Thirty-something divorcee Kara has recently moved in with her Uncle Earl, in part because she wants to help him run his weirder-than-weird museum of oddities, but also because she REALLY doesn't want to move back home with her mother. One day, while Kara's manning the museum, she discovers a hole in the wall, though it turns out that this hole is not your normal hole and is in fact odder than anything in Uncle Earl's museum. Armed with nothing but sarcasm and a thermos of spiked coffee, Kara and her friend Simon head through the wall into a foggy world filled with spooky, mist-covered islands (each inexplicably housing a cement bunker), lots and lots of willows, and, well, not a lot else. As they explore, Kara and Simon discover more and more unsettling things about this strange land, and hope to close up portal between the museum and the islands, hopefully with themselves safely on the museum side.
This is a wonderfully creepy story, made more so by the presence of all the taxidermy (I mean, when DOESN'T that make a story creepier?). But the shining star of this book isn't so much the atmospheric creepiness as it is Kara's quirky personality and matter-of-fact way of looking at things. As Simon panics in one scene, she rightly notes that only one of them can panic at a time if they're going to make it through the situation; in other scenes, her brain focuses on small details (fonts on a school bus, the official name for a particular shade of gray found in the mist) rather than take in the enormity of the situation. I found her a winning protagonist, and not just because she has an excellent name, spelled correctly. Anyway, the book was awesome, and I'll definitely be checking out more by Kingfisher (better known in the kid book and graphic lit worlds by her real name, Ursula Vernon). Highly recommend this funny creepfest.
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