The Land of Stories – Worlds Collide

Chris Colfer's The Land of Stories - Worlds Collide is a fairy-tale fantasy for 9 year olds where the characters from every story come crashing into the real world.

What happens

It opens somewhere you won't expect. Conner Bailey is eighty years old, a much-loved children's author at his birthday event in a packed bookshop. Then a girl in the audience asks what ever happened to his twin sister, Alex. And he can't remember.

So he opens his own book to find out, and we're back with fifteen-year-old Conner. Alex has been missing for a week. A hospital bathroom has vanished into thin air. His friends from the fairy-tale world are hunting for her, and a whole army of characters from Conner's own stories is waiting in the hospital commissary, bored stiff.

Then the news comes on. Something is happening at the New York Public Library, and the stone lions out the front have just come to life!

This is the last book in the series, and it really does feel like everyone has turned up for the ending. Robin Hood talks in capital letters. Red Riding Hood says exactly what she thinks. The Tin Woodman asks "which table?" when Conner says to lay everything on the table. The pirates have discovered I Love Lucy reruns and won't look away from the telly. It's a very busy, very funny cast (and a lot of names to keep track of).

It's also very much a finale. So much of it leans on what happened in the earlier books, which the characters talk about all the time. A reader coming to this one first would probably feel a bit lost.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Worth knowing too that it's a notch darker and older than the shelf might suggest. Conner is fifteen and his friend Bree is sixteen. A witch keeps stolen children in her basement and drains their life into bottles. People have been turned to stone. And Jack uses a swear word in a pep talk that you might not expect to see in a book for this age.

If your reader has followed the twins all the way here, none of that will slow them down. They'll just want to know where Alex is (and what on earth she's doing in New York).

What to read next

If they've jumped in at the end, the earliest book in the series we have is A Grimm Warning, where Napoleon's soldiers drag the Brothers Grimm into a tent and demand to know where their stories really come from.