Book Corner: Take Your Kids on a Trip to Abadazad
Are your kids suffering from withdrawl waiting for the latest adventure of Harry Potter? Not enough Artemis Fowl to keep them occupied? Are they already in mourning for the soon-to-be concluded Series of Unfortunate Events? Well, there’s a new children’s fantasy series that may be just the thing for them - J.M. DeMatteis’ Abadazad.
Abadazad is the story of Kate and her little brother Matt, children growing up in New York City who find refuge from their troubles by reading 100-year old books about a magical world called Abadazad. Their joyful days end when Matt is abducted at a fair, lost without a trace. Years later, a teenage Kate meets an old woman who also has a taste for the classic tales of Abadazad. The old woman, Martha, insists that Abadazad is real - and that Matt is being held captive there. To save her brother, Kate must find a path that will take her straight into the world she read about as a child, a world that is as real as her own.
Abadazad was originally published in a comic book form by the short-lived CrossGen Comics. The book premiered to great acclaim in 2004, but it was too little too late for the troubled publisher, which went out of business after only three issues were published. The company was later bought by Disney, which took the Abadazad story with its original creators, DeMatteis and illustrator Mike Ploog, and fashioned it into this new form.
The new Abadazad books use a lot of artwork from the old comic book, fleshed out by new prose by DeMatteis. The result is a unique melding of comic storytelling and novels that may be just the thing to pull in children that are graduating from picture books to chapter books. The books are particularly colorful as well - in addition to the full-color illustrations by Ploog, even the text pages are in bright, vibrant colors, just the sort of thing that will draw in a child’s eye.
DeMatteis is a marvelous fantasy author and Ploog’s artwork is simply beautiful. Together they have crafted a world as rich and layered as L. Frank Baum’s Oz or Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, both of which are clear inspirations for this new tale. Between the two of them, they’ve created dozens of bizarre environments and hundreds of fantastic creatures, both good and evil, to help Katie on her quest or place her in mortal danger.
The first two Abadazad books, The Road to Inconceivable and The Dream Thief, were both published last month and are available everywhere. Third book in the series, The Puppet, the Professor and the Prophet, is scheduled for release next February - more than enough time for kids of all ages to get drawn in to this new world that’s bound to be a classic for the next generation just as Oz and Wonderland were for generations past.