Audience Pick!

Title: Travel Far, Pay No Fare
Author: Anne Lindbergh
Category: Fiction, Middle Grade
Rating: 2/5
Why I Read It: Because you told me to! This one’s been on the suggestion list since March, but it took a while for it to arrive via interlibrary loan.

Summary: 12-year-old Owen moves to Vermont when his mom decides to marry her widowed brother-in-law. Owen’s tasked with watching his 9-year-old cousin Parsley, but she keeps disappearing for long periods of time.

Review: I loved the premise of this book—that you can travel into your favorite books. (Tangent: Where would you go if you could? Hogwarts for me, hands down.)

But as fun as the premise was, I don’t think the writing held its own. Issues ranged from too much exclamation to a play-by-play of every thought and feeling the main character had. Here’s an example from a good ways into the book:

I’ve seen movies that had me close to tears, but even the saddest of them was nothing compared to this. Jody was hurting. I could tell! And I hurt with him: a tight, heavy kind of hurt that swelled inside my chest and behind my jaw. What did it mean? Was it because Flag was still there and condemned to die? Should I knock on the door and ask?

However, this book was written in 1992 so it’s probably not fair to hold it to my modern reading tastes.

I did like that the family conflict was front and center in the story, along with the parents. It heightened the tension and made it more realistic.

Borrow: Your local library | Swap
Buy: Powell’s | Amazon

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