Having never met her father, and her mother disappearing when she was a baby, Pages & Co is all Tilly has ever known, but she loves books like her grandparents so it’s a life she is content with. Is this the perfect life? I certainly think so! Home for a week for school holidays, Tilly is enjoying diving into some of her favourite books, including Anne of Green Gables and Alice in Wonderland. She has a friend who lives across the road, Oscar, above another cafe called Crumbs where she also gets delicious treats from. There’s a delightful little cafe inside the store where Jack experiments with delicious treats, and because her grandparents own the store, there is no shortage of books to read. Tilly is a young girl who lives with her grandparents above a bookshop called Pages & Co in London.

It’s a book about books, my favourite kind, so it’s no surprise I loved it, but I was impressed with how engaging the story was for me as an adult – my kids will no doubt love it as soon as they are old enough to read it too. Pages & Co.: Tilly and the Bookwanderers by Anna James is the first in the Pages & Co series that was recommended to me by my boss, a fellow booklover at Calgary Reads. Although I don’t plan on making this a habit, I just adored this book so much I couldn’t help but shout about it from the rooftops, or in this case, from the screen. In the 8 years I’ve been writing ivereadthis (yes, it has been that long!), I believe this is my first review of a middle grade work of fiction, which is books written for 8-12 year olds. Tilly meets a host of classic book characters from Alice in Wonderland to Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, stepping into the unknown to solve the mystery of what happened to her mother and fighting threats to the book world.This may be a first for my blog.

She loves to escape into the pages of her favourite stories and one day the characters start crossing over from the page to the real world “book wandering” into the shop. The Pages and Co series follows the magical, bookwandering adventures of Tilly - an eleven-year old who has lived above her grandparents’ bookshop ever since her mother disappeared, shortly after she was born. The bestselling series celebrates the best things in life: books, adventure, friendship, and cake. Pages and Co by Anna James is the perfect series for bookworms aged 8+.

Tilly and the bookwanderers