The Divide

The ingenious box-like binding of this attractively produced novel represents the Continental Divide of the title, the watershed in Costa Rica where it is possible to stand astride the flows towards the Atlantic and the Pacific. 13-year-old Felix is doing this as a last adventure in his brief life, because he is slowly dying of heart disease. While thus straddling the 'divide' he suffers an attack and momentarily 'dies', recovering to find himself in a magical parallel world where all mythical creatures are real, and human beings together with other earthly animals are the creatures of myth. There follows a fast-paced, complex, rollicking story of mythic villains and heroes, as Felix is befriended by assorted elves, unicorns and griffins, and pursued by greedy entrepreneurial pixies. The aim of his friends' endeavours is to get him safely back across the divide, but also, more urgently and seriously, to cure his ailing heart. The book is a clever and original variant on the fantasies of transference which are commonplace in modern children's fiction, and it has a serious side. All the efforts to help Felix, especially by the gifted and wonderful griffins, vividly convey the excitement of ideas, research and discovery, while the unscrupulous pixies, marketing untested drugs for profit, are an emblem of our shady multinationals driven by commercial greed. The sub-text of the book is consistently intelligent and enlightened, and the story itself is a genuine page-turner, sometimes funny, sometimes moving, always captivating: a real winner.