"The books we love when we're growing up shape us in a special way, Tilly. The characters in a book we read help us decide who we want to be."

I can't guarantee that your middle grader will love this book, but if they do, they're going to be in pretty good shape and will be in good hands with Tilly and her friends. Eleven-year-old Tilly is from a long line of bookwanderers, people who "read a bit harder than most people" and go from "visiting the books purely in our imagination to being physically transported there." She doesn't know that at first, so she goes from being raised by her grandparents in a bookshop to actually meeting her book friends in person and bookwandering into their stories. I'm happy to report that Alice's Wonderland and Anne's Green Gables are just as you remember them.

Like any good adventure inside a book, however, that's just the tip of the iceberg. The story, which touches on family and loss and friendship and tenacity of spirit, is fairly predictable, with a few info dumps peppered throughout. But since those info dumps contain plenty of love notes to books and libraries and bookshops, they're easily forgiven. It isn't nearly as intricate or gripping as Inkheart, which it immediately brings to mind, but it's charm and nostalgia make up for a lack of bite and sophistication. I'll definitely be looking for the next book in the series (coming in May, I think).

Spoiler

And not just because plenty of questions linger about this original story and this world: *Did* Crewes somehow recognize them? Why was Chalk's book so peculiarly set? What mischief will he get up to next? Are source characters all sentient like that? Should they have more freedom then? But also because the next one seems to be about Oskar and his family's book of fairy tales.