Narrator Heath Miller is entrancing in this fantasy featuring 13-year-old Osmo, who longs for an interesting life outside Littlebridge. Under unfortunate circumstances, Osmo must enter the adjacent woods, where the fierce and cunning Quidnunx reign. His initially unwilling companions are Bonk the Cross, a skadgebat (skunk-badger-wombat), and Nevermore, a pangirlin. Miller creates a fantastical array of character voices for these and other denizens of the woods, where everything has two natures. Miller’s Osmo is fittingly kind and soft-spoken as he dutifully carries out his appointed quest. The standout, however, is Bonk, who is portrayed with a Scottish brogue and a melodramatic crustiness that is improbably endearing. Miller’s droll English accent expresses authority yet invites trust; the listener is willingly carried off to the fabled Eightpenny Woods. L.T. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Osmo Unknown and the Eightpenny Woods
Narrated by Heath Miller
Catherynne M. ValenteUnabridged — 12 hours, 30 minutes
Osmo Unknown and the Eightpenny Woods
Narrated by Heath Miller
Catherynne M. ValenteUnabridged — 12 hours, 30 minutes
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Overview
From New York Times bestselling author Catherynne M. Valente comes an inventive middle grade fantasy that follows a boy journeying away from the only home he's ever known and into the magical realm of the dead to fulfill a bargain for his people.
Osmo Unknown hungers for the world beyond his small town. With the life that Littlebridge society has planned for him, the only taste Osmo will ever get are his visits to the edge of the Fourpenny Woods where his mother hunts. Until the unthinkable happens: his mother accidentally kills a Quidnunk, a fearsome and intelligent creature that lives deep in the forest.
None of this should have anything to do with poor Osmo, except that a strange treaty was once formed between the Quidnunx and the people of Littlebridge to ensure that neither group would harm the other. Now that a Quidnunk is dead, as the firstborn child of the hunter who killed her, Osmo must embark on a quest to find the Eightpenny Woods-the mysterious kingdom where all wild forest creatures go when they die-and make amends.
Accompanied by a very rude half-badger, half-wombat named Bonk and an antisocial pangolin girl called Never, it will take all of Osmo's bravery and cleverness to survive the magic of the Eightpenny Woods to save his town...and make it out alive.
Editorial Reviews
03/07/2022
Twining familiar folk and myth elements with an arch, quippy voice that welcomes the reader as co-conspirator, Valente (The Glass Town Game) conjures an underworld odyssey that “must be kept secret.” For countless decades after a Forest and Valley fall in love, then quarrel, the human inhabitants of Littlebridge village and the forest-dwelling Quidnunx have avoided deadly conflict through a tenuous treaty. But years after the Quidnunx have begun to fade into legend, the hunter mother of hazel-eyed, black-haired Osmo Unknown, 13, unwittingly breaks the treaty by killing a Quidnunk; as a result, Osmo is given to the forest as bridegroom to the dead being’s ghost. Journeying through the Quidnunk afterlife in the grudging company of an acerbic skunk/badger/wombat and a defiantly lonesome, copper-scaled girl/pangolin, Osmo uncovers the roots of enmity in the region while trying to restore peace. Wordplay-dense prose and a languid pace underpin a singular, if self-aware, world filled with memorable chimeric creations exploring the impact of generational trauma. Final art not seen by PW. Ages 8–12. Agent: Howard Morhaim, Howard Morhaim Literary. (Apr.)
Charmingly dark and darkly charming, a fairy tale that veers between the almost familiar and the wildly unexpected, Valente’s story will delight any reader who is both fierce and gentle, wild and mild, fond of wombats and pangolins and all manner of strange beasts.
* "This imagination- and description-rich tale is for those enamored by The Phantom Tollbooth and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It’s threaded with laugh-out-loud humor and danger, but ultimately it’s a call for empathy and overcoming adversarial attitudes, which feels exactly right in these divided times."
Valente takes us on a wild journey through the absurd, the mundane, the outlandish, the silly, and the strange, often turning us on our heads. I loved every speck of it.
Narrator Heath Miller is entrancing in this fantasy featuring 13-year-old Osmo, who longs for an interesting life outside Littlebridge. Under unfortunate circumstances, Osmo must enter the adjacent woods, where the fierce and cunning Quidnunx reign. His initially unwilling companions are Bonk the Cross, a skadgebat (skunk-badger-wombat), and Nevermore, a pangirlin. Miller creates a fantastical array of character voices for these and other denizens of the woods, where everything has two natures. Miller’s Osmo is fittingly kind and soft-spoken as he dutifully carries out his appointed quest. The standout, however, is Bonk, who is portrayed with a Scottish brogue and a melodramatic crustiness that is improbably endearing. Miller’s droll English accent expresses authority yet invites trust; the listener is willingly carried off to the fabled Eightpenny Woods. L.T. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
2022-01-26
A 13-year-old skeptic finds himself traveling in strange realms, including the land of the dead, after his mother kills a magical creature.
Promising readers a tale as “grand and strange and wild” as they are, Valente opens with the murder of a supposedly mythical Quidnunk followed by the arrival of a really rude skadgebat (a “badger-wombat-skunk thing”) named Bonk the Cross to collect a human in recompense, pursuant to a long-forgotten treaty between the Valley and the Forest. So it is that Osmo journeys through fungal mycelia to meet a host of chimerical Forest residents—notably a scaly and resolutely solitary pangirlin named Nevermore—on the way to a startling transformation and a forced marriage to the ghost of the murder victim. Along with characteristic fey bits, like inserting unnumbered chapters of authorial commentary and repeatedly swearing her audience to secrecy, the author loses no chance to fold metaphorical over- and undertones into names, events, and themes as she steers her Everytween protagonist through tests of character and cleverness in locales from the city of Quiddity to the Meaningful Desert (“everything here means something else”) and over the River After to a destiny strung out through four post-climactic chapters of conversation, unpacking, and wrap-up. The cast presents as White.
Prime fare for fans of bildungsromans bedecked with sentient mushrooms, tricksy monsters, and allegorical gewgaws. (map) (Fantasy. 10-13)
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940177458335 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date: | 04/26/2022 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Age Range: | 8 - 11 Years |
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One: The Wild and the Mild
Chapter One THE WILD AND THE MILD
Osmo Unknown had always lived in Littlebridge, and nothing interesting had ever happened to him there.
He was born, neither rich nor poor, in a little white four-room cottage on the north side of the Catch-a-Crown River, almost at the furthest edge of town. He thought he would most likely die an old man with a white beard, neither rich nor poor, in a little white four-room cottage on the north side of the Catch-a-Crown River.
He was quite, quite wrong about that.
Osmo Unknown was not precisely the sort of person you think of when someone says the word hero. He wasn’t impressively big or strong. He didn’t have a famous sword or a glorious destiny foretold through the ages. He had thick curly black hair and friendly hazel eyes, the color of old pages and old leaves. He was a bit short and thin for his age, with long clever fingers. The boys in school thought him strange and the girls didn’t think about him at all.
On the other hand, Littlebridge was precisely the kind of place you think of when someone says the word village. The bell tower in the center of town. The painted houses with straw-and-clover roofs and crisscrossed windows. The schoolhouse and the green-and-brown river full of trout and eels and the tavern with golden, welcoming light in the windows even at eight in the morning. The bits of roof gargoyle and marble rose leaves from an age when folk took a bit more care with architecture. All nestled in a pretty valley with good, steady rain and strong, reliable sun, sandwiched between the steep blue mountains on one side and a deep, thorny forest on the other.
And of course, there was no shortage of mysterious legends no one believed in anymore and stern rules everyone broke when they were young and insisted on when they got old.
What sorts of rules? Oh, just the usual kind. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Don’t go out alone after sundown and never eat anything that talks and stay out of the woods no matter what, this means you.
In fact, there was only one single, solitary strange and unusual thing in the whole town. Only one thing you wouldn’t find in any other town of the same size and age and climate.
Where the crossroads met in the center of town rose a great red granite pillar. On the very tip-top of the pillar, a silver skull had looked down on everyone for a number of centuries now.
The skull was huge.
The skull was not human.
The skull was almost like an elephant’s head, and a little like a great stag’s, and something unsettlingly like a tyrannosaurus’s. But it was not an elephant, either. It was not a deer. And it was most certainly not a Tyrannosaurus rex.
No one paid it any more attention than they gave to the bell tower or the shoe shop.
Except Osmo Unknown.
Osmo paid attention to everything. He knew every street and side road of his home. Every wishing well, every stony building and sturdy roof. Good old Dapplegrim Square with Soothfaste Church on one side and the Cruste and Cheddar Tavern on the other. The Afyngred Agricultural Hall and Bonefire Park. The Katja Kvass Memorial Fountain bubbling away pleasantly on the long grass, clear water weeping from a pretty young woman’s pale stone eyes and spilling from the wound in her marble heart into a great wide pool. The crumbling Brownbread Mill still grinding wheat into wealth just south of the main part of town. St. Whylom’s School in its industrial shadow, looking out over the river. The little Kalevala Opera House that hadn’t put on a single opera in Osmo’s thirteen years of life. All the fine shops with real glass windows lining Yclept Closeway. The big wide half-burnt steps of Bodeworde’s Armory, which had gone up in a blaze a hundred and fifty years before. They’d kept the stairs as a reminder never to get careless with gunpowder again.
Osmo knew them all.
The boy with the hazel eyes had never gotten lost, not once, not in his whole life. He couldn’t get lost in Littlebridge any more than you can get lost in your own body.
Osmo hated it.
He hated knowing every street and side road. He hated knowing that the sugar maples in front of Mittu Grumm’s Toy and Shoe Shoppe would always go bright scarlet by the third of October. He hated the ravens that stayed and the sparrows that had somewhere better to be—somewhere he could never go. He hated his dumb ancestor who couldn’t even be bothered to come up with a good fake name for the family. On days when he felt particularly angry at the shape of everything, he even hated the Whaleskin Mountains for keeping him penned in with their useless, dopey sheer glittering jagged cliffs.
But most of all, deep down in his bones, he hated that he’d never been lost, not one minute in his life, that he never would be lost, not in Littlebridge, not in his little white four-room cottage, not anywhere. Of course there were stories of a much more interesting Littlebridge, long ago when magic and monsters and princesses and curses were as common as tea in the afternoon. But they seemed to have run right out of that sort of thing.
Except the silver skull. Except that one single, solitary, fantastic, wonderful strange and unusual thing. Every time he passed it on his way from one dull, familiar place to the next, Osmo swore he could feel its huge, empty eye sockets watching him. Its long, curved fangs reaching out for him. It made the hairs on the back of his neck rise up and his stomach flip over. But that was little enough strangeness for a heart to live on.
Everything in Osmo’s world was already mapped out to the very edges of the page. The village ran like a perfect brass watch. All he wanted was to wake up one day and find the hands snapped off and the bell ringing out twenty-five o’clock.
The very worst of it all was this: Osmo Unknown absolutely, thoroughly loathed the entire idea of becoming a hunter when he grew up. Everyone assumed he’d do just that, as surely as the moon changed in the sky. Osmo would follow his mother, Tilly, into the family business, make a good marriage, and keep the little house of Unknown industry chugging along neatly. But he wanted nothing to do with it. Osmo didn’t want to kill anything. He didn’t want to be good at using his mother’s big beautiful gun. He didn’t want to know how to cut up pelts and gut a deer and portion out the meat so that it could be made into pies and kebabs and stews and roasts.
He didn’t want his job to be hurting things.
But he couldn’t tell anyone how he felt, and Osmo hated that, too. Hunting was a noble profession. Any family would be proud to have a hunter at the holiday table. He knew everyone had to eat to live, and killing a single deer could mean safety and health for a whole winter. But he just didn’t see why it had to be him.
The only good thing about hunters was that they were allowed to go into the Fourpenny Woods whenever they wanted.
Everyone else was forbidden to cross the tree line. When he was little, Osmo’s mother let him wait for her every day, just inside the first clusters of maples and junipers. He used to stare into the shadows, and his soul filled up with the rich, new smell of sap.
But it was off-limits.
To everyone. Forever.
And it was all because of them. Everyone knew what would happen if you went too deep into the woods. Something lived in the deep trees. Something no one had seen in living memory, but everyone dreamed of on their worst nights, tossing and turning in their beds as though it were possible to escape. Something with terrible teeth that lived in the dark.
Something called the Quidnunx.
The Quidnunx stayed in the woods. Humans stayed in the village. Meddling with that was beyond foolish. It was pure, screaming madness.
No, each to their own was best for all, agreed the old folk from the mansions to the marshes. Monsters and men do not mix. The woods were very wild and the town was very mild. The wild and the mild of this world do not get along so well, and nobody ever born in Littlebridge was the sort of person to go testing the rules.
Except one boy with very bright, very wide hazel eyes and long shaggy dark hair and no friends to speak of.
Every inch of the Forest the law let Osmo explore was as precious as a whole emerald to his heart. He loved the woods like he loved his mother. And he feared the great tangle of trees, as he feared his father. But he didn’t love the Forest for the usual reasons. He didn’t love it because it was forbidden. Well, not just because it was forbidden. He didn’t love it because it was dangerous, and therefore exciting. He loved it because it was secret and quiet and lonely, like him. He loved it because it was never the same twice. You couldn’t know a forest like you could know a village. As soon as you thought you did, it would change on you. The trees that went orange before the harvest last year hung on to their green almost till Christmas this year, and the sound you heard might be a hedgehog or a squirrel, but it might just as easily be something... else.
Osmo Unknown lived and breathed and thirsted for the Else.
But until he turned thirteen, all he ever found in the shadows were hedgehogs and squirrels and the occasional bright red October leaf, swirling down from a grey, cold sky.
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