April 3, 2012
Our Best Book of the Library Haul: Zoom by Tim Wynne-Jones & Eric Beddows
The great news is that the library workers have been back to work since Friday, and that we’re off to the library tomorrow to freshen this haul that’s been kicking around for a while. But this haul has been a good one, and it’s sustained us while the library workers had to go and stand up for what’s owed to them. And we have been particularly enamoured of the Zoom trilogy by Tim Wynne-Jones and Eric Beddows (who is also illustrator of Night Cars. It’s possible that I’m genetically predisposed to fall in love with any book his nib has touched).
Zoom is all the elements of the fantastic, but without the dragon and gauntlet cliches. That Zoom is a small white cat is incidental to these stories, in which other worlds are accessed via strange tall stairways and bookcases in a rather curious house. Zoom’s adventures all involve his sea-faring Uncle Roy and a woman called Maria who explains nothing, and it never occurs to Zoom to ask anyway as he travels down an underground Nile to ancient Egypt, or follows a tiny corridor in pursuit of the North Pole.
