Amy Amaryllis

The silver lining to being felled by this terrible lurgy that's going around is that it's opened up hours of guilt-free reading time, and I have been racing through my Too Be Read pile. I spotted Amy Amaryllis on Brotherhood Books and couldn't resist its cute premise. Amy, an ordinary suburban Australian girl, begins to write a story in her green book, a story about Amaryllis from magical Ankoor, who lives in a castle amid the crags where reinbeast roam... Meanwhile, Amaryllis, in her own world, begins to write the story of Amy, a girl with freedom to explore and few duties to perform. Inevitably, the girls swap places and have to deal with each other's problems in very different realities, as well as figure out how to return home.

Apparently Amy Amaryllis is the first in a 'loosely linked' series, which from the titles, seems to be set in Ankoor. I think I might have come across Candle Iron in the past, but haven't read it; I might have to remedy that. I did enjoy Amy Amaryllis a lot, but it's weird how a book written in the 1990s has dated more obviously in some ways than some written in earlier decades. They always warn you that nothing dates a book more quickly than slang, and Amy and her brother's exclamations of 'Grossisimo!' and 'Blastissimo!' (not sure that was ever genuine slang, actually) did grate slightly after a while. But despite that quibble, this was a very enjoyable world-swap story and one I would have adored as a kid. It's like Charlotte Sometimes, but with more action and humour, rather than Charlotte's eerie solemnity.