Book Review: Tilly and the Bookwanderers by Anna James

Tilly and the Bookwanderers by Anna James

Book Title: Tilly and the Bookwanderers (*affiliate link)
Author: Anna James
Genre: Middle grade fantasy
Published: September 18, 2018
400 pages
My rating: 4/5

“Our stories are how we will be remembered – so we’ve got to make sure they are worth telling.”

Eleven-year-old Matilda “Tilly” Pages lives upstairs the little bookshop kept by her grandparents. One day, she meets the main characters from her two favorite books – Alice in Wonderland and Anne of Green Cables – and learns that she can travel into books. Together with her friend Oskar they begin an adventure into the world of books and try to solve the mystery of what happened to Tilly’s mother.

Tilly and the Bookwanderers is a middle-grade fantasy for anyone who has wanted to travel into books or meet their favorite characters. Books about books, libraries, and bookstores as well as the idea that you can travel into books is something that I love. One of my favorite books last year (and also this year when I reread it) was WildWood Revisited by Cinasee Pollett. So when I spotted Tilly and the Bookwanderers in my local library, I knew I wanted to read it – even more so since one of my goals this year is to read a middle-grade book.

The worldbuilding is cute and cozy, and the characters traveling from classic children’s books give the book an old-fashioned vibe which I found endearing. As it’s often true in the children’s books, the lessons are clear: “Be brave, be curious, be kind.” The themes of bravery and friendship are important and help Tilly tackle the challenges she faces. This is not an action-packed book, but there is enough going on that you never get bored.

In fact, at first there seemed to be way too many plotlines: the travel into books, Tilly’s lack of friends, the disappearance of Tilly’s mother, the question of who her father was and what happened to him… That’s partly the reason why the ending felt rushed. A large chunk of the book was used for explaining how bookwandering works, and there was not a lot of pages left to wrap up the plot. As this is a first book in a series, it might have made more sense to introduce Tilly into the world of bookwandering in the first book and address the question of what happened to her parents in later books in the series.

I also had a problem with the bad guy in the book. He was really one-sided and so obviously a villain I suspected I was wrong, that he must be a red herring, and that the real villain would be revealed later. He didn’t make a particularly interesting antagonist, and it didn’t make much sense how the other (adult) characters had been duped by him for years.

As an adult, I’m obviously not in the right demographic for this book, and I found the plot rather predictable. But I would definitely recommend this for children around 10 to 12 years of age. I’m not in a hurry to continue with this series, but I might pick up the next books if I come across them in the library.

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