Beyond the Deepwoods

Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell's Beyond the Deepwoods is a wildly inventive fantasy for 11 year olds about a boy who has never fitted in with the family that raised him.

What happens

Twig's family are woodtrolls. They're short, they love pickled tripweed and they never, ever step off the forest path. Twig is tall and smooth-skinned, he thinks tripweed smells of rotten eggs, and the other woodtroll children bully him for being different.

He's nearly thirteen when his mother tells him the truth. He was found as a baby at the foot of their tree, wrapped in the shawl he still wears knotted round his neck. Now the sky pirates have noticed him, and he's sent off to a cousin's for his own safety.

"Stick to the path," says his mother.

You can probably guess what happens next.

What makes this book is the world. It's packed with new and strange things. Wood that sings as it burns. A tree that feeds on flesh. A halitoad whose breath can kill you at ten paces. It feels like walking into someone's wonderful, slightly revolting imagination (in the best way).

Twig's first night off the path is terrifying and brilliant. He fights a floating worm with a mouth full of tentacles. Then he rescues a slaughterer boy whose venomous bite has puffed him up like a balloon, and the pair of them float up into the treetops. After that comes the noisiest feast you can imagine (the slaughterers have their lunch in the middle of the night).

Twig himself is so easy to care about. He's lonely, dreamy and desperate to belong somewhere. Every time someone welcomes him, you'll hope it lasts.

It's a dark forest in every sense. Creatures hunt and eat each other just out of sight, the other children kick and punch Twig, and everyone lives in dread of a forest bogeyman called the gloamglozer. For a reader who likes their fantasy with real danger in it, that's exactly the appeal. A more nervous reader might want to know the woods are this wild before they set out.

What to read next

To stay in the Edge a little longer, The Curse of the Gloamglozer is set in the same world, and that dreaded creature is right there in the title.