Tilly and the Bookwanderers

Anna James's Tilly and the Bookwanderers is a bookshop fantasy for 9 year olds about a girl who starts meeting people who ought to still be on the page.

What happens

Tilly Pages lives above Pages and Co, her grandparents' bookshop, and she would rather be there than anywhere else in the world.

Half term has just started badly. Grace, who used to be her best friend, has the netball team and two new friends now. Tilly has decided very firmly that nobody at school is best friend material anyway.

Her actual favourites are Anne Shirley and Alice. She counts the qualities off on her fingers for her grandad. Adventurous, clever, brave, funny.

Then the shop starts behaving oddly. Grandma is laughing with a young woman in a long old fashioned dress, and by the time Tilly comes round the corner the chair is empty. There is a half eaten marmalade sandwich on the floor by the door.

Grandma says the woman is an old friend called Lizzy, and changes the subject rather fast.

That is the bit that snags. Because Lizzy, Grandma lets slip, reminds her of Tilly's mum.

Beatrice Pages left when Tilly was a baby and nobody knows where she went. Tilly has learned not to ask, because her grandad goes somewhere else for days afterwards when she does. So every scrap she gets is hoarded and guarded.

Then she finds a box taped shut at the back of a kitchen cupboard with Bea's Books written on the top in marker pen.

Reading it is cosy and a bit sad at the same time. The shop smells of blown out candles and dark chocolate, the nineteen year old who runs the cafe is trying to bake the exploding honey cakes out of Enid Blyton, and the cat is called Alice. Then right in the middle of all that is a girl who thinks book characters seem more real than she does.

Tilly's missing mum is not a twist, by the way. It is there from the first few pages and it sits under everything. If your reader has lost someone, or worries about a parent going away, the quiet grief in this one might land harder than the magic does. For most children it is the opposite. It is what makes them need to know.

She is also very good company. Dramatic about the potatoes, rude about netball, completely certain she is right.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, the Christmas after it is Tilly and the Lost Fairy Tales, where she and her friend Oskar go to Paris and find the fairy tales themselves have started going wrong.