The Forest in the Hallway

by Gordon Smith

Book Overview

The afternoon of the day before her fourteenth birthday, Beatriz comes home from school to find her parents missing without a trace.After a brief, futile search, she is shipped off from her home in... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0618688471
• ISBN13: 9780618688470
• Release Date: November 2006
• Publisher: Clarion Books
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.8" x 8.5"
• Age Range: 10 to 12 years
• Grade Range: Grades 5 to 7

Customer Reviews

An enchanting new classic for young adults

Beatriz, the heroine of this wonderful book, is a thoroughly sensible and resourceful fourteen year old who finds herself in a magical world. This world is much like our own except that events are prone to veer off into sorcery at unpredictable moments. Beatriz confronts with unfailing aplomb first Death himself, toting the latest technology along with his scythe, and then an array of villains, the chief of whom is a satisfyingly malevolent witch. She is befriended by Rose, a down-to-earth and motherly middle-aged woman who nevertheless sports a pair of wings and by a mysterious whale-like creature. Along the way she meets blind Mr. Borges, whose guest house is named The Library, twins named Pyramus and Thisby and friends Jim and Leo. The literary allusions are slipped in with a lightness of touch that characterizes Smith's style. The book is fast-moving, funny, sometimes scary, always inventive and beautifully written. It is enchanting.

Mystery and Magic

I am not a teenage girl and never have been, but I think I would like The Forest in the Hallway should I be reincarnated as one. Of course, I'd have to enjoy reading (because this book has words in it), and I'd need to be curious about things like mystery and magic, life and death, rivers of knowledge and fountains of youth (because this book has all those wonderful things in it). If I were this kind of teenage girl, I'd love this funny, philosophical page-turner. And I'd recommend it to all my girlfriends.

Excellent fantasy of a girl's journey to find family

Fourteen-year-old Beatriz comes home from school to find her parents have vanished, and she's sent to stay with an uncle only to find a strange invitation to visit the 19th floor of his apartment building - a place she's never seen. Her discovery of a strange forest to another world leads her on a journey which will hopefully result in finding her parents - or saving the world - in this excellent fantasy of a girl's journey to find family. Leisure readers who loved O'Brien's classic THE SILVER CROWN will find much to love here.

A new favorite book!

Do yourself a favor and don't stay up to read this book all in one night. (Read it with your kids instead!) It is far too clever, well-written, and multi-faceted to speed through. The writing is lovely- rich descriptions of demonic, wildly tangling wisteria, placid rivers in the late afternoon, and the smells of the forest immediately put the reader in Beatriz's world without being long or tedious. The humor of the characters is at once adult-like but accessible to kids, and contemporary - a fun plus to the fantasy. The author clearly knows how kids think - Beatriz's impatience with grownups, yearnings and insights will be familiar to anyone who is or can accurately remember being 14. Many of the images feel familiar and linger on after the book is finished- knots in wood that shift to become faces, letters sliding off the pages of a book of magic as a spell takes hold... making you wish The Forest in the Hallway really was real, a feeling I haven't had since reading Half Magic or the Phantom Tollbooth as a kid.

Scary and Funny and Deep and Entertaining

If you've ever wanted to get away from a cocktail party, or knew your teacher was a buffoon, or loved Harry Potter, or a good mystery, you'll love this book. From a gloomy hallway of a New York apartment building, our 14-year-old hero, Beatriz, stumbles into a familiar yet strange world that has few place names. No one has ever heard of New York. It has telephones, but they don't work. It has a computer that displays the workings of time, but she can't understand the images. Beatriz is living a child's worst fear--her parents have vanished--and she has to find them by going deeper into this frightening world. This book is funny. Death, who wears a cloak-and-scythe costume, is a kindly but distracted bureaucrat. He works for God ("The Big Guy"), whose attention wanders. One of the worst villains tells really bad jokes and says things like "Let's just have a look-see." Grown-ups in this story are just as foolish and repulsive as in real life, and the hero makes some rash decisions (though she is too smart to go into that clichéd dark basement). The story is about the pain of being a bright child who encounters undependable adults but never loses her faith in the dependable ones. And, through her eyes, the reader feels the pain of adults as well. Like all good fantasies, this one tickles the reader with homages to Shakespeare and Greek mythology and goes on to introduce characters who looks like James Joyce and Leopold Bloom. But one doesn't have to get the references to be enraptured by the story. And certainly one doesn't have to be a young adult.