Under Wildwood

Colin Meloy's Under Wildwood is a snowy fantasy adventure for 10 year olds, full of bandits, talking animals and a forest that keeps pulling people back.

What happens

It opens with a hold-up. A boy in an old officer's coat and a furry hat steps into a snowy road and shouts THIS IS A STICKUP! There's a rat on his shoulder, and the rat is much ruder than the boy. It doesn't go to plan. The lady in the carriage lifts her veil to reveal a big bushy beard, and a pistol.

That's Curtis, and he's just failed his first test of bandit training.

A few miles and a whole world away, Prue McKeel is sitting in science class in Portland, not listening. Her grades have dropped. She's been skipping school to stare across the river at the Impassable Wilderness. And she can hear plants now, which is very useful when a show-off classmate brings in her poor grafted tomato plant. (Let's just say the tomato gets its own back.)

Then a heron crashes out of the sky with a message for Curtis. His friend Prue is in grave danger. Meanwhile a jet-black fox is watching her from the bottom of the bluff.

There's a third thread too. Curtis's sisters, Elsie and Rachel, get dropped off at a gloomy orphanage in the Industrial Wastes while their parents fly abroad to search for their missing son. It's a very creepy building, with a flickering neon sign promising industrial machine parts.

This is a big, rich book to sink into. The sentences take their time and there are lots of characters to keep track of. It's worth saying that it hops between Prue, Curtis and the sisters, so it suits a reader who's happy holding a few stories in their head at once.

It's funny as well as grand. Septimus the rat throws up in Curtis's lunch bag after his first flight on a heron (and tells him not to open it). The Bandit King makes fun of a bandit in a pink gown. And a huge owl in spectacles comes out to welcome his "good bandits".

It's the second Wildwood book and it carries straight on from the first, so if you can, start with Wildwood.

If your reader is the sort who wants to disappear into another world for a few weeks, this is a lovely one to get lost in.

What to read next

If they'd like another snowy wood with talking creatures round every corner, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is in the library too. Lucy steps through the back of a wardrobe into a winter forest and meets a faun carrying parcels under an umbrella.