February 15, 2022
A 13-year-old skeptic finds himself traveling in strange realms, including the land of the dead, after his mother kills a magical creature. Promising readers a tale as "grand and strange and wild" as they are, Valente opens with the murder of a supposedly mythical Quidnunk followed by the arrival of a really rude skadgebat (a "badger-wombat-skunk thing") named Bonk the Cross to collect a human in recompense, pursuant to a long-forgotten treaty between the Valley and the Forest. So it is that Osmo journeys through fungal mycelia to meet a host of chimerical Forest residents--notably a scaly and resolutely solitary pangirlin named Nevermore--on the way to a startling transformation and a forced marriage to the ghost of the murder victim. Along with characteristic fey bits, like inserting unnumbered chapters of authorial commentary and repeatedly swearing her audience to secrecy, the author loses no chance to fold metaphorical over- and undertones into names, events, and themes as she steers her Everytween protagonist through tests of character and cleverness in locales from the city of Quiddity to the Meaningful Desert ("everything here means something else") and over the River After to a destiny strung out through four post-climactic chapters of conversation, unpacking, and wrap-up. The cast presents as White. Prime fare for fans of bildungsromans bedecked with sentient mushrooms, tricksy monsters, and allegorical gewgaws. (map) (Fantasy. 10-13)
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February 15, 2022
Grades 5-8 *Starred Review* In the town of Littlebridge, nestled in a valley and against the Fourpenny Woods, Osmo Unknown yearns to be somewhere---anywhere--else. Instead, the 13-year-old feels his future already written without any consideration given to what he wants. But that was before his hunter mother accidentally killed a Quidnunx, a trickster beast that could be one of Maurice Sendak's Wild Things, breaking an ages-old treaty between humans and Quidnunx that states, "Take one of ours and we take one of yours." That one, of course, is Osmo. Thus begins the adventure he so craved, but not remotely in the fashion he imagined: he must marry the ghost of the murdered Quidnunx. Valente crafts a mirror world of sorts, where animals speak and are mashups of those the boy knows (his companions are a bombastic skadgebat--a skunk--badger-wombat named Bonk the Cross--and a fiercely solitary pangirlin--a pangolin-human girl named Never). Together, they must travel through the land of the dead and collect a list of impossible items before finding Osmo's bride in the Eightpenny Woods. This imagination- and description-rich tale is for those enamored by The Phantom Tollbooth and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. It's threaded with laugh-out-loud humor and danger, but ultimately, it's a call for empathy and overcoming adversarial attitudes, which feels exactly right in these divided times.
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March 7, 2022
Twining familiar folk and myth elements with an arch, quippy voice that welcomes the reader as co-conspirator, Valente (The Glass Town Game) conjures an underworld odyssey that “must be kept secret.” For countless decades after a Forest and Valley fall in love, then quarrel, the human inhabitants of Littlebridge village and the forest-dwelling Quidnunx have avoided deadly conflict through a tenuous treaty. But years after the Quidnunx have begun to fade into legend, the hunter mother of hazel-eyed, black-haired Osmo Unknown, 13, unwittingly breaks the treaty by killing a Quidnunk; as a result, Osmo is given to the forest as bridegroom to the dead being’s ghost. Journeying through the Quidnunk afterlife in the grudging company of an acerbic skunk/badger/wombat and a defiantly lonesome, copper-scaled girl/pangolin, Osmo uncovers the roots of enmity in the region while trying to restore peace. Wordplay-dense prose and a languid pace underpin a singular, if self-aware, world filled with memorable chimeric creations exploring the impact of generational trauma. Final art not seen by PW. Ages 8–12. Agent: Howard Morhaim, Howard Morhaim Literary.