The Empty Place
by Olivia A. Cole
Intermediate, Middle School    Little, Brown    320 pp.
11/24    9780316449427    $16.99
e-book ed.  9780316449533    $9.99

Henry Lightfoot has always been the “earthworm” to her father’s “social butterfly,” more interested in making art at home than joining him on far-reaching adventures. But after he wanders out of Quinvandel Forest on her twelfth birthday—the same forest into which he’d disappeared exactly one year earlier—she ventures into the woods to determine where he had been and prove her bravery. Henry quickly finds herself in a Neverland-like realm referred to as simply “This Place” by its inhabitants, who are all lost beings trying to find their way back. Cole revels in developing the delightfully arbitrary rules of This Place (e.g., no one needs food to survive, and a native berry makes human-animal communication possible). Meanwhile, equally strange yet increasingly sinister occurrences are indicative of a new mysterious instability to which Henry, along with fellow lost children Wolfson and Ndidi, must discover a solution. “Home is the best North Star,” writes Henry’s father, a man whose initial charm Cole gradually complicates, causing Henry to acknowledge his more callous traits. Home may be no paradise for Henry, Wolfson, or Ndidi, but Cole contends that only through embracing where they are from—and who they resolve to become—will they find guidance, safety, and healing from literal and figurative loss.

From the ">January/February 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.