Honestly, this book frustrated me. In my mind, there's a limit to how long the author should keep the reader in suspense, and TMTSOJ mostly exceeded that limit. I was more than halfway through when I grew so frustrated I actually said, "Come on! Get on with it!" out loud. In a way that's a good thing. I cared enough about the characters and the plot to feel as confused and impatient as the character Jack himself probably did. On the other hand, I obviously disliked the overlong setup. So I'm not crazy about this book, but it did hold my interest.

Basically, the premise of the book is that there's something magical about a little town in Iowa, but what exactly is it? Our title character, Jack, is taken from his home in San Francisco to this little Iowa town and slowly realizes he is at the heart of some dangerous dealings. Children disappear, houses shimmer and move as if alive, and it's clear there are people out to get Jack. But Jack is happy in Iowa because, for the first time in his life, people actually see him. For as long as he can remember, he's been mostly invisible to everyone around him, even his family, even when he's standing right in front of them.

The ending left room for a sequel, but I never completely bought into the world Barnhill created, so I'm not too excited about it. Still, this may appeal to kids who like dark fantasy/fairy tale stuff. ( )

hmmm... interesting ( )

Children's fiction; adventure/suspense. Not sure which parts of the story aren't true, but it's a good title, and an exceedingly well-told story--hard to believe this is Barnhill's debut. Not sure if it will catch the eyes of the Newbery panel, but for what it's worth I like it more than I did Despereaux. ( )

I'm not at all sure that I have the linguistic prowess to accurately express just how much I disliked this book. It was an ambitious tale of supernatural good vs. evil that failed in just about every manner imaginable.

There are five characters who are children. None of them are developed well enough for the reader to care what happens to them. None of them behave or speak much like children, and one of them turns out not even to be a person, but some sort of supernatural tree-boy who is only three years old but has had 12 years of fake memories with a human family implanted in his tree-boy brain by a magic spell from an old man who is not his uncle. (This is one of the less confusing and more logical supernatural elements of this garbled mess of a book.) The supernatural and magic grow more and more prevalent, more and more confusing, and more and more irritating the further the reader goes into the book. By the end, it's a jumbled mish-mash of otherworldly gibberish, of which even the characters in the book simply say, "I can't explain it."

Magic and the supernatural need guidelines and rules to work. Stephen King and Neil Gaiman create elaborate worlds of supernatural that work perfectly, because they establish the rules for their worlds and then stick to them. J.K. Rowling's magic works for the same reason. There is non-stop magic through all the Harry Potter series, but all of that magic has rules which are meticulously followed. The magic and supernatural in this book seems to have no rules at all. Why did this happen? Because: Magic! Does the story make any sense? No, but that's okay, because: Magic!

The book jacket to the paperback has positive quotes from reviews in Booklist, Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and the Los Angeles Times. Did these critics read the same book I did? It boggles my mind that critics from legitimate sources, usually fairly trustworthy, could see this nonsense as anything more than that. Read it
at your own risk. Maybe you'll catch all the wonderful features these critics saw that all completely eluded me. ( )

Thanks to dull, detached writing, this potentially suspenseful and darkly-whimsical tale has had the charm sucked out of it. ( )