The Forbidden Library 4 – The Fall of the Readers

Django Wexler's The Fall of the Readers is the fourth Forbidden Library book, a fantasy for 10 year olds about a girl who has picked a fight with the people who run magic.

What happens

Alice is an apprentice Reader. Readers pull creatures out of books and bind them, and Alice carries hers in the back of her mind like threads she can grab. One for toughness. One for strength.

A month ago she trapped her own master inside a book and left him there, alive, because the house stops working if he dies. Then she told everybody she meant to bring the whole order down.

That was a month ago. Now the old Readers send monsters at her nightly, a magical library has turned into a war zone, and Geryon's spare bedrooms are full of refugees. Sprites. Mushroom people called the Enoki. A bone witch. A clockwork spider who would rather calculate the best evacuation route than actually evacuate (which is very funny and also the problem).

Alice is running all of it, and she knows perfectly well she's losing.

It opens at two in the morning with her raiding the kitchen because she's missed dinner again, and honestly that's the best thing in it. Everybody is exhausted. Her friend Isaac admits he doesn't believe any of their planning will make a difference. Then a girl called Soranna falls through the doorway caked in dried blood with a bandage round her thigh, and a drill they've never got under fifteen minutes has to work in ten.

Two things to flag. This is a siege book and the pressure never lets up. There's no gore, but people arrive hurt, and the whole weight of it sits on a girl who hasn't slept.

The second is practical. It's the fourth book and it does not stop to catch you up. Names, creatures and betrayals all arrive assuming you were there. Your reader wants the first three first, and if they haven't read them, start somewhere else.

What's lovely, if they have, is how grown-up it feels. Alice isn't a chosen one. She's a tired girl who made a decision, and now a hundred and three people upstairs depend on it.

What to read next

If your reader loves the idea of stepping into a book and finding it real, Tilly and the Bookwanderers is in the library. Tilly lives above her grandparents' bookshop, and one day Anne of Green Gables walks in.