Book Review: The Empress of Otherworld

The Empress of Otherworld (2017) by Corey Michael Dalton and Bryland Sutton is a comedy fantasy novel, mainly for children of all ages, which features characters from L Frank Baum's "Wizard of Oz" stories, from Lewis Carrol's "Alice in Wonderland," from J.M. Barrie's "Peter Pan" and some original characters, with some additional ideas more than a little reminiscent of C.S. Lewis's Narnia.

If you can imagine that someone had brought Wonderland, Oz, and the world of Peter Pan together into a common story in the same way that the authors of the American TV fantasy drama series "Once upon a time" brought lots of children's storis together, you have a fairly good idea of what "The Empress of Otherworld" is like.

The first line, which I'm not going to quote to avoid a spoiler, skewers Hap, the central character as memorably as C.S. Lewis skewered the central character of "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" with the first line of that book: 

"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."

It is Hap's eleventh birthday, and he thinks his elderly Great Aunt Benny - his only living relative, who is bringing him up after the deaths of his parents a few months before in a road traffic accident - has forgotten. To cheer himself up he decides to investigate the one room in the house where he is not allowed - "The Colonel's study."

Without wanting to spoil the story, he soon finds himself in a madcap romp through a strangely familiar world with a lot of favourite characters from other books.

I think this is a story which many children, including a lot of big people who are kids at heart, will love. 

You can find it on Amazon at

The Empress of Otherworld eBook : Dalton, Corey Michael, Sutton, Bryland: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store


Mitth'raw'nuruodo


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