I just finished Over the Woodward Wall by A Deborah Baker, a pseudonym for Seanan McGuire. I canNOT express to you how much I love her work. On its own, this book reads like a fairytale for adults. The main characters are two children from the same street who have never really met, and are opposites in almost every way. Avery is highly controlled, he does not deal will messes well. Zib is almost entirely unsupervised, wild, and unrestrained. On the way to their different schools one day, both of the ways are blocked, so they have to take a new way, which brings them together. They come across a wall which is not a wall, and decidedly not supposed to be there. They climb over the wall and find themselves in the Up-and-Under, trying to find the improbable road to take them to the Impossible City. The prose is such a delight, almost poetic in its nature, and yet there are times when the childishness of the story comes through: an owl named Meadowsweet. But then again, there are some very adult themes.

But the real magic of this book is that it’s a book within a book. In Middlegame by Seanan McGuire, Deborah is a powerful alchemist that meets two kids very similar to Avery and Zib and writes the story, which goes on to have magical properties. Essentially this is a story within a story, and yet we actually get to READ the story that was in the story. Book 2 comes out soon and you can’t believe how excited I am for both that and Middlegame.

5/5 kids on an improbable adventure stars