This fantasy adventure stars fourth-grader Rose, the younger adopted sister of Oliver, who was featured in Gopnik’s The King in the Window. Rose loves living in New York City, where exciting things happen every day, and she dearly loves her adoptive parents and her brother, although she is occasionally troubled by feeling like she doesn’t really belong. This feeling, perhaps along with some trauma from her mostly unremembered pre-adoption life, has contributed to her having a slight speech impediment. She occasionally mixes up her sounds, saying "U Nork", when she means to say "New York."
Then, one day on an outing to the park, Rose sees something amazing - a flight of glass stairs rising from the lake and sweeping into the sky, before disappearing like a mirage. Only it's not a mirage, and Rose discovers that she has been watched by representatives of a hidden city, midgets who have been posing as children in her class at school. When, at their direction, she manages to climb the stairs, she finds herself in the hidden city of U Nork, a city that in many ways mirrors the New York she knows. This city, though, is a fantastical reflection, where buildings are so tall it is an all-day elevator ride to the top, where cars can drive up the side of the buildings, people fly from building to building on pigeon back, and where diners eat by climbing a pyramid of other diners and having food shot into their mouths by waiters manning food cannons from across the street. As the mayor of the city explains to her, everything in the two cities is linked: "everything in New York explains everything in U Nork, and everything in U Nork explains everything in New York.".
To her amazement, Rose discovers that she has been seen in the sky of the city, and that its citizens are expecting her to save them from a mystical invader known as the Ice Queen, who wants to destroy the city by claiming the diamond that serves as its foundation. As she endeavors to save the city, she solves many puzzles about her own past, her relationship to her family, and her connection to the magical city.
This is a wonderfully imagined novel, with echos of Oz and Wonderland, but transported to a modern cityscape. Gopnik’s love of the city is plain, and city dwellers in particular will enjoy his fun-house-mirror take on city conventions. However, occasionally the author’s need to portray the fantastical city reaches the point where it slows the action and interferes with the movement of the story. For that reason, this book is not recommended for emerging or reluctant readers. However, those who love fantasy and have a taste for the absurd in their reading will find much to enjoy here.
Recommended by Linda Lucke, Librarian.
