Canada includes other realms too…

For our third instalment in celebration of Canadian Children’s Book Week 2021, I’ve pulled four children’s and YA novels by three different authors off my To Be Read pile. And I must confess, they’ve been on my TBR pile a fair while. But they continue to call to me because they all promise to transport me to other realms, passports to mental travels yet to come. Canada also includes fantasy worlds and alternate realities!

To set this in a proper context, it is possible that we here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library suffer from a fairly severe case of tsundoku, a Japanese word that describes the act… some might call it the art… of buying more books than you can physically read in one human lifetime. In practical terms, it means that we sometimes add books to our collection that don’t get read for a very long time. For that I apologise to these three authors, but I also think they would all understand!

The first of these books is Endymion Spring, by Matthew Skelton, published by Puffin Books, the children’s imprint of Penguin Books. The book tells the story of siblings Blake and Duck Winters, who find a strange book in a library at Oxford University that could lead to all the knowledge in the world, linked to a story set in Gutenberg’s printshop in the 1400s. So a book about books and printing presses and libraries and magic… what’s not to love?

The cover of Endymion Spring by Matthew Skelton.

As an added real life twist to this recommendation, this book is currently out of print, so if either the cover or the description have caught your interest, you get the added adventure of having to track down a copy through your favourite used bookstore or booksite.

The second book on our list today is The Shadow of Malabron, by Thomas Wharton, published by Doubleday Canada. We’ve mentioned Tom before in an earlier Small Press Saturday post profiling NeWest Press and Tom’s adult novel Icefields. The Shadow of Malabron is his first novel for younger readers, and the first volume in his Perilous Realm trilogy.

The cover of The Shadow of Malabron by Thomas Wharton.

I will leave it to the book’s jacket blurb to entice you further:

“You are part of the Story now, Will…”

When Will Lightfoot crashes his father’s motorcycle, he is catapulted into another world _ one of knights, mages, and talking creatures, where everything is familiar yet strange: the world of Story. Ages ago, this Perilous Realm fell under the shadow of the Night King and his desire to control all stories. Now, unwillingly caught up in the struggle against this ancient evil, Will must face a host of perils if he is ever to find the gateless gate that will take him home.

(First a book about a book, and now a book about story? Yes, I know you’re surprised.)

Our final pair of books for today are two by Marty Chan, Demon Gate and Infinity Coil, Volumes I and II of The Ehrich Weisz Chronicles, published by Fitzhenry & Whiteside. This time the strange portal is one that throws our hero, Ehrich Weisz, into an alternate dimension of our world, an alternate New York where he finds work as a Demon Hunter.

Covers for Demon Gate and Infinity Coil, Volumes I and II of The Ehrich Weisz Chronicles by Marty Chan.

Demon Gate is Marty’s first teen fantasy novel, and the first in the Ehrich Weisz Chronicles trilogy, set in a steampunk world populated by characters such as Nicola Tesla, Albert Einstein, and (wink wink) the magician Harry Houdini.

And now that I have these books pulled out for this post, they will perhaps stay out, back near the top of my TBR pile again. Canadian Children’s Book Week is, after all, all about “the pleasures of reading and the delights of Canadian children’s books.” I’ve already got the second part covered, I will endeavour to get to the first!

Happy Reading!

– Winston

Find these books at your local Canadian indie bookseller!

( Endymion Spring is out of print – best wishes on your quest! )