The Real Boy, Anne Ursu
The Real Boy, Anne Ursu
1 Rating(s)
List: $22.99 | Sale: $16.09
Club: $11.49

The Real Boy

Author: Anne Ursu

Narrator: Chris Sorensen

Unabridged: 8 hr 40 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/24/2013


Synopsis

National Book Award Longlist * Bank Street Children's Book Committee Best Book of the Year""Beautifully written and elegantly structured, this fantasy is as real as it gets.""—Franny Billingsley, author of ChimeThe Real Boy, Anne Ursu's follow-up to her widely acclaimed and beloved middle grade fantasy Breadcrumbs, is a spellbinding tale of the power we all wield, great and small.On an island on the edge of an immense sea there is a city, a forest, and a boy named Oscar. Oscar is a shop boy for the most powerful magician in the village, and spends his days in a small room in the dark cellar of his master's shop grinding herbs and dreaming of the wizards who once lived on the island generations ago. Oscar's world is small, but he likes it that way. The real world is vast, strange, and unpredictable. And Oscar does not quite fit in it.But now that world is changing. Children in the city are falling ill, and something sinister lurks in the forest. Oscar has long been content to stay in his small room in the cellar, comforted in the knowledge that the magic that flows from the forest will keep his island safe. Now even magic may not be enough to save it.

About Anne Ursu

Anne Ursu is the author of the acclaimed novels The Troubled Girls of Dragomir Academy, The Lost Girl, Breadcrumbs, and The Real Boy, which was longlisted for the National Book Award. The recipient of a McKnight Fellowship Award in Children’s Literature, Anne lives in Minneapolis with her family and an ever-growing number of cats.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Emrys on November 16, 2013

Moments of great prose, and a fabulous finish that touched everything together into a very topical allegory with themes about the greed of the wealthy, and the potential to lose humanity through the pursuit of perfection. With that acknowledged, I have a lot of misgivings about this book. These misg......more

Goodreads review by R.J. on March 31, 2015

A lovely, lyrical tale, alternately heart-warming and heart-rending, this book tackles some deep and thorny issues (autism, abuse, overconsumption, hedonism and exploitation of the poor by the rich among them) without bogging down or losing the fantasy-mystery plot. There's some beautiful language h......more

Goodreads review by Betsy on October 31, 2015

My two-year-old is dealing with the concept of personhood. Lately she's taken to proclaiming proudly "I'm a person!" when she has successfully mastered something. By the same token, failure to accomplish even the most mundane task is met with a dejected, "I'm not a person". This notion of personhood......more