“Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky” by Kwame Mbalia

I finally got around to trying one of the Rick Riordan Presents books! 😊 I enjoyed reading Riordan’s Percy Jackson and Heroes of Olympus novels, so I was glad and eager for novels published under his imprint since they would also be fun middle-grade fantasy novels but would instead tap into other world mythologies and folklores.

Apart from that, I was also interested in Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky because there are few middle-grade fantasy novels that center on a Black character and is grounded in Black culture and myths. So I was beyond excited to read this, and I enjoyed it!

Genre:

MG Fantasy

Series:

Tristan Strong, book 1

Pubbed:

2019

Goodreads summary:

Seventh-grader Tristan Strong feels anything but strong ever since he failed to save his best friend when they were in a bus accident together. All he has left of Eddie is the journal his friend wrote stories in.

The Enchanted Wood by Enid Blyton, illus. by Jan McCafferty

I’ve been searching for this book for years. Ever since I decided to start collecting books, I’ve wanted to add the books responsible for making me a fan of the fantastic and peculiar. They are three: the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, The Neverending Story by Michael Ende, and a series of books I couldn’t recall the title or author of…until now.

My interest in fantastical stories was piqued by fairytales, but these three books cemented my interest in it. I borrowed them constantly from the library as a kid and read them over and over again, never getting enough and wanting more. But my library in Jamaica was limited on such stories.

Over the years since childhood, I’d forgotten about Enid Blyton and her books. I started collecting books in college starting first with the books I love: the Harry Potter series, Chronicles of Narnia, and The Neverending Story. I knew there was another book I should get, one that I cherished as a kid, but try as I might to remember it, I couldn’t. For years I wracked my brain about it and mentioned it often on this blog hoping someone would be able to tell what I was talking about from the few clues I could remember: It’s an old children’s fantasy book with pixies and elves and there’s sometimes a mention of a garden.