by Frances O’Roark Dowell
ages: 9+
Read by Jessica Almasy
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I love me some Frances O’Roark Dowell. I first discovered her a couple years ago when Shooting the Moon was nominated for a Cybils. I absolutely fell in love with her books, her writing style, her storytelling. There’s something simple about her books, and yet her stories are actually quite sophisticated, with subtle dark undertones.

This book is pretty much all that I’ve come to expect from Dowell. It was simple: the story of a somewhat neglected girl — Isabel Bean, age 10 — with an aura of the otherworldly about her. She doesn’t really have friends, and while she’s not a bad student or child, she doesn’t really seem to fit in at all. Her mother isn’t very motherly, and Isabel drowns that neglect in a sea of books, especially fairy tales.

It’s all fine and good, I suppose, until one day when Isabel hears this buzz coming from the floor of her school. She gets sent to the principal’s office (because hearing a buzz isn’t exactly normal school behavior), and on the way there gets sidetracked and fell into a closet into the nurse’s office.

Into where, you may ask?

Well, into another world. One which, in Jessica Almasy’s capable hands, was slightly British. Definitely old-fashioned, and most definitely fairy-tale-ish. With a magic, of sorts, a witch that’s terrorizing the county of five villages. Isabel has to help defeat the witch, of course, but it’s not really about that. It’s about making friends, and learning to be a friend. Simple, yet elegant.

And Almasy’s narration was spot-on. Her voice was slightly irritating to begin with, but after a while it became Isabel. And it helped that she had different voices for the characters, ones in which you could picture the character just from their voice. It’s also a book that worked better as an audio — there were lots of interruptions by the narrator, making the book more of a story to be heard rather than read. I’m not sure I would have liked it as much as I did had I read it. (Though it is Frances O’Roark Dowell.) But it was a fabulous listen.