Pages & Co: Tilly and the Lost Fairy Tales

Anna James's Tilly and the Lost Fairy Tales is a bookish fantasy for 9 year olds in which the magical library under the British Library gets a worrying new boss.

What happens

Tilly Pages can bookwander. She can step inside a story and talk to the people who live there, and so can Oskar, her best friend. It opens with five of them squashed into a stock cupboard because Grandad thought bookwandering from a wardrobe would be more "Narnia" (it isn't even a wardrobe, as Oskar points out).

Then it's off to the secret Underlibrary to see a new Head Librarian chosen. The favourite is a kind old man with a beard down to his shins. But the winner is Melville Underwood, who has just come back after years lost inside fairy tales. The odd thing? He doesn't seem to have aged a day.

Melville isn't a friend. Straight away he bans Tilly's family from the Underlibrary and announces plans to limit bookwandering for anyone under eighteen. Everyone is to be "stamped" too, so the librarians can track which books they go into. Who gets to decide which stories you're allowed inside? That question runs right through it.

The fairy-tale part is really clever. Grandad explains that nobody actually wrote the first versions. They were told around campfires and passed on out loud, so the stories are wobbly and can crash into each other. That makes them the most exciting (and the most dangerous) places to wander.

It's full of lovely book-lover moments and Oskar is VERY good value. He's the one who asks the questions everyone else is too polite to ask. It's great fun spotting the stories they mention too.

There's quite a lot of grown-up politics, with votes and speeches and sides being taken. A reader who likes to work out who can be trusted will enjoy that. One small scene might make a squeamish reader wince, where the new Librarian pricks his finger for a drop of blood in the ink.

This is a later book in the Pages & Co series and it picks up where earlier adventures left off, so start with Tilly and the Bookwanderers if your reader hasn't met Tilly yet.

What to read next

For a girl who'd fight for the right to read, Anna James also wrote Hetty and the Battle of the Books. There's no magic in this one, just a very determined Hetty and her plan to save her school library from being closed.