Wildwood

Colin Meloy's debut middle-grade novel sends Portland twelve-year-old Prue into a secret forest — the Impassable Wilderness — to rescue her baby brother from an exiled queen. The world-building is rich, Prue is a genuinely capable and intelligent protagonist, and the 85 illustrations by Carson Ellis give the book a handsome, old-fashioned quality that most middle-grade novels cannot match. It won the E.B. White Read-Aloud Award for good reason. The honest caveat is length and pacing: at 541 pages the middle third drags, and the familiar fantasy structure — chosen hero, hidden world, evil queen — is not meaningfully subverted. The resurrection-ritual plot has mild fantasy-occult elements, nothing graphic. For readers aged nine to fourteen who want a richly illustrated, fully imagined parallel world, this is a worthwhile commitment.