Fantastic Journeys

For ages 8–14

We could all use a bit of magic in our lives, and there’s no shortage of it in these eight tales—from traveling through time to flying on broomsticks. In Penelope Farmer’s Charlotte Sometimes, a ’50s schoolgirl wakes up in 1918. The bookish heroine of Alison Uttley’s A Traveller in Time, meanwhile, is transported back to the time of Mary, Queen of Scots—and can’t help but try to save the doomed queen. In Mary Chase's Loretta Mason Potts, a straight-laced ten-year-old has his world upended when he meets his impish older sister, who soon leads him into a fantasyland hidden in a bedroom closet, while two siblings escape the mysterious All Wishes Town in Maria Gripe’s curious fairytale The Glassblower’s Children. And in Mistress Masham’s Repose, by T. H. White of The Sword and the Stone fame, an orphaned girl fights to protect a secret island full of tiny people: the Lilliputians of Gulliver’s Travels.

Cat lovers will rejoice in Barbara Sleigh’s Carbonel, the story of a young girl who discovers the broom and feline friend she picked up at the market are enchanted, and Nancy Willard’s The Adventures of Anatole, whose orange tabby Plumpet never leaves his side, no matter what strange enchantments they encounter. And in Eric Linklater’s madcap The Wind on the Moon, two mischievous sisters embark on a quest to save their army major father, with the help of a few talking animals.