Seven Sorcerers

March 28, 2011
With her debut novel, published in England in 2009, King demonstrates the whimsy, melancholy, and matter-of-fact coping with horror that characterizes classic British children's literature. Nineveh "Nin" Redstone is 11 years old and resolutely ordinary. Her four-year-old brother is nothing but a nuisance until the awful Wednesday when she wakes up and he's gone. Worse, no one but Nin remembers he exists. It's left to her to reclaim him from Skerridge (a bogeyman) and the Terrible House of Strood. A young vagabond, Jonas, fortuitously offers his assistance in navigating the Drift, a parallel world where the Fabulous ("Faeries and worse. Giants, dragons, elves, the lot") live. But the magic that sustains the Fabulous is dying, and most of what is left is as terrible as the bogeymanâ"the essence of dread and desire made real." There are also unpredictable traces of the seven vanished sorcerers, whose lingering magic changes the course of Nin's adventure. The telling is energetic and absorbing; only the abrupt ending detracts slightly. King has already published a sequel in the U.K., and readers stateside ought to be eager for it. Ages 8â12.