Over the Woodward Wall by A. Deborah Baker

Over the Woodward Wall by A. Deborah Baker is the book featured/quoted in Middlegame by Seanan McGuire, written by McGuire so that she could more easily refer to it. You absolutely do not have to have read Middlegame to read this book and, if anything, reading Over the Woodward Wall might add to your experience of reading Middlegame (but I did read them in the other order). Also, completely unlike Middlegame, Over the Woodward Wall is a children's/middle grade/pre-YA book, where as Middlegame is an adult book.

Avery is an exceptional child. Everything he does is precise, from the way he washes his face in the morning, to the way he completes his homework – without complaint, without fuss, without prompt.

Zib is also an exceptional child, because all children are, in their own way. But where everything Avery does and is can be measured, nothing Zib does can possibly be predicted, except for the fact that she can always be relied upon to be unpredictable.

They live on the same street.
They live in different worlds.

On an unplanned detour from home to school one morning, Avery and Zib find themselves climbing over a stone wall into the Up and Under – an impossible land filled with mystery, adventure and the strangest creatures.

And they must find themselves and each other if they are to also find their way out and back to their own lives.

This book is definitely not similar to Middlegame, it merely exists in the universe of that book. I cannot stress this enough. If you are looking for a similar companion novel to Middlegame, then you will be disappointed. If you are looking for a portal fantasy book featuring children from a non-specified time period finding themselves in a slightly nonsensical magical world, then this is the book for you.

I liked Over the Woodward Wall. There were a lot of interesting side characters, who added to the story. There were also some creepy villain characters that the children had to contend with. There were a variety of small lessons for children to learn over the course of their adventure, which were not heavy-handed. One thing that I was not expecting is that this ended as the start of a series. This might have been mentioned in Middlegame, but for whatever reason I had been expecting a standalone story, so that's something to keep in mind if you prefer tidy endings.

Overall, this was an interesting portal fantasy for children, especially if you hold it up against the ideas explored in Every Heart a Doorway. Over the Woodward Wall is absolutely not set in the same multiverse, and has its own unique voice more suited to the kind of book it is trying to be — one that is not juxtaposed against other ideas of portal fantasy. (That said, it put me in mind of The Wizard of Oz, but that's mainly because both are portal fantasies with a road for the protagonists to follow.) I recommend this book to readers, both old and young, who find appealing the idea of two very different children thrust into a magical world together.

4 / 5 stars

First published: October 2020, Tor.com
Series: Apparently this might be a book 1 of a continuing series (based on Goodreads)
Format read: eARC
Source: Publisher via NetGalley