Anna James: Pages & Co – The Last Bookwanderer (HarperCollins Publishers 2023)
The whole world is open to you if you read.
Tilly Pages and her friends have even more possibilities, as they are bookwanderers, some of the few who can read themselves into the books and meet the characters. All they need for this is their imagination. All of this is in danger, however, because the Alchemist wants for himself all the magical powers that lie in books and in people’s fantasy. Tilly, Oscar, Milo and Alessia therefore set out on a mission that first leads them to the Arthurian legends and then to the world of Greek and Norse myths. Here they also experience that the old heroes, if you look at them more closely, are less heroic than they seem at first.
One of the main points of the final volume of the series is that the stories we read help us figure out who we want to become. Everyone has their own story, and whether it’s monumental or modest, long or short, they’re all equally important. And maybe we all have the ability to get so immersed in a story we’re reading that we almost live with the characters. And when it’s over, we often find it difficult to part with them. But we must know that the end of one story means the beginning of another.
Unfortunately, Anna James did not grow up in a bookstore like Tilly, but her grandparents and reading played a decisive role in her life as well. She had always thought that bookstores and libraries were filled with magic. She studied library science at the University of Birmingham and worked as a school librarian, where she was able to observe first-hand the impact of books and libraries on young people. The Pages & Co series was brought to life by the illustrations of Paola Escobar and Marco Guadalupi, and although the book series has ended, the author’s next middle grade novel will be published this year under the title The Chronicles of Whyteherwhy – The Age of Enchantment.
