Went into the city, bought butter, stopped by the bookstore

[conuly]

I swear, every other book I picked up in the kid's section was some flavor of "kid goes to magical world". Is there something in the water lately?

***********

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Treasure Fever

The pesticide industry's playbook for poisoning the earth

Rural Montana Had Already Lost Too Many Native Women. Then Selena Disappeared.

What Happens When Sheriffs Release Violent Offenders to Avoid Paying Their Medical Bills

Comments

[conuly]

Portal fantasies were just not all that common a few years ago, and now they're everywhere. It isn't just kidlit either.

[coyotegoth]

A desperate wish for escapism.

[conuly]

Maybe. But you don't really escape anything in a portal fantasy - you move from your safe world to a very dangerous one!

(Or, occasionally and for humorous effect, as in the delightful Homerooms and Hall Passes, you leave your World of Adventure for this strange realm that looks suspiciously like the reader's home world. It is very dangerous, natch.)

[elf]

You move from a boring, frustrating world to an exciting one where evil can be challenged and sometimes defeated. It's a compelling trope.

[mc776]

A terrible surfeit of isekai also seems to be a meme around my area of Mastodon the past couple months...

[conuly]

There is something in the zeitgeist, and I'm not sure it's just a desire to escape this trashfire of a continuity.

[tcpip]

An inversion of the narrative would be intresting.

[thekumquat]

There's the equally big genre of 'perfectly normal kid in normal place suddenly meets a god/supernatural being/magical being/dead person/alien', usually followed by 'and only you can save mankind!*'


*Only You Can Save Mankind was one of the earlier ones, by Pratchett.

[tcpip]

I was thinking magical kid goes to normal land and is suddenly from bedlam to banality.

[conuly]

There are a few like that, though the only one I know of recently is Homerooms and Hall Passes.