. It even happened to another book by Ian Fleming. And so your dilemma is this: which book do you buy or borrow, to read or give to your kids? Which counts as the classic?

Far be it from me to condemn film moguls for milking every penny they can out of their film rights. If the industry didn't make them sickeningly rich, they wouldn't feel keen to take risks on big, exciting, new movies. But from a book lover's point of view, it does make me a mite mopey to see the original author's labor of love shunted into a side-line, overshadowed by the multimedia empire that grew out of it. It's an especially melancholy matter to muse on in the case of this book, which Ian Fleming—creator of the 100-million-plus-copies-selling James Bond series of novels, also better known today from the film franchise it inspired—wrote on his deathbed as a present for his little boy. The only children's book he ever wrote, it was published two months after Fleming's death in 1964. Four years later it became a hit movie with a screenplay co-written by Roald Dahl. Then somebody turned the screenplay into a novel, and that was published too. And though it's a pretty safe bet that the film novelization is no longer in print, you can now enjoy at least three recent sequels to Fleming's book written by Frank Cottrell Boyce. So if you want to read the classic children's book that started it all, you'll have to choose carefully.

The original book by Ian Fleming introduces us to the "crackpot" Pott family: Commander Caractacus Pott, a retired naval officer who now makes a meager living as a freelance explorer and inventor; his long-suffering wife Mimsie; and their good-natured twin children, Jeremy and Jemima. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in a book written by a Dad who was also the creator of James Bond, most of the personality in the family goes to Caractacus. After he invents a new kind of candy and sells it to the local sweet-maker for a tidy sum, he buys a one-of-a-kind old racing car and rebuilds it in his inventing shed. Even in pieces, the old girl seems to have a mind of her own, making modifications to her own design while Pott is looking the other way. Once she is finished, the family takes her out for a spin and discovers that Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (as she names herself, after the noises she makes when starting) really has more under the hood (or rather, bonnet) than anyone expected.

Yes, she can drive really fast. But Chitty Chitty Bang Bang can also fly like an aeroplane, and float like a speed-boat. Though even Caractacus Pott doesn't know the purpose of all the levers and knobs on her dashboard, he soon learns well enough to obey when a light flashes at him saying, "PULL"—and to do it promptly, before another light adds, "IDIOT." With one surprising feat after another, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang saves her family from being stuck in traffic, from drowning at high tide, and from becoming part of the evil plans of a gang of robbers led by Joe the Monster. The kids get a chance to show some independent character when they are kidnapped by Joe and his goons. But thanks to the latest addition to their family, everything turns out well.

The edition I read was part of a new imprint that was evidently designed to go with Cottrell Boyce's sequels. So it shouldn't be hard to get hold of. And once gotten hold of, it won't be hard to enjoy. Although the idea of children's literature including suspense, action, danger, and cliff-hangers, went against the taste of its time, it holds up pretty well today. The magical car in the story was old-fashioned even by 1964 standards, so today's young readers may experience a little culture shock. Kids familiar with the movie may be surprised by how different it is. And readers looking for more attitude and spunk in their heroes may find the Pott family a little square. But Ian Fleming was clearly not an adult who talked down to children, but one who talked to them as equals, only giving them a little extra time to keep up. He uses big words like "conglomeration" and "transmogrify," then explains them in littler words, like a forerunner of Lemony Snicket.

I predict that if a parent reads this book aloud to her children, or a teacher to his class, a lot of little voices will soon be joining in choruses of "GAH-GOOOH-GAH" and "But, but, but, and again BUT!" Everyone will be begging for 4,000-franc boxes of chocolate and craving the fudge recipe that Fleming includes in his book. And giving credit where due, I must admit that the 1968 movie starring Dick Van Dyke is a lot of fun, an excellent next stop after reading this book—though you can also expect some confabulation (to use another Ian Fleming word) about the differences between the book and the movie. And again, I can't deny that Frank Cottrell Boyce is worthy, if anyone is, of continuing what Ian Fleming started. His sequels so far are titled Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the Race Against Time, and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Over the Moon.

Wildwood

Wildwood
by Colin Meloy
Recommended Ages: 12+

When I saw this book at the public library, I thought it had a striking design. This, including loads of quirky but beautiful illustrations, is the work of Carson Ellis, who has also decorated books by Lemony Snicket and Trenton Lee Stewart. As for the author, I thought his name sounded familiar. Only later, after I had brought the book home, did I connect it with the alternative-rock band The Decembrists, of which Colin Meloy is the lead singer and songwriter. If you're familiar with his music, you may not be surprised to learn that hints of a political message and of a New Agey, earth-magic type of spirituality perfume the pages of his book. But it's also a thrilling fantasy adventure featuring a couple of kids from St. Johns, Portland, Oregon, who find a strange, magical, perilous world hidden within a short bicycle ride of their city.

One fine day, Prue McKeel is pedaling around town with her baby brother Mac in tow, when the sky is darkened by a murder of crows. Catching Mac up in their talons, they carry him away across the river, past the Industrial Waste, and into the Impassible Wilderness where Prue's parents have always warned her never to go. She goes anyway, to save her brother. A nerdy neighbor named Curtis tags along. Almost immediately they are separated, when Curtis is captured by a pack of coyotes who walk on their hind legs, wear military uniforms, and speak English. Prue falls into her own adventure, hitching a ride with the postmaster as he makes his rounds through a country where humans, birds, and animals live together as equals.

What Prue finds in the civilized South Wood is a police-state ruled by an increasingly paranoid Governor-Regent. The arrival of an outsider, together with the news she brings about crow kidnappers, threatens the stability of the regime. While the secret police starts rounding up Avians and anyone else who worries them, Prue escapes on the back of an eagle, searching for someone to help her rescue her brother.

Meanwhile, the coyotes bring Curtis to their mistress, the deposed Dowager Governess, who was kicked out of the South Wood after she went mad and started working black magic. Now she is working on getting her power back, starting by conquering the Wildwood with her canine minions. The next step of her revenge is to enact a terrible sacrifice, unleashing an ancient, slumbering force that will annihilate the entire Wood. At first tricked into helping her, Curtis is imprisoned the moment he sees what the Governess is up to.

And so it is up to two children from the outside world to save one baby and an entire fantasy land from a coyote army, an insane lady, and a ritual of death. Obviously they will need allies. Curtis will have to break out of jail. Prue will need to elude constant attempts to kill her, capture her, or trick her into going home empty-handed. And the two of them will have to persuade birds, bandits, farmers, and mystics to set aside their differences and fight together against their common enemy.

In this book the whimsical pictures of Ms. Ellis, combined with the author's flair for sharp imagery, create a world of immense originality and delightful strangeness. It gives the impression at times of being heartwarmingly adorable or tummy-ticklingly cute. And then it turns on a dime and presents scenes of shocking violence, the terror of battle, suspense, danger, grievous loss, and burning injustice. Often within a single scene, its characters move from charming to menacing, from silly to noble, from weak to strong. It combines fairy-tale concepts, like talking animals and wicked witches, with invocations of gods, goddesses, or the force within earth, air, and trees. The latter examples prompt me to issue an Occult Content Advisory, for Christian parents to keep in mind as they decide when (or if) to introduce their kids to this fantasy world. And though it comes to a very satisfying ending, it is the first book in a trilogy called the Wildwood Chronicles. The other two books are Under Wildwood and Wildwood Imperium.