Narrated by Steven Crossley
Ever wish your books -- the really good ones, the faerie tales and adventures in other worlds and stories about magic and "otherness" -- would become real? Ever want to run away from reality and jump into your books, permanently?
David takes shelter from a cruel, cold, confusing world in his books, when he and his father move in with Rose. It's an odd, rundown sort of big old house, with bugs and spooky sounds and shadows. David loves his books, even when they whisper to him and say things he doesn't understand, and they sound kind of angry. He's an unhappy, hurting boy who has lost his mother to cancer, his world darkened by the advent of WWII. Then his life is invaded by Rose, and the baby she has with his father.
When David climbs through a gap in a stone wall, he ends up in a world where faerie tales seem a little familiar, but frighteningly different. He is chased through a darkening, sad landscape to a castle where the Crooked Man promises all his dreams will come true -- for a price.
Is David willing to pay it? Will he learn from the mistakes of those who went before him before it's too late?
A sad, shadowy kind of book that is fascinating -- and sharply humorous in a dark kind of way. There are books you wish you had written, and others that you know you never could have written, and yet admire all the same. This is one of the latter.
