All Osmo Unknown wants is to venture out beyond his small town of Littlebridge - and to be known as something other than a turnip. One day, his mother accidentally kills a Quidnunk, a fearsome and intelligent creature that lives deep in the woods. This shouldn’t have anything to do with Osmo, except there was a treaty between the Quidnunx and the people of Littlebridge that was forged hundreds of years ago.

Accompanied by a half-badger/half-wombat named Bonk and an antisocial pangolin girl named Never, Omsmo must embark on a quest to find the Eightpenny Woods - the kingdom where all the forest creatures go when they die - to make amends.

This took me a little bit to get into it. I knew it was going to be good, but my attention for it didn’t truly catch on until a little over 100 pages in, once all the group had been assembled.

As much as Bonk initially annoyed me, the more and more I got to know him, the more I understood and liked him. I even started writing down my favorite insult names he used: ornery wee fork, ya dropped egg, absolute doorknob, trashcake supreme. I loved Never off the bat and loved every inch of her antisocial self.

There’s a narrator you see only in the beginning and towards the end, that breaks the fourth wall between the narrator and the reader - otherwise it’s told in third person through Osmo’s POV.

I can see middle grade readers really enjoying this and walking away from the last few pages feeling like they themselves went on an adventure. Even as an adult, I felt that I was just told the most fabulous story sitting around a campfire. Give it a few more pages when you’re getting into it than you probably usually do - but you won’t regret it! ( )

This is a fantasy novel about a kid who goes into a magical forest in order to fulfill his role in an ancient treaty between humans and the creatures of the forest. Though I have enjoyed some of Valente's work (she had three works on the Hugo short fiction ballots last year, and they were all strong), too often I am left feeling that if it had been half as long, it would have been twice as good. Most of her books are overnarrated; perhaps in deference to the younger audience, this mostly manages to avoid that (though the narrator is still twee and condescending), but instead fills up the pages with voluminous "funny" dialogue that goes nowhere. At one point the main character gets horns on his head but doesn't know it, and somehow there is a full ten pages of back-and-forth between Osmo being confused at another character saying "what's up with your head?" and someone finally saying "you've got horns!" By about page one hundred, this book had squandered all of its goodwill and I did not care about what anyone was trying to do, but there were another three hundred pages I had to read.

It's a kind of bad that annoys me: like Seanan McGuire's, Valente's YA is self-consciously nostalgic in a way I find forced and annoying. Rather than capture what the fantasy of our childhood was actually like, it very archly tries to capture our nostalgia for reading fantasy in childhood—which isn't the same thing at all. Oz may be a fairly whimsical place, but the book doesn't smash your face into this fact, it just gets on with taking the world seriously. I don't believe actual young adults (or middle-graders, which is what Osmo Unknown skews toward in my opinion) would actually like this book. It's for adults nostalgic for when they were supposed to be reading young adult fiction.

I did like the pangolin character a bit.

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/hugos-2023-lodestar-award-for-best-ya-book/

Fantasy of a boy called to save his people with a bunch of unlikely allies, which charmed me with Valente’s approach to integrating folklore with her own narrative, with vivid descriptions of people and places, and also just by not being a sequel. Gets my vote this year. ( )