Twelve-year-old Flick Hudson isn’t excited about her family’s move from the city to a small English village. Her parents are busy with long hours at their working-class jobs and caring for her younger brother, so Flick wanders alone—and stumbles into the Strangeworlds Travel Agency, which houses a collection of suitcases, each of which is a portal to another world.
The overseer of the Strangeworlds Society is eccentric, sarcastic 18-year-old Jonathan Mercator, whose mother is dead and whose father has mysteriously disappeared into the multiverse. Jonathan, who has a penchant for old tweed suits, discovers Flick’s own latent magical abilities and enlists her to help find his father.
Yet Flick soon discovers that all is not well in said multiverse. Buildings and streets in its central city, Five Lights, are disappearing. And if Flick and Jonathan can’t fix the problem, traveling through other worlds to do so, Five Lights might collapse into nothingness—taking Flick’s world with it.
Jonathan is subtly cued as transgender, and author L. D. Lapinski has confirmed this, but his trans identity is incidental to the plot. His trans identity does show at times, e.g., in a reference to someone who “thought I was a girl” and in his being exceptionally modest about where he changes his clothes, but the story is about his and Flick’s adventures in the multiverse, not about his transness per se, and that’s actually kind of refreshing. Not all books with queer characters have to be “about” their queer identities, and it’s wonderful seeing them just have adventures. Those who are attuned to these things will pick up on his identity pretty clearly, however, I think.
It’s wonderful seeing queer characters have adventures when their queer identities are incidental to the tale (which is not to say their queer identities should be totally ignored; the small references to Jonathan’s transness above show how it can still be acknowledged). Trans characters have been particularly lacking in this type of story (though there have been some), so it’s great to see another.
On first glance, Flick may seem like the main protagonist, but as the books progress, Jonathan comes into his own; I really see them as a pair. Lapinski has talked about them being a duo and about their “flat team structure.” They have also described Jonathan by observing, “There’s bits of Artemis Fowl in his character, some William de Worde from Discworld, Q from the latest James Bond movies, and there’s definitely some Good Omens’ Aziraphale and Crowley mixed into his personality, too!” If you know any of those books or movies, you’ll have a sense of just how fun Jonathan is.
A side character uses they/them pronouns. In the next book of the series, we also see Flick developing a crush on another girl. Both Flick and Jonathan read as White.
Fun and fantastical in the best tradition of classic British children’s literature, but happily queerer.
