Osmo Unknown and the Eightpenny Woods (Catherynne M. Valente)

Osmo Unknown and the Eightpenny Woods
Catherynne M. Valente
Margaret K. McElderry Books
Fiction, MG Fantasy
***** (Great)

DESCRIPTION: Long, long ago, when a particularly wild forest fell in love with a particularly mild valley, all was right with the world... but, of course, things change, as things are wont to do. The forest created a whole host of creatures just as wild as itself, while the valley built a tidy little village just as mild as itself, attracting all manner of people. Then the creatures, particularly the wildest sort known as Quidnunks, started to hunt the people of Littlebridge, and the people hunted the creatures and Quidnunks, and only the creation of a powerful treaty kept them from killing each other off outright. Under the treaty, for every human killed, a Quidnunk must marry that human's ghost and live in the village of Littlebridge, and for every Quidnunk killed a human must do the same, going to live in the wild forest villages. Again, for a time, all was right with the world... but, again, things changed...
The boy Osmo Unknown knows every nook and cranny and plank and cobblestone of Littlebridge - and he hates it. He hates how mild and orderly life is here, how nothing ever seems to happen, especially to a boy like him. He hates how he's expected to become a hunter like his mother, even though hunters at least get to venture into the Fourpenny Woods beyond town (forbidden to all else) in search of increasingly-scarce game. He hates how wealthy girls like Ivy never notice boys like him, and never will. Just once, he wants to get lost, find himself elsewhere, have an adventure, but these days the world seems fresh out of adventure; there haven't been any strange creatures or Quidnunks sighted in so long that some, like Osmo, are convinced they're just a myth, a metaphor, something made up to keep little children from breaking the rules. Then his mother accidentally shoots an odd creature just outside the village - a creature with gold blood. A Quidnunk.
Whisked away by a cantankerous being, the half-badger, half-skunk Bonk the Cross, Osmo finds himself deep in the Fourpenny Woods, far from everything he's ever known. If he fails in the seemingly impossible quest set before him, the treaty will be broken and his whole village will suffer the wrath of the wilds. This is just the sort of thing Osmo used to dream of happening in his boring, mild life back in Littlebridge... only it's far more terrifying than he ever anticipated, to actually be on an adventure instead of just reading about one.

REVIEW: I've had pretty good luck with Valente's work in the past, so when I saw this audiobook available on Libby I snapped it up for a listen. With wonderful turns of phrase, colorful characters, bold adventures painted in all the colors of imagination, and genuine heart, Osmo and his companions kept me wonderfully entertained from start to finish. It moves at a fairly snappy pace, yet manages to create characters and situations with some roundness and dimension to them. No scene, no sentence, no word is ever wasted. I also must say I appreciated the narrator, Heath Miller, who gave such life to already-lively prose and did so in a way that I could actually hear, without mumbling or muttering or whispering or otherwise making me adjust the volume on my earphones every five seconds (unlike some audiobook narrators I've encountered). I can highly recommend it to readers of any age who want a wild and whimsical adventure.

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