Losing the Plot

Annaleise Byrd

Walker Books, 2024

144pp., pbk., RRP $A14.99

9781760656409

Imagine if you preferred to be playing any sport in the world on a Saturday afternoon instead of having to stop indoors to practise your reading.  Especially with a kid you have nothing in common with.  Or, on the other hand, you enjoy reading but you’ve been assigned the task of helping someone with theirs, someone with whom you have nothing in common and who wants to be anywhere else instead. 

And then, suddenly, one of the characters leaps from the pages of the book and you are dragged into it and a wild adventure….

That’s the situation for Basil Beedon and Terry Clegg, who are neighbours but the street they live in is the only thing they have in common.  But since Basil’s dad and Terry’s nan got talking and it transpires that Terry will be kicked off the football team if his schoolwork doesn’t improve. Basil has been assigned to helping him with his reading. Every. Single. Saturday. 

Because boys of that age who don’t like reading prefer a bit of action and gore, Basil chooses some of the original versions of the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, but neither is prepared for what happens.  As they begin to read The Complete Fairytales of the Brothers Grimm  Gretel comes shooting out of the story in tears because her brother Hansel is lost and she needs their help.  So the boys are plunged into a dangerous world run by the Fairytale Alliance Network of Character Yunions (FANCY), where not everyone is what they seem, Hansel has been kidnapped and a plot hole threatens to destroy everything.

With its setting far from the saccharine depictions of early childhood picture book version of the fairytale, familiar characters yet very different from the expected, fast action, clever use of words , particularly acronyms, and a myriad of twists and turns in the plot, this is the first in a series that will capture not only Basil and Terry but other newly independent readers as they not only discover a different world of fairytales beyond those presented by Disney (not so long ago I met a bookseller who did not know that there was a version of Cinderella before Disney!) but also that there is a wide range of these tales to read and explore, well beyond the most familiar.  It is a story that opens up the familiar in an unfamiliar way, draws on the need for trust and compromise as friendships, relationships and alliances are built between unlikely companions, and celebrates the magic that reading, in itself, can offer.  One that not only works with this year’s CBCA Book Week theme but also that of 2021 – Old Worlds, New Worlds, Other Worlds.  

(And while they wait for the next episode, readers might like to explore Pages & Co or Temora and the Wordsnatcher.)