Robert McDonald, children’s buyer at The Book Stall at Chestnut Court in Winnetka, Ill., is looking forward to selling a book he wishes he’d discovered as a young reader.
The Emerald Atlas by John Stephens is the forthcoming book that I have been most enthusiastically recommending to fellow booksellers. It’s a novel that comfortingly adheres to many middle-fiction fantasy conventions: three orphaned siblings, a wise old magician, a beautiful and evil witch. We meet dwarves that seem to have waddled straight out of Tolkien, and awful beings called Screechers that owe something to Tolkien’s Nine Riders. But Stephens’s wise and confident authorial voice is such that instead of feeling bored, as if I’d read all this before, I rushed to the end, thinking, “How did I miss this classic story when I was growing up?”
Time-travel elements help to distinguish this book as the author’s own, as does his humor. (The end-of-the-line orphanage the children find themselves in as the tale opens is “The Edgar Allan Poe Home for Hopeless and Incorrigible Orphans.”) Character is also one of Stephens’s strengths as a writer, and his affection for his sibling protagonists is obvious. The eldest child, Kate, is old before her time, weighted with the burden of caring for her younger siblings. Bookish Michael is both steady and mischievous, while firebrand Emma has learned that her life has one rule: “when you stopped fighting, you were finished.”
Fans of Narnia and Middle Earth will delight in this kindred volume, greet it as a long-lost cousin, and impatiently wait for the necessary sequel. I still fondly remember the small-town librarian who led me to the Narnia books. It’s gratifying and humbling to think that, in introducing young readers to The Emerald Atlas, I might be leading them to a lifelong favorite.
The Emerald Atlas by John Stephens. Knopf, $17.99 April ISBN 978-0-375-86870-2
