The Spindlers (review)

At breakfast, young Liza realizes there is something just a bit off about her little brother, Patrick; by lunch, she's convinced that evil spider-like creatures have stolen his soul, and by bedtime, she has formulated a plan to venture into the world Below (a world only whispered to her in tales by her very favorite babysitter), challenge the Spindlers, and retrieve her baby brother's humanity. Venturing through a hole in the wall of her house's basement, Liza meets Mirabella, a standing, talking rat with a newspaper skirt, who offers to be her guide. Good thing, too, because besides being filled with unfamiliar creatures such as nids and troglods, the world Below is a treacherous, frightening place and its residents—even the apparently well-intentioned ones—are quick to betray an outsider to the Spindlers for the right price. Fantastic beings are just the start of the imaginative components here; Oliver offers a richly developed world with a mythology that positions Liza and her unyielding loyalty to her brother with the wise, ethereal good guys as they battle the Spindlers for both Patrick's soul and for Below itself. With her flair for the dramatic, Mirabella makes a particularly entertaining tour guide, and Liza's journey plays out much like any good quest tale, with seemingly insurmountable obstacles overcome, self-pity vanquished, and the bad guys duly outdone. Oliver's fluid, poetic prose elevates this tale above the genre, often imparting weight to the simplest sentences. Similar in its action and pacing to Collins' Gregor the Overlander (BCCB 1/04) but with the emotional resonance of Ursu's Breadcrumbs (BCCB 10/11), this is sure to win over middle-grade readers.