N. D. Wilson

1/17/25: SIX TIMES IT'S TAKEN ME SIX READS TO REALIZE THAT DOTTY AND FRANK WENT INTO ENDOR ALL THOSE YEARS AGO!!! grabbing henrietta and shaking her girl you are so dumb. maybe DONT open the black cupboard and maybe the witch wouldnt be out in the wild now who could have guessed (i am a henrietta apologist except for that entire saga)
my favorite part of this book is just how zeke shows up and is like ok guess i go here now ?
(EVERYBODY LIKES ZEKE AND I WOULDNT WANT A WITCH TO GAS HIM)
blake show more is my g still
baseball is magic brb writing an essay about little magics in fantasy books
the letters are SO funny actually. whimpering child, reprehensible and a shame to all who pursue wisdom. enemy, hazard, and human mishap. going to start calling people that
anastasia and richard are both insane characters
i love you so much cupboards to other worlds (that are really all the same world connected by trees :))
frank and dotty penny my unbothered eldest sister queen (she should've let anastasia kill nimiane)
erm yea i will always love this book. kind of funny to me most of this series is just henry desperately having to come into his heritage because of HENRIETTA and then zeke getting dragged into it and simply not leaving
Westmores!! Sons of Amram!!!
hi darius hi monmouth hi eli fitzfaeren hi carnassus hi byzanthemum hi badon hill

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10/24/22: bros what am i doing reading this Again. it's the FIFTH TIME! i literally have been reading this instead of doing the million and two homework assignments i have to do. i am literally exhausted don't run barn chores in 70 degree weather :D . anyway like - cupboards. Henry. Henrietta and Penny and Anastasia. Frank and Dotty. Raggants. Zeke. everyone likes Zeke!!! Nimiane and Bast. mildly excited for everything go insane in dandelion fire now if i ever get time to read it I love mondays which is not something I thought I'd ever say. but mondays are OFF and FREE and of course i spent it rereading a random middle grade book i've read four times already. cupboards are cool I'm going to go stare at the list of cupboards again. I want to have cupboards. Henrietta is SUPER annoying and stupid in this one but so was I at 11 probably x100 so whatever. understandable. i love rereading books and realizing what Certain Things mean because i know the full story. this book is literally so tame compared to the next ones that's funny for some reason. I am so tired I am just rambling in here WAIT WHAT IS MONMOUTH DOING IN THE EPILOGUE ??? ok so this book was written in 2007 and i would've been 3-4 then which is legitimately INSANE but it is funny reading about Frank and his old computer and Internet store. TWO THOUSAND SEVEN? that was literally 15 years ago. WHAT. i just realized that ??? it's not even 10pm and i am like going to black out at this point this is such a revelation to me (that is 5/6ths of my life). cupboards are cool i am mildly fascinated by the workings of them even though they're just like vaguely unexplained by the clever plot device of Henry simply choosing not to read that part of the letter but i feel 12 again reading this book for the first time suddenly. this had made me realize that Door Before would've been set in like the 70s-80s at latest if my approximate timeline works out WHAT THE LITERAL HECK ! !!!! shoutout to Ashtown tbh. uuhhhhhh also shoutout to the faeren lmao . MORDECAI! RIP to frank tbh I have never considered exactly how !RJIo2375135u his story is. his home world be BRUTAL lmao i have been thinking about it quite a bit and i have come to the simple conclusion that it is absolutely harsh on everyone but that is how medieval ish fantasy is like. 2007 was 15 years ago??! im still not really over that mfw. shoutout to Blake the cat i want a Blake except i wouldn't shove him in the toilet as a four year old RIP to henry but I'm different. goodnight I forgot everything else I was thinking during this book

edit, 25 minutes later: i opened my laptop for the sole reason of editing this to say that i find it hysterical that Wilson only deals with 12-13 year old MCs. 7th grade boys are another breed of Girl What Is Going On!!!!! they are somewhat fascinating creatures that i do not envision as book protagonists thumbsup ok to be fair it's been 6 years since i was 12 but still. yeeowhchh. Henry and Cyrus and Sam and Alex and what's his face from Boys of Blur and Leepike Ridge you know et cetera. I am still incredibly tired but I don't want to sleep because now I've pulled out Dandelion Fire!!! life choices. have to be up at 6 tomorrow bro

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i have no idea when i wrote this down:
everytime i reread this book i suddenly gain a new appreciation for the cupboards
and zeke show less

“‘I don’t know where to start,’ Tom said.

‘According to some people, the beginning is a good place.’

Tom puffed his cheeks. The beginning? His day dying. Jeffrey Veatch chasing his mom. Refrigerator deliverymen. Packing foam.”

At eleven years old, Tom already has quite a few stories to tell. Leepike Ridge is just a piece of Tom’s story–Tom’s life after his father’s death. It’s his life with his mother in their home on top of a rock in which he misses his father terribly show more and loathes his mother’s new boyfriend Jeffrey Veatch. And it’s his struggle to survive and to find the light again when he is pulled underwater metaphorically by the weight of his burdens and also literally by the current.

This struggle for survival begins in earnest when Tom decides to ride the packing foam down the local stream in the middle of the night (he can’t sleep after being informed that his mother is “considering” Jeffrey’s proposal). Tom awakens to being pulled underwater into a series of underground caverns from which there is seemingly no escape. This fact becomes all the more trenchant when Tom meets Reg, a man who has been stuck underground for three years with little light, with negligible diet variation (crawdads, crawdads, and more crawdads), and with no company save for the occasional visit from a partially lame canine named Argus. Reg tells Tom of his underground lair, “The hard part wasn’t finding this place; that was an accident. The hard part is staying alive, wanting to stay alive when you can’t get back out.”

Yet, together Tom and Reg (and Argus the dog) help each other to hope and to search for a way out. Reg tells Tom, “If you die trying, I’ll die alongside you. It would be a nice change of pace from firelight and pasty-looking crawdads.”

Above ground, Tom’s mother Elizabeth refuses to give up hope that Tom’s still alive. In searching for Tom, she discovers that her husband’s death may not have been accidental. Throw in a villainous group of men who pretend to search for Tom but are actually searching for treasure and who will stop at nothing to get their hands on it and a sinister dimension is added to an already gripping mystery-survival story. N.D. Wilson’s first novel for young children is a riveting adventure that cries out to have its pages turned to the very end in order to find out whether Tom will ever again see the light of day.

Fans of adventure-survival stories like those of Gary Paulsen, Will Hobbs, Harry Mazer, and Jean Craighead George (as well as fans of the more classic adventure authors such as Daniel Defoe, Robert Louis Stevenson, and H. Rider Haggard) will likely feel they’ve struck gold in reading Leepike Ridge.

Takeaway quote:

Reg: “After three years down here, I’ve not learned too much. But one thing I do know is that our bellies aren’t big enough for revenge. It turns sour and eats you up. We’ll get out, but we’ll get out for the sun, the moon, and mothers, not for small-souled enemies, though we’ll deal with them when we get there.” show less

Thomas Hammond has always lived next to Leepike Ridge, but he never imagined he might end up lost beneath it! The night Tom's schoolteacher comes to dinner and asks Tom's mother to marry him, Tom slips out of the house and escapes down a nearby stream on a floating slab of packing foam. The night and stars lull Tom to sleep, and when he wakes, he has ridden his foam raft all the way to the ridge, where the stream dives underground. Flung over rapids and tossed through chasms, Tom finally show more hits shore, sore but alive. What Tom finds under Leepike Ridge - a dog, a flashlight, a castaway, a tomb, and buried treasure - will answer questions he hadn't known to ask, and change his life forever. Now, if only he can find his way home again. . . .

In the grand tradition of "Robinson Crusoe," "Hatchet," and "Tom Sawyer," N. D. Wilson's first book for young readers is a remarkable adventure, a journey through the dark and back into the light. show less

5/18/25: this book makes me want to sob!! :) :) me when family and siblings and mentors and the love present in everything ever & that's what Wilson is so incredibly good at
DEATH BY LIVING FIRE EMOJI

a couple of Wilsonisms I picked up along the way that made me feel INSANE ("along the way" meaning spamming paul with every single thought I had about these books):

"I am the Avenger of Blood! Where my brothers fall, there I will be. Where my sisters stumble, there you will find me. My road is show more paved with shadow, and my bed is made of pain. I am the Keeper of unmarked graves and the walker of forgotten tombs. I am the point of Brendan's spear, and the hunter of Brendan's enemies, wherever they may be. So I have sworn, and so it has been, so it shall be--till Death bend me and the ground take me."

"I cannot be David. But perhaps, if almighty grace permits, I can be the stone. I am here, tossed by the river, rounded and smoothed by hardship. I am ready to be placed in a sling and thrown." p. 282

"Son, run faithfully to the end, and like all good men, you will die of having lived." p. 297

cannot believe Wilson makes me like this iteration of John Smith. love love Arachne and Nolan as always, cheers to everyone else in the fight - Boones and Livingstones and Polygoners. Dixie Mist is the smartest person in this book lowkey. I was so jealous of the training sequences as a kid (except the squid swimming) - I want Arachne to reweave MY bones I hurt bro I'm not even 21 yet. The dynamics of the transmortals is bonkers always and forever. Oh, Dan. Cy and Tigs growing into their roles makes me so happy I love them so much. RUPERT GREEVESSS me when the Christian themes are Right There. Truly I feel like everything in these books has such a sharp sense of wonder I miss in a lot of contemporary fiction - not to be that person, but have we forgotten the glory of the world? Burials are SO COOL I think it's really funny O of B bureaucracy is just overthrown. Everyone is GOING THROUGH IT!!! Things are certainly occurring!!! Everybody's so sharply real in Wilson's books, especially the reluctant hero kids. Lowkey forgot about the antagonists half the time because I was too busy thinking about the Smiths aaahhhhhh

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2021: listen everytime i reread these books i suddenly gain more of an appreciation for nolan and arachne show less