By Maureen Tai, 17 May 2024

Friendships are tricky, especially if you’re a 10-year old boy like Hex who doesn’t understand himself sometimes. Like why he spontaneously danced in class. Or made fun of the classmate who had wet his pants. Or runs away from a terrible accident that happens in the woods while Hex, his best friend Tommo, and an irrepressible little girl called Sascha (who has tagged along with them) are playing on a rope swing. Caught up in a swirl of emotions, Hex runs, and the next day, Hex keeps on running until he meets a strange woman in the deep, dark forest and is beckoned to her cottage. The woman’s shaggy dog, Leafy, is depicted in one of the many spooky, monochrome illustrations to be as large as a pony. The woman offers Hex the chance to right the wrongs done to him, to erase the hurt. Does Hex take it? Do any of the complex, haunted characters in this richly imagined, carefully brewed, middle-grade novel take that one devastating option offered to them, to irrevocably alter the world – and their lives – as they know it? The story in The Worlds We Leave Behind unfolds slowly but surely, revealing itself to be dark, deeply philosophical, and above all, exquisitely written.

Ages 12 and up.

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