Honestly, if I didn't have the history I have with this book, it would probably be a four star read. But screw objectivity, nostalgia is affecting me in a big way and there's nothing wrong with that! I have been reading this book ever since I was a little kid. A recent Twitter conversation about New Zealand authors encouraged me to dig it out of the bookcase and read it again, and I loved it just as much as I ever have.

The thing is, you see, growing up in NZ a few decades back, and being a total SFF fan even as a child, pretty much all the SFF available - with a few notable exceptions - was from overseas. You know that those cookie-cutter European-inspired fantasy settings? There were lots of those, and I enjoyed them, I did, but there was something about reading stories set here that was just amazing. Moreover, because Maurice Gee lived in the same small town as I did, books like The World Around the Corner were set in places I saw every single day. At one point I even lived across the road from Botanical Hill, which is the focal setting of the story. I can't tell you how often I pretended to be Caroline, but it was lots. This book and Maurice Gee probably did more for ten-year-old me's imagination than any other story out there. I love it.