The happiest of book birthdays to my pal LD Lapinksi, whose first book The Strangeworlds Travel Agency is published today! I’m so pleased to be able to share a review of the book with you and order you to rush (online) to buy it.
“There have always been places in our world where magic gathers.”
It’s a good opening line, yes? Intriguing enough to get you looking about you to spot such a place, yet knowing enough to make you realise you haven’t a prayer of finding one.
The Strangeworlds Travel Agency is the first in a trilogy of world jumping adventures of Flick Hudson, who discovers a strange shop in the small town she and her family have moved to. Here is the description of the shop from the book. I love this:
“The Strangeworlds Travel Agency was very much like a magical shop should be.
The leaded windows were dirty and cracked. There was peeling paint on the front door and it hardly ever seemed to be open. However, there was one element of the shop that refused to fade into the background: the sign over the window. It was always clearly painted, in silky gold letters embellished with black against a ruby-red background. There was a globe at the beginning of the sign and another at the end.”
I love how this starts off sounding like Black Books but moves quickly to something much more exciting and classy. Inside the shop are suitcases that are the portals to other worlds. But this isn’t just a Faraway Tree kind of ‘flitting through things for fun’ kind of series, these worlds are connected and there is trouble afoot. For the guardian of the agency, Jonathan Mercator, is looking for his father, a world jumper who has gone missing. When Flick and Jonathan join forces to try and find him, they find a whole lot more mischief and magic waiting for them…
I was excited to read this because I have knitted socks for the author and, as everybody knows, this is the basis for an excellent relationship. Seriously, though, I love what she’s already achieved with this, the first book in the series. The details of each world are delightful, packed with humour and observation but there is a serious tone and messages for our world that resonate without being preachy. In Flick, we have a great main character that is brave and adventurous, but also loving and occasionally self-doubting and, as such, she feels real – a real person acting as we might.
I really enjoyed this but my daughter (aged 7) heard the opening description of the book above as read by LD herself on Youtube last week, and her mouth dropped open with excitement. She has excellent reading taste, so if you don’t take my word for what a great book this is, take hers.
You can buy The Strangeworlds Travel Agency at all good bookshops that are currently offering mail order (and many of them are – why not buy independent?)
Susan E Barsby 
Sounds interestingly good, hope you’ll be saving it for me. Xx