THE LOST FAIRY TALES

Why is the new head of the Underlibrary cracking down on bookwandering?

After Enoch Chalk escaped into fiction in series opener The Bookwanderers (2018), the old Head Librarian was disgraced. Her replacement, the smarmy demagogue Melville, begins his tenure with a bang: He forbids Oskar and Tilly from bookwandering, bans Tilly’s whole family from the British Underlibrary, and implements tracking measures to locate every bookwanderer. Oskar and Tilly are ready to battle the new regime, and they don’t understand the wariness of Tilly’s grandparents, who warn them to obey the new rules. When they disobey the adults’ dire warnings and enter a book of fairy tales, they discover horrible dangers. Fairy-tale characters are dissolving into black ooze or vanishing altogether. Oskar’s kidnapped into Rapunzel’s story, and even Tilly, who’s half-fictional on her father’s side, is hard-pressed to rescue him. The fairy-tale boundaries are so corrupted that Rapunzel is besieged by countless worthless Prince Charmings—Tilly and Oskar had best find out what’s wrong posthaste. Droll illustrations spice up the text, though frequent changes of typeface add distraction rather than flair. An author’s note on fairy tales is insufficiently clear on the distinction between the oral tradition and original tales. The story itself is clearer on this point, which is lucky, as fairy tales’ having no original source edition is key to the adventure. Oskar has brown skin; Tilly (and most other human characters) seems to be white.

Winsomely harking back to the oldest children’s classics, this has special appeal for romantic bibliophiles.