Gradually the children - sensible Kate, methodical Michael and fiery Emma - realize they have the power to change the course of history and discover their parents’ fate. The book whisks them back 15 years earlier to a time when Cambridge Falls was the site of a high-stakes battle between a beautiful but malevolent witch named the Countess and a kindly, pipe-smoking wizard, Stanislaus Pym. When they reach their latest unpromising abode - a dusty, near-empty manor in the upstate New York town of Cambridge Falls - the children stumble upon a strange blank book, which functions as a kind of portal to an alternate reality. Fourteen-year-old Kate, 12-year-old Michael and 11-year-old Emma have been bounced from one miserable orphanage to the next since their parents’ mysterious disappearance 10 years before.
Lewis’s Narnia epic (which it closely resembles in story, if not style), it can be read aloud by a parent at bedtime or enjoyed independently by an older reader.Īlso like “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” “The Emerald Atlas” features displaced siblings who discover a fantastical alternate world hidden inside their prosaic one. Written by John Stephens, a television writer and producer who’s worked on “Gossip Girl,” “Gilmore Girls” and “The O.C.,” “The Emerald Atlas” has a targeted readership between the ages of 8 and 12, but like C. “The Emerald Atlas,” the first in a planned trilogy called the Books of Beginning, was the talk of the Bologna Children’s Book Fair last year. Poised between the powerless dependence of childhood and the frighteningly unmoored freedom of adult life, preteen and teenage readers understandably want books that address their most urgent and open-ended questions: What is my destiny? How can I know the extent, and limit, of my powers? Do the moral choices I make really matter? Fantasy literature provides these anxieties a cosmological stage on which to play out. What from an adult perspective may seem a crushing sameness - how many orphans must battle how many dragons before the world is saved already? - only speaks to the universality of fantasy. Rowling’s Harry Potter - have a powerful archetypal appeal, with each iteration attracting young readers afresh.
Series about children learning to harness otherworldly powers to vanquish cosmic evil - Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight,” Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” and, of course, J. The rest of book publishing may be tottering on the brink, but the market for young adult fantasy seems as difficult to destroy as, well, a vampire.
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