hardcover, 208 pages
Published Oct. 5, 2020 by Tor.com.
Avery is an exceptional child. Everything he does is precise, from the way he washes his face in the morning, to the way he completes his homework – without complaint, without fuss, without prompt.
Zib is also an exceptional child, because all children are, in their own way. But where everything Avery does and is can be measured, nothing Zib does can possibly be predicted, except for the fact that she can always be relied upon to be unpredictable.
They live on the same street. They live in different worlds.
On an unplanned detour from home to school one morning, Avery and Zib find themselves climbing over a stone wall into the Up and Under – an impossible land filled with mystery, adventure and the strangest creatures.
And they must find themselves and each other if they are to also find their way out and back to their own lives.
No real spoilers, just a note to self
This looks like a great series, find a child to give it to
Over the Woodward Wall is a fairy tale with stranger hunger and feathers under its skin, unfolding a winding world in the overlap between strange and familiar.
The MC's are fantastic together and separately, they're explicitly very different people in a way that suits the narrative without feeling like they're caricatures of children. The way their relationship builds and is complicated felt natural and really, really good. They had an amount of emotional progression that fits the size of the story: enough to make this slice of their adventure help the grow as people, but not so much as to break narrative immersion. The secondary characters have ways of looking at the world which feel aching and sharp, for they are of the Up-and-Under which has its own rules to flaunt, follow, or break.
I love the narrative style, the narration speaks about the MCs in a ways that is …
Awesome Oz-esque portal fantasy. A couple regular kids get ripped away from their regular lives by weird coincidental road construction and a wall that shouldn't be there.
The story detail's Zib and Avery's improbable adventures through the Up and Under searching for their way home.
I listened to the audiobook and the narration by Heath Miller was fantastic on top of prose that is nearly lyrical but not to the point of being dense, just the right word with the right feel and the right sound at the right time.
