and she may be able to go back with them. Tilly soon realises that she is meeting characters from her favourite books. Wanting to know more about her mother, she notices one day strange people appearing in the bookshop that seem somehow familiar. Growing up around books she is a true reader, and despite not knowing her father, her mother disappearing while she was still a baby, books are her respite. Tilly Pages lives above her grandparents' bookshop. Immersive story and famous characters make for a young book lover's dream.
Immersive story is a young book lover's dream Overall, it wasn't a bad read but I'm interested in getting a review from some of my 8-10 year old students, so watch this space. I found these issues all quite distracting. Furthermore, the reader struggled to provide more masculine voices which resulted in it sometimes being difficult to tell the grandparents, in particular, apart when they were both in the same scene. To my knowledge, "aboot" is more characteristic of central and southern Canadian provinces and it just felt out of place in this context. She is usually played with a more British accent and if anything, Prince Edward Islanders have an Irish twang I believe. She also fell back on the stereotypical about/aboot Canadian accent which felt wrong for the character. She appeared to struggle with the way the a number of characters used the word "why" to start sentences and this often resulted in the word being disjointed from the rest of the character's sentence and thus receiving undue focus. In the audio version, the reader had a lovely voice and was nice to listen to for the most part but her accent voicing was a little on the weak side. The split focus between Alice and Wonderland, The Little Princess and, more briefly, Anne of Green Gables, didn't really resolve itself all that well, I thought. I think it would have been nice to have developed the plot a little more and either woven in more classics or developed the intrigue and depth in the adventures within a single book. A bit of surprise felt like the main emotion expressed in regard to the mother's return. On top of that, the Tilly/Mum reunion felt very tokenistic, rather glossed over, and altogether, rather lacked emotion from any of the characters, Tilly, Mum, best friend, or Grandparents. The references to Pride & Prejudice, Sherlock Holmes and, to an extent, Treasure Island, would most likely also be lost on them.
However I wondered how 9&10 year olds would relate to the underlying story of the Mum falling in love with a fictional character. Of course it was written for children so maybe I was expecting too much. I felt the key parts of the story unravelled rapidly and the rest was just a lot of padding. An interesting concept but a little undercooked for me.
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