About Wondertown
Wondertown is a full-length fantasy novel from Mac Fallows that includes twelve original songs—each one an extension of the story sung by the characters themselves- and seventeen illustrations from acclaimed illustrator, Emrah Elmasli.
The story centres around Neil Abbott, an undersized, introverted eleven-year old boy with the ability to tell about people by touching their possessions. He doesn’t fit in either at home or at school and rarely speaks to anyone, with the exception of his grandmother, who has a secret talent of her own.
One day, after a particularly difficult week, Neil asks his grandmother if she thinks he’s normal, and she responds by telling him the remarkable story of an unlikely hero, who long ago crossed the five parts of the world to free his only friend from a demon lord. Filled with hidden meaning, vivid images, and songs that bring the characters to life, Wondertown is an unforgettable journey to a place inside each of us few of us dare to go.
Available on Amazon & iTunes
Review
For anyone who loved Princess Bride and enjoys a good bedtime story!
Neil Abbott feels different, something most eleven year old kids don't appreciate. His grandmother tells him a story about another young boy, Rabbit, who felt the same way.
Rabbit is the son of a King, but he's different. One day, after overhearing his mother and dad talk about him, he runs away into the forest. There he meets a princess who is having problems of her own. They have an immediate connection, but then the princess is taken away. Rabbit knows he must find her and will stop at nothing to do so. Along the way, he faces many obstacles and meets many creatures. Will he save his princess? Just as importantly, can he find what makes him special?
This book is simply gorgeous. Not only are the illustrations incredible and lifelike, but the characters leap off the page. I could imagine my own grandmother sitting down to tell me this story. Simply put, it transports you to another place... to Wondertown.
I did not get the opportunity to hear the accompanying music, but I can only imagine how gorgeous it is based on the lyrics printed at the back of the book and the author's meticulous ability to craft another world. One that is both awe-inspiring and relatable.
Adults and teenagers alike (I can't wait to pass this on to my 11 and 13 year old girls) will embrace the beauty of this tale. It screams to be made into a movie.
Rating: 5 stars
About Mac Fallows
Reclusive writer and composer Mac Fallows first began pitching the idea of a musical book for teens and adults to music and book publishers in the late eighties. But without the technology to support his vision, he didn’t get far.
So instead, he set out to travel the world in search of new challenges . . . and stories. He went on to write and produce over 100 songs in a dozen languages in places including Dakar, Mumbai, Prague, and Santiago for singers including Youssou N’dour, Shankar Mahadevan, Pape and Cheikh, and Kavita Krishnamoorthy.
Along the way he lived with taxi drivers and their families, camped in farmers’ fields, butchered bulls, sold tea, raised chickens, translated travel contracts, worked as a session musician, a construction worker, a teacher, and toured the biggest festivals in Europe as a member of one of Africa’s most celebrated bands.
Wondertown is the first true musical story he’s published. It includes a full-length fantasy novel, 12 related songs and 17 illustrations.
For more information, please visit his website and on Facebook and Twitter.
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Excerpt
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(Chapter One)
The smell of the rain came first, then the dark clouds, then
raindrops so big and sparse you could count them as they splattered against the
car and onto the cracked, grey asphalt of the old road. The wind picked up and
pushed the rain sideways into the forest that flanked the road as far as you
could see north or south. Soon there was nothing but blurred shapes through a
window of water, the sound of the wheels churning up the splatter, and the
bickering of unhappy parents.
Elizabeth Abbott studied the sky through the passenger-side window. “It’s getting worse.”
John Abbott, her husband, let
out a short, boiled-over laugh. “Don’t even think about staying the night.”
Elizabeth’s face tensed along
the jaw line. “Nobody’s asking you to.”
“I’d rather get hit head-on.”
“You’re such a—” Elizabeth dropped the last word under her breath and checked over her shoulder.
John, meanwhile, tapped his thumbs on the centre of the steering wheel like he’d won whatever was up for grabs and pressed his size-fifteen loafer down on the accelerator until his wife ordered him to slow down. They were on their way to Albatross, the seaside village where Constance Arthur, Elizabeth’s mother, lived, John and Elizabeth sitting in the front of the family car and Neil, their son, in the back, same as every Saturday morning for the past three years. It was a ninety-minute drive to the golf-crazed community, and it was even longer in the rain. John and Elizabeth made the trip four times every weekend.
John caught his son’s glance in the rear-view mirror and held it. “You even care that we sacrifice every weekend for you?” he asked.
Neil pushed a fingertip against
the window and wrote no in the condensation, then rubbed it out and looked
through the clear spot at the wall that had suddenly appeared on the far side
of the old road. The wall was built of fieldstone, four feet high and three feet
wide. It began on the shoreline at the northernmost tip of Albatross and
followed the border inland and around the village to the shoreline in the
south, stopping for Church Street, the only way in and out of Albatross unless
you hopped the wall and came through the forest—or you had a boat. He’d walked
the wall from one end to the other—everyone in Albatross had at least once. He
remembered how cold it was that day, how tired he was, and how badly he wanted
to feel as if he belonged.
“Would you slow down?”
Elizabeth scowled until John scowled back. “Jesus! Do you think just once you
could make the turn without slamming on your brakes?”
John bit into his bottom lip
like he was about to pronounce the letter F and accelerated the car. His wife
glanced in the direction of his feet and ran her tongue calculatingly around
her mouth.
“Why do you hate it so much?”
“The Oracle, for starters,” John said.
Elizabeth sucked in whatever
she’d intended to say next and turned back toward the passenger-side window.
“You asked.”
“You’re right,” Elizabeth said.
“And it’s the last time I will.”
They turned left onto Church
Street past the stone birds that watched over the entrance to the village from
each side of the opening in the wall. The birds were supposed to be seagulls,
not albatrosses. The village wasn’t named after the large seabird. It was named
for the ultimate golf shot, a three-under par: a double eagle, an ace on a par
four, an albatross. The great Gene Sarazin had called the shot a dodo,
according to Constance Arthur, so apparently, it could have been worse.
John swerved to avoid a man
dressed in rain gear and riding a bike just off the gravel shoulder.
“Get off the road!”
“Oh, for God’s sake! That’s Mr.
Edwards!” Elizabeth waved at the man as if she were trying to say “Sorry.”
“He’s an idiot.”
“He’s eighty years old. Where
do you want him to ride?”
“Gee, I don’t know—how about
somewhere other than in the middle of the frigging road.”
Elizabeth exhaled loudly and
slouched like a fighter on his stool between rounds as the air leaked out of
her. To the back seat, she said, “No sweets this weekend, all right? You’ve had
enough this week already.”
Neil looked at his mother.
“Neil, I’m talking to you.”
“I’m not Neil.”
“Fine. Do we have a deal,
Rabbit?”
Neil nodded.
“Don’t you think he’s a bit old
for that?” John asked.
Elizabeth defended her son.
“Just leave him alone—he likes it.”
“It’s ridiculous.”
“Why?”
“Rabbit Abbott?”
“So? It’s cute.”
Elizabeth made the sort of
sound people make when they’ve run out of ways to communicate how exasperated
they are. John turned up his palms and shook his head.
“Every time we come here, he
makes us call him that and you’re okay with it.”
“You just don’t like it because
my mother thought it up.”
“No, I don’t like it because
it’s ridiculous.”
“You didn’t have a nickname
when you were his age?”
“It’s not a nickname. It’s an
alter ego.” John hunched forward and squinted at the dark ribbon of sky between
the tops of the enormous oak trees lining the road. “God only knows what it
really means.” He looked at the road, then back at the sky again, as if he were
racing something above them.
Neil kicked the back of the
driver’s seat lightly with the toe of his shoe. He’d never asked his
grandmother why she’d always called him Rabbit; the fact that it rhymed with
his last name seemed like reason enough. His father’s comment made him wonder
whether there was more to it than that.
The car rolled to a stop where
Church Street met Beach Road. Elizabeth’s gaze skated across the windshield,
over the wipers. “No matter how many times you come here, it still takes your
breath away,” she said with some reverence, as if daring her husband to
disagree with the notion that the view from the end of Church Street in
Albatross was the most spectacular in the world.
John fiddled with the radio. He
didn’t even look up until he'd turned onto Beach Road and the view had shifted
to the passenger side.
“No playing on the beach,”
Elizabeth said to her son. “Not when it’s like this.”
Neil unbuckled his seatbelt, as
he always did when they reached the ocean.
“Don’t go on the rocks,
either,” Elizabeth added.
“I don’t go on the rocks,” Neil
said.
“Really?” Elizabeth sounded surprised.
“Well, don’t start now, okay?”
Albatross sat at the foot of a
harbour that was ushered to the open sea by steep, ragged cliffs. The water was
dark, as though there were nothing beneath it to stop the storm light and send
it back. The shoreline was drawn out of shape by boulders piled on top of each
other, the rock stained by reddish algae that turned the strand bloody in the
gloom.
The village itself was little
more than a waterfront surrounded by a collection of small cottages with a
private golf course atop the cliffs to the north and a cemetery atop the cliffs
to the south. There was none of the contrived decoration that defined the other
small towns up and down the coast, nothing to welcome outsiders like John
Abbott but a view of the world unlike any other and the salt winds blowing in
off the sea.
It was the only place Neil felt
right. In the city, during the week, he lived in his memories of the sea smell
and the gull noise and the overgrown forest and the magic that loomed in the
mist of the waves. Then Saturday would arrive, and he’d return to Albatross and
come alive again.
He used to wonder how his
mother could ever have left Albatross to live in a skyscraper on a hill
surrounded by big, dull buildings with someone like his father. Then one day he
realized that parents made mistakes, that his mother hadn’t meant to end up
where she had, and that not everyone could know things about the unseen world,
even if their mother could, or their son…
It wasn’t the same after that.
The words dried up. Even the love dried up. These days he wished his parents
would leave him in Albatross and never return.
He knew what they wished for.
Only Grandmother understands me, Neil thought, tucking his hands under his thighs. She could tell things about the future, so she knew what it was like to be different. That’s why they got along so well. He could tell about people just by touching their possessions. He could know their stories and what scared them. Carrie, a girl in his grade, had burned herself on purpose with a curling iron. He'd found that out by touching her knapsack. And Fat Kenny, one of the lunch monitors, had been stealing money from his own dad’s wallet. He'd learned that from Fat Kenny’s basketball, which Fat Kenny had thrown at him one day during recess. He knew a lot of things, things he shouldn’t know, things he wished he didn’t. Sometimes he’d sit on his hands and think about something else, but it didn’t change much. He still didn’t fit in, not at home or at school or anywhere else for that matter—except in Albatross, with her.
Please visit other stops on the Wondertown blog tour page.
Thanks to Pump Up Your Book for including me on this blog
tour.
Note: I received a complimentary copy from Pump Up Your Book for review purposes. No other compensation was received. A positive review
was not guaranteed or requested; the views expressed are my
own.
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