And Aletheia was blessed with magic, and its people prospered because of it. Once upon a time, there was an island at the edge of the world called Aletheia. Of course we were going to read this new book. Why did we read this book: We both have read and loved Anne Ursu’s Breadcrumbs ( Thea’s initial review, Ana’s What She Said review) – an elegiac, beautiful middle grade novel with fantasy overtones. How did we get this book: e-ARC from the publisher Now, even magic may not be enough to save it.

Oscar has long been content to stay in his small room in the cellar, comforted in the knowledge that the magic that flows from the trees will keep his island safe. Children in the city are falling ill, and something sinister lurks in the forest. And Oscar does not quite fit in it.īut it’s been a long time since anyone who could call himself a wizard walked the world, and now that world is changing. The real world is vast, strange, and unpredictable. Oscar’s world is small, but he likes it that way. Oscar spends his days in a small room in the dark cellar of his master’s shop, grinding herbs and dreaming of the wizards who once lived on the island generations ago. And the boy is called Oscar, a shop boy for the most powerful magician in the Barrow. The forest is called the Barrow, a vast wood of ancient trees that encircles the city and feeds the earth with magic. The city is called Asteri, a perfect city that was saved by the magic woven into its walls from a devastating plague that swept through the world over a hundred years before.

On an island on the edge of an immense sea there is a city, a forest, and a boy.

The Real Boy by Anne Ursu