Strangeworlds Travel Agency

March 15, 2021
Have (magic) suitcase, will travel. Twelve-year-old English girl Flick, the imaginative daughter of a post office employee and a garbage collector, isn't thrilled about moving from their urban tower block to the outskirts of a posh village--until the day she wanders into a magical travel agency. There, she meets lonely 18-year-old shopkeeper Jonathan, who inducts Flick into The Strangeworlds Society, whose members use suitcases to explore different worlds. Jonathan has been abandoned following his father's mysterious, multiverse-related disappearance, and the two set out to find him. This is classic children's literature following in a very specific tradition, with portals and adventures that pique the imagination more than the adrenaline. The writing is at times reminiscent of Diana Wynne Jones, who similarly envisioned multiverses and populated her very British fantasies with real children frustrated by real concerns: Flick, conscious of her family's socio-economic status, worries about her new school and carries heavy responsibilities for housework and minding her baby brother, as her parents work long hours and opposite shifts. This series opener takes a picaresque route--including a world of children who never grow up, a giant tree full of magic crystals, and more--and by the end, something larger is clearly in motion. Readers will be eager to visit more worlds with irrepressible Flick and prickly Jonathan. Characters read as White by default. Utterly delightful. (Fantasy. 11-14)

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Starred review from April 5, 2021
Twelve-year-old Flick’s move from city life to the village of Little Wyverns takes her farther from her dreams of adventuring beyond the U.K.’s borders—with parents occupied by opposite work shifts and her demanding baby brother, Flick fends for herself in the boring village. But Little Wyverns is home to a “tiny, squashed-looking” travel agency that secretly houses the Strangeworlds Society, whose collection of 743 suitcases each contains a portal to another world. When the suitcases’ 18-year-old custodian, Jonathan Mercator—whose family founded the society nearly 150 years ago—discovers that Flick has the rare ability to see magic, he offers to make her the first new society member in years, and enlists her help in tracking down his missing father. Lapinski takes time to build a layered friendship between Flick and Jonathan, both cued as white, in this well-paced, ebullient fantasy, while sending them via cleverly imagined portable portals to a handful of worlds, including a crystal-studded giant forest. The series opener poses more questions than it answers, but it lays a potential-filled foundation for subsequent books, introducing an absorbing multiverse of interlocking realities and several intriguing mysteries. Ages 8–12.

May 1, 2021
Grades 4-7 While wandering her new British suburb, 12-year-old Flick happens upon an archaic travel agency, and she senses something unusual about the services it provides--why would a travel agency require a wall of dusty suitcases but no computer? When she sees travelers step out of a suitcase, it's revealed that the agency provides portals for careful exploration of other worlds in the multiverse. Flick is delightedly drawn into the magic and mystery, but when it becomes apparent that not all is right in the other worlds, she realizes there may be more to her travels than she bargained for. Lapinski's debut is captivating, particularly in its descriptions of new worlds, and while evoking shades of Doctor Who and His Dark Materials--the exploration of new places beyond imagination or rifts in space, leaking magical dust--this still feels like a wonderful world of its own. Absorbed readers will be relieved that a few loose ends (and piles of unexplored portals) point to sequels.

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