Book Review: Octavia Bloom and the Missing Key, Through the Fairy Door Book 1, Estelle Grace Tudor
YA/Fantasy: Octavia Bloom and the Missing Key, Through the Fairy Door Book 1, Estelle Grace Tudor
Blog Tour February 14, 2022
Sometimes a book just feels like the author is trying things on to see what works and what doesn’t. I love reading debut novels. I especially enjoy reading early works of novelists who have since mastered their craft. Often, though, those early works show both the promise of what will be as well as the scaffolding needed to work things out.
Octavia Bloom and the Missing Key is a debut novel. I would never have known if I had not read the bio of the author at the end of the book. It does not read like a debut novel. It is definitely aimed at late-elementary and middle-school aged readers, but don’t let the easy language and the simple plot fool you. This book is wonderful.
The Bloom family have a secret. They have kept this secret for generations and soon it will be almost-10-year-old Octavia’s turn to hold the secret. There is one door between our world and the land of the fairies, and the Bloom girls are charged with protecting and hiding and keeping that door secret. There is danger for both worlds if people wander between them.
Octavia doesn’t know any of this. She is nine, about to turn ten, and she has not been told of her family’s legacy or her part in it. Accidentally though, while in her grandmother’s attic (against her grandmother’s strict prohibition), she touches hands with her older sister, Felicity. To their shock and amazement they feel a surge within them. A light glows, illuminating a small door that had previously been invisible.
Any reader of Narnia or Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series knows what will happen. Octavia and Felicity learn the secret and go through the door, along with their cousins Martha and Beatrice, braving the dangers of the fairy world to go on an amazing adventure.
Estelle Grace Tudor presents the story in a way that made me want to join the girls in fairyland. Talking animals, winged fairies, good and evil, magical sleep. Yes, it is the stuff of many books in this same genre, but Tudor makes it feel fresh and new. You see the fairy world through the wide eyes of children. You feel the danger through the emotions of our young heroes. You are delighted when they learn to shoot an arrow, learn to do magic, learn that animals can talk, learn that they are part of a grand design that has been in place long before their births. Tudor is a mom (well, she’s in the UK, so she’s actually a mum) who knows how to talk to kids on their level. That ability to put herself into kids’ shoes shines throughout this book.
Utterly delightful, engaging and well done, this is a book I would give to my granddaughters when they are a little bit older. It’s at least possible that grandpa may even read it aloud to them before they can read it themselves.
Our thanks to The Write Reads for our copy of Octavia Bloom and the Missing Key, provided as part of the blog tour for the top 10 winners of the Book Bloggers Novel of the Year Award (BBNYA). The opinions here are solely those of Scintilla. For other perspectives, check out the other bloggers on this tour.
Book Review: Octavia Bloom and the Missing Key, Through the Fairy Door Book 1, Estelle Grace Tudor
Fantastic review, glad you enjoyed it!