OSMO UNKNOWN AND THE EIGHTPENNY WOODS

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.